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Optimizing Bio-energy Crop Farm Profitability with Spatial Distribution of Bio-fuel Refinery Sites

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Biofuels and Bioenergy (BICE2016)

Part of the book series: Springer Proceedings in Energy ((SPE))

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Abstract

With increase in prices of food grains and non-renewable fuel, the scientific community has turned to nature for answers. Biomass and bio-fuel production system must be optimized to enhance bio-fuel production. This can be done with a bio-energy crop production system concentrating on farm profitability and resource energy management. The system defined here stands on climatic and geo-spatial characteristics of potential energy crops, production and availability of infrastructure, socioeconomic parameters, public (subsidies) as well as private fuel consumption, qualitative and quantitative analysis of bio-fuel crops, cultural guards and intrusions. This article presents a linear programming model considering the above parameters as inputs. The model seeks to accurately determine the profitability of each bio-fuel crop pair which can be rotated in a specific geography. Simulations to relate mean distance to bio-refinery and net biomass crop profit are performed for four region specific bio-fuel crop pairs in the United States. The model helps in understanding the connections that agricultural management is having with various parameters connected with production starting from cost of seeds to value of the final biomass in hand. This helps in the derivation of a stochastic model providing an insight on statistical impacts of multiple parameters on improving the feasibility of the proposed bio-fuel production system. This analysis implies closer bio-refinery spacing than current grain elevator spacing under most anticipated circumstances signifying that transportation infrastructure plays a significant, perhaps dominant, role in creating successful regional biofuel production programs and policies.

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Abbreviations

LP:

Linear programming

MMR:

Multi-parameter multiplicative regression

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Acknowledgements

We are very grateful to Prof. Ann Christy for teaching us the subject of Bio-fuels and all our colleagues at the Department of Food Agricultural and Biological Engineering, The Ohio State University who provided constructive comments while we were putting this work together. We also thank the Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur for providing the financial support. We also greatly acknowledge the advice from Prof. Alfred Soboyejo and Prof. Larry C. Brown. We also thank Amrita Kaurwar and Sandeep Gupta for reviewing this work.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Food Agricultural and Biological Engineering Department, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, 43210, USA

    Kevin Duemmel

  2. Ohio Department of Transportation, Cambridge, OH, USA

    Kevin Duemmel

  3. The Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur, Jodhpur, Rajasthan, India

    Anand Plappally

Authors
  1. Kevin Duemmel
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  2. Anand Plappally
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Anand Plappally .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Chemical Engineering, MANIT Bhopal, Bhopal, India

    S. Suresh

  2. Energy Technology Research Center, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Prince of Songkla University Energy Technology Research Center, Songkhla, Thailand

    Anil Kumar

  3. School of Energy, Construction and Environment,, Coventry University, Coventry, United Kingdom

    Ashish Shukla

  4. Division of Environmental Sciences, Centre for Environment Science and Climate Resilient Agriculture, New Delhi, India

    Renu Singh

  5. Department of Mechanical Engineering, MANIT Bhopal, Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India

    C.M. Krishna

Appendix

Appendix

(see Table 1; Figs. 7 and 8).

Table 1 Biofuel crops and their geographical and climate suitability
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Fig. 7
figure 7

The LP and MMR modeling framework

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Fig. 8
figure 8

The spreadsheet implementation of the LP formulation [Microsoft Excel 2010 version, The Ohio State University]

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Duemmel, K., Plappally, A. (2017). Optimizing Bio-energy Crop Farm Profitability with Spatial Distribution of Bio-fuel Refinery Sites. In: Suresh, S., Kumar, A., Shukla, A., Singh, R., Krishna, C. (eds) Biofuels and Bioenergy (BICE2016). Springer Proceedings in Energy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47257-7_16

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47257-7_16

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-47255-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-47257-7

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