Feasibility of an Adaptable Biorefinery Platform: Addressing the Delivery Scale Dilemma under Drought Risk

Michael C. Farmer, Aaron Benson, Xiaolan Liu, Sergio Capareda and Marty Middleton

Journal of Agricultural and Applied Economics, 2014, vol. 46, issue 01, 15

Abstract: Conversion of biomass to electricity is often not economically feasible as a result of large transportation costs and low output prices. We build a model of an adaptable biorefinery situated at an agri-processing facility that already has biomass on-site and consider the optimal scale of the plant to achieve a price premium by selling peaking power given uncertain biomass deliveries year over year as a result of climatic variability. We find that, for conservative electricity prices, a plant situated near cotton gins in Texas could operate with positive expected net revenue while converting on average only 38% of available biomass for peak electricity prices.

Keywords: Agribusiness; Agricultural and Food Policy; Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies; Resource/Energy Economics and Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/169041/files/jaae650.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Feasibility of an Adaptable Biorefinery Platform: Addressing the Delivery Scale Dilemma under Drought Risk (2014)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:joaaec:169041

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.169041

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Agricultural and Applied Economics from Southern Agricultural Economics Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().