Institut für Interoganizational Management & Performance

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    Strategic network planning in biomass-based supply chains
    (2021) Fichtner, Stephan; Meyr, Herbert
    Fossil resources are limited and will run short. Moreover, the extensive usage of fossil resources is discussed as a key driver for climate change which means that a changeover in basic economic and ecological thinking is necessary. Especially for energy production, there has to be a movement away from the usage of fossil resources and towards renewable resources like wind, water, sun, or biomass. Within the first part of this work a structured review of recent literature on the long-term, strategic planning of biomass-based supply chains is provided. Therefore, in the first step, the overall research field “bioeconomy” by means of the various utilization pathways of biomass is structured and the demand-oriented view of supply chain management models and the supply-oriented view of bioeconomy are combined. In the second step, a literature review of operations research models and methods for strategic supply chain planning in biomass-based industries are provided. Thirdly, trends are identified and conclusions about research gaps are drawn. One of the identified research gaps is to make biomass-based supply chains profitable on their own, i.e., without governmental subsidies. Therefore, new optimization models are necessary, which should be as close to reality as possible, by for example considering risks and actual surrounding constraints concerning the legal framework. Within the second part of this work, an approach for strategic optimization of biogas plants considering increased flexibility is developed. Biogas plants can produce their energy flexibly and on-demand if their design is adjusted adequately. In order to achieve a flexibly schedulable biogas plant, the design of this plant has to be adapted to decouple the biogas and electricity production. Therefore, biogas storage possibilities and additional electrical capacity are necessary. The investment decision about the size of the biogas storage and the additional electrical capacity depends on the fluctuation of energy market prices and the availability of governmental subsidies. This work presents an approach supporting investment decisions to increase the flexibility of a biogas plant by installing gas storages and additional electrical capacities under consideration of revenues out of direct marketing at the day-ahead market. In order to support the strategic, long-term investment decisions, an operative plant schedule for the future, considering different plant designs given as investment strategies, using a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model in an uncertain environment is optimized. The different designs can be evaluated by calculating the net present value (NPV). Moreover, an analysis concerning current dynamics and uncertainties within spot market prices is executed. Furthermore, the influences concerning the variation of spot market prices compared to the influence of governmental subsidies, in particular, the flexibility premium, are revealed by computational results. Besides, the robustness of the determined solution is analyzed concerning uncertainties. The focus of the third part of the work is to consider variable substrate feeding in the mentioned optimization approach because it is expected that variable substrate feeding and thus a demand-oriented biogas production can influence the optimized plant design. In order to support this extension, an operative plant schedule for the future, considering (non-) linear technical characteristics of the biogas plant and the legal framework is optimized. Therefore, mixed-integer linear programming models with integrated approximation approaches of non-linear parts, representing the biogas production rates, are constructed. Furthermore, the influences of fluctuating spot market prices, governmental subsidies, and biomass feedstock prices on the decisions are analyzed for a fictional case example, which is based on a biogas plant in southern Germany. These numerical experiments show that variable substrate feeding can play a decisive role during the optimization of a biogas plant schedule as part of a long-term design optimization. However, the size of the strategic optimization problem makes the use of a heuristic solution algorithm necessary.