System-level cost evaluation for economic viability of cellulosic biofuel manufacturing

Biofuel is a clean and renewable energy source and is considered a promising alternative to traditional fossil fuels. The economic viability is crucial in promoting large-scale adoption and long-term sustainability of biofuel. Most of the current literature on biofuel economics assumes the individual biofuel manufacturing processes are independent of each other. Consequently, the interrelationships between parameters within and across processes regarding manufacturing cost and biofuel yield are not well investigated. In this paper, a system-level cost model for cellulosic biofuel manufacturing is established across multiple production processes to investigate the relationships between the individual process characteristics and the system performance to reduce the overall cost under the constraint of biofuel yield. Two numerical case studies are conducted to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed model. Compared with the baseline case, the cost-effective case shows that 12.8% of the total cost is reduced without ethanol yield loss.