Designing a regional forest fuel supply network

New regulations on bioenergy lead to increasing demand for forest fuel. This paper describes a new approach to configure a wood biomass supply network for a certain region, a federal state of Austria. The network consists of several forest areas and a number of energy plants with a total demand of 1.2 million loose cubic meter (lcbm) wood biomass and 502,000 lcbm forest fuels. Starting with the regionally available forest fuel and the potential number of heating and energy plants we evaluate the different supply lines for the woody biomass from forest to plants by calculating the system cost for a number of alternative configurations. Especially, we compare central chipping against a local approach. The main contribution of this paper is to provide an evaluation method of forest fuel supply network design for a whole region. (C) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.