Strategic Planning of Biorefineries for the Use of Residual Biomass for the Benefit of Regions with Low Human Development Index
Academic Article in Scopus
The scarcity of fuels, their feedstocks as well as the environmental impact and the climate change caused by them are issues that have gained strength in recent years. To deal with this situation, biomass has been incorporated as a renewable resource that gives rise to the production of high value-added products in biorefineries such as special chemicals, biofuels and electricity. In this context, the planning of a distributed scheme of biorefineries able to involve the selection of raw materials, cultivation and harvesting sites, processing routes, processing sites and the selection of the distribution of the different products to the markets is needed. Even though the economic and environmental impacts have been widely studied, the social impact has been neglected in the strategic planning of bioresource supply chains. Therefore, this work incorporates a new metric for the social impact into the optimization of supply chains for different biofuels and products. Moreover, one of the major aims of the social objective is to distribute equitably the benefits in the cultivation sites considered within the supply chain. To prove the methodology, a case study of Mexico is considered. Results show that considering economic and social benefits as objectives it is possible to obtain solutions able to benefit from 25 up to 100% of the states of the country, by presenting a slight increase in the value of their human development index. Graphical Abstract: [Figure not available: see fulltext.].
