Research indicates that large biorefineries capable of handling 5000-10000MT of biomass per day are necessary to achieve process economies. However, such large biorefineries also entail increased costs of biomass transportation and storage, high transaction costs of contracting with a large number of farmers for biomass supply, potential market power issues, and local environmental impacts. We propose a network of regional biomass preprocessing centers (RBPC) that form an extended biomass supply chain feeding into a biorefinery, as a way to address these issues. The RBPC, in its mature form, is conceptualized as a flexible processing facility capable of pre-treating and converting biomass into appropriate feedstocks for a variety of final products such as fuels, chemicals, electricity, and animal feeds. We evaluate the technical and financial feasibility of a simple RBPC that uses ammonia fiber expansion pretreatment process and produces animal feed along with biorefinery feedstock.
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Carolan et al. (2007) studied this question.