Abstract
Graphical abstract
1. Introduction
2. Problem formulation
3. Data collection for indian scenario
4. Results & discussions
5. Conclusions
Appendix A. Supplementary data
References
Abstract
To deal with the rising demand of fossil fuels and their associated untoward environmental and economic effects, the feasibility of Indian government’s green move towards blending of 20% fuel grade ethanol with gasoline has been studied by performing techno-economic-environmental analysis of second generation lignocellulose biomass as feedstock. An optimized supply chain network (SCN) has been designed with four layers of structure starting from raw material suppliers to the retailers through the layers of the manufacturers and the distributors aiming at the net present value (NPV) maximization. The cost calculation includes operating expenditure (OPEX) and capital expenditure (CAPEX) components involving transport, storage, production and import decisions as linear variables and decisions on connections between two nodes between two consecutive layers as binary variables. The distribution layer of the mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model has been uniquely designed for the imported ethanol to serve the twin purposes of meeting the unmet demand as well as enhancing the bio-ethanol product quality in terms of research octane number. The revenue generation is calculated not only from selling the final product but also from the carbon credits calculated using greenhouse gas emission (GHGe) during project life cycle assessment. Further, sensitivity analysis has been performed to show the effect of various parameters such as modes of transport, transport distance limitation on feedstock and product, number of zones, international fuel price fluctuations, feedstock availability on NPV. With ∼۸۰% increase in demand over the 9-year planning horizon, a dynamically changing supply chain (SC) structure shows a ∼۳۶% increase in the newly added locations. Feed availability, critical for Indian scenario, to the tune of at least 40% of the capacity is needed to meet the projected demands.
Introduction
The reserve of fossil fuels that are being used as energy resource is depleting day by day (Razm et al., 2019). The rising pace of development across the globe has led to a great demandsupply imbalance for these conventional fuels, causing unexpected cost escalation and economic inflation (Dovì et al., 2009). Apart from this, they have vital role in environmental pollution (Liu et al., 2018). Thus, a need is felt to migrate from non-renewable to renewable resources of energy, providing immense opportunity to various untapped renewable resources namely, solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, tidal and bio energy (Sequeira and Santos, 2018). Fig 1 (Govt of India Minsitry of Power, 2018; Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment, 2018) shows the current usage of different sources of energy in India. Amidst these alternatives, bioenergy, more precisely bioethanol, generated from 2nd generation biomass (~ 13%, Fig 1b) is one of the sources of carbon neutral renewable energy that is gaining popularity in India. This is because the major part of economy and society in India depends on forest and agriculture and 70% of the its population represents rural India (Yong et al., 2016; Natarajan et al., 2015). As per the government regulation, it is mandatory to blend fuel grade ethanol with gasoline to reduce the burden of crude oil import and this blending percentage is increasing over years (Tables 1 and 2) (Ahmad, 2018; Aradhey, 2017). Moreover, this sector can provide jobs to local people and help boost the national gross domestic product. The low pollution greenhouse gas emission (GHGe) can help in getting revenue in the form of carbon credits for biofuels as per the Kyoto protocol (Grubb et al, 1997).