Optimizing biodiesel production in India

India is expected to at least double its fuel consumption in the transportation sector by 2030. To contribute to the fuel supply, renewable energies such as jatropha appear to be an attractive resource for biodiesel production in India as it can be grown on waste land and does not need intensive water supply. In order to produce biodiesel at a competitive cost, the biodiesel supply chain – from biomass harvesting to biodiesel delivery to the consumers – is analyzed. A mixed integer linear programming model is used in order to determine the optimal number and geographic locations of biodiesel plants. The optimization is based on minimization of the costs of the supply chain with respect to the biomass, production and transportation costs. Three biodiesel blends are considered, B2, B5 and B10. For each blend, 13 scenarios are considered where yield, biomass cost, cake price, glycerol price, transport cost and investment costs are studied. A sensitivity analysis is carried out on both those parameters and the resulting locations of the plants. The emissions of the supply chain are also considered. The results state that the biomass cost has most influence on the biodiesel cost (an increase of feedstock cost increases the biodiesel cost by about 40%) and to a lower effect, the investment cost and the glycerol price. Moreover, choosing the right set of production plant locations highly depends on the scenarios that have the highest probability to occur, for which the production plant locations still produce a competitive biodiesel cost and emissions from the transportation are minimum. In this study, one set of plant locations happened to meet these two requirements.