A wonderful article on ways to maintian the transportation cost of biomass . I was actually telling myself off for not having seen this earlier. It is indeed a lovely article.
The research studies claim that two alternatives have been explored:
a.Transport by rail
b.Transport by pipeline.
Though some truck transport will be required to move biomass from field in either of these alternative scenarios,a large portion of the total distance from source to biorefinery would be carried by rail or pipeline.One problem that arises immediately when using a carrier liquid and wood chips is the uptake of the liquid by the chips. The water content of the chips rises by 13% when water is used, and incredibly, the chips absorb upwards of 50% of their weight in oil when a hydrocarbon carrier is employed.
Even though pipelines may be more cost-effective at large distances compared to trucking, the costs of moving biomass for such long distances is still quite expensive regardless of method (on average $15 per dry tonne by pipeline for a 100km distance to nearly $40/dry tonne for 500km .
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