Economic viability of utilizing biomass energy from young stands—The case of Finland

Ahtikoski, Anssi; Heikkilä, Jani; Alenius, Virpi; Sirén, Matti

doi:10.1016/j.biombioe.2008.01.022

Cited by 64 publications

(41 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…Therefore energy wood thinning in young stands has been subsidized by the government since the late 1990s and this so called Kemera fund enables the harvesting activities in young stands in Finland (Tanttu and Sirén 2004, Heikkilä et al 2007, Ahtikoski et al 2008. State subsidies for logging are 7 € m -3 and for chipping 4.25 € m -3 (Kemera opas 2004).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Harvesting alternatives, accumulation and procurement cost of small-diameter thinning wood for fuel in Central Finland

Laitila¹,

Heikkilä²,

Anttila³

2010

Silva Fenn.

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This study compared harvesting alternatives, accumulation and procurement costs of smalldiameter thinning wood chips for fuel, when trees were harvested either as delimbed stemwood or whole trees. The calculation was made for a hypothetical plant located in Central Finland and the radius of the procurement area was 100 km via the existing road network. Cutting was done with conventional harvester head equipped with multi-tree-handling (MTH) accessories, with the logged trees being chipped at the roadside storage. The cost of delimbed stemwood chips at heating plant was 24% higher compared to the cost of whole tree chips. The availability analysis attested that delimbing lowered the regional cutting removal by 42% compared to the whole tree harvesting, when the minimum accumulation for the fuel fraction at the stand was set at 25 m³/ha. Delimbing diminishes the recovery rate at the site, resulting in a diminishing number of potential recovery sites meeting the threshold volume. However, the study showed that the forest energy potential is increased and procurement costs are reduced, if delimbed stemwood is harvested from stands where the whole tree harvesting is not acceptable due to nutrient loss or for other ecological reasons. Intelligent selection of cutting methods for different stands enables minimization of transport distance and control of procurement cost.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Harvesting alternatives, accumulation and procurement cost of small-diameter thinning wood for fuel in Central Finland

Laitila¹,

Heikkilä²,

Anttila³

2010

Silva Fenn.

Self Cite

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“…The observation-based range of 3-8 TgN yr −1 in the magnitude of these emissions could result in a 10 % difference in predicted tropospheric ozone burden. OAT sensitivity analysis is used in a variety of research fields including environmental science (Bailis et al, 2005;Campbell et al, 2008;de Gee et al, 2008;Saltelli and Annoni, 2010), medicine (Coggan et al, 2005;Stites et al, 2007;Wu et al, 2013), economics (Ahtikoski et al, 2008) and physics (Hill et al, 2012). While the ease of implementing OAT sensitivity analysis is appealing, a major drawback of this approach is that it assumes that the model response to different inputs is independent, which in most cases is unjustified (Saltelli and Annoni, 2010) and can result in biased results .…”

Section: Different Approaches For Sensitivity Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Fast sensitivity analysis methods for computationally expensive models with multi-dimensional output

et al. 2018

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Abstract. Global sensitivity analysis (GSA) is a powerful approach in identifying which inputs or parameters most affect a model's output. This determines which inputs to include when performing model calibration or uncertainty analysis. GSA allows quantification of the sensitivity index (SI) of a particular input -the percentage of the total variability in the output attributed to the changes in that input -by averaging over the other inputs rather than fixing them at specific values. Traditional methods of computing the SIs using the Sobol and extended Fourier Amplitude Sensitivity Test (eFAST) methods involve running a model thousands of times, but this may not be feasible for computationally expensive Earth system models. GSA methods that use a statistical emulator in place of the expensive model are popular, as they require far fewer model runs. We performed an eight-input GSA, using the Sobol and eFAST methods, on two computationally expensive atmospheric chemical transport models using emulators that were trained with 80 runs of the models. We considered two methods to further reduce the computational cost of GSA: (1) a dimension reduction approach and (2) an emulator-free approach. When the output of a model is multi-dimensional, it is common practice to build a separate emulator for each dimension of the output space. Here, we used principal component analysis (PCA) to reduce the output dimension, built an emulator for each of the transformed outputs, and then computed SIs of the reconstructed output using the Sobol method. We considered the global distribution of the annual column mean lifetime of atmospheric methane, which requires ∼ 2000 emulators without PCA but only 5-40 emulators with PCA. We also applied an emulator-free method using a generalised additive model (GAM) to estimate the SIs using only the training runs. Compared to the emulator-only methods, the emulator-PCA and GAM methods accurately estimated the SIs of the ∼ 2000 methane lifetime outputs but were on average 24 and 37 times faster, respectively.

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“…However, environmental concerns, responding to human induced global warming, have recently lead to the realisation that the utilisation of other tangible and intangible forestry services must also be included as additional forest management objectives. As a response, exploring the potential of energy biomass production and how to integrate its production in forest management practices is getting much attention at present (Hoen and Solberg 1994, Ahtikoski et al 2008, Kärkkäinen et al 2008, Heikkilä et al 2009). Current forest management practices aiming mainly at timber production may not necessarily be appropriate as such for the integrated production of energy biomass and timber and also for increasing the carbon sequestration and stocks in the forest ecosystem.…”

Section: Energy Biomass Production and Utilisationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effects of forest management and climate change on energy biomass and timber production with implications for carbon stocks and net CO2 exchange in boreal forest ecosystems

Alam¹

2011

Diss. For.

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Alam, A. 2010. Effects of forest management and climate change on energy biomass and timber production with implications for carbon stocks and net CO 2 exchange in boreal forest ecosystems. Dissertationes Forestales 117. 30 p. Available at: http://www.metla.fi/dissertationes/df117.htm ABSTRACTThe aim of this work was to investigate the effects of forest management and climate change on energy biomass (wood) and timber production with implications for carbon stocks and net CO 2 exchange in boreal forest ecosystems in Finland. First, the impacts of thinning on growth, timber production and carbon stocks under the current and changing climate were analysed by employing an ecosystem model for the whole of Finland over a 90-year period (Article I). Concurrently, the potential of energy biomass production with implications for timber production and carbon stocks under varying thinning and climate scenarios was studied (Article II). Thereafter, a life cycle assessment (LCA) tool for estimating net CO 2 exchange of forest production was developed (Article III), and it was applied in interaction with ecosystem model based simulations to study the impacts of different management regimes (initial stand density and thinning regimes) on energy biomass production and related CO 2 emissions at a stand level with a rotation length of 80 years (Articles III & IV).The results showed that the climate change increased the production potential of energy biomass and timber, and carbon sequestration and stocks over the whole of Finland, but, in a relative sense more in northern than southern Finland (Articles I & II). Decreasing basal area based thinning thresholds compared to the currently recommended ones, increased the harvesting of the annual average amount of timber compared to the annual average growth of stem wood, and reduced carbon stocks in the forest ecosystems (Article I). On the other hand, the use of increased basal area thinning thresholds concurrently increased energy biomass and timber production, and carbon stocks in the forest ecosystem regardless of climate applied (Article II). The development of the LCA tool made it also possible to estimate the net carbon exchange of the forest production (Article III). Based on the use of the LCA tool with the ecosystem model simulations, it was found that the impacts of management related emissions on net carbon exchange were small compared to the total ecosystem fluxes. It was also found that the increase in initial stand density compared to the conventional practice of 2000 seedlings ha -1 , not only increased the energy biomass production at energy biomass thinning, but also reduced management related CO 2 emissions of energy biomass production (Article IV).To conclude, the applied management substantially affects the net atmospheric impacts of production potential of forest ecosystems. The combined use of ecosystem model simulations and the LCA tool will together provide new insights for the analysis of ecologically sustainable energy biomass and timber production systems ...

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Economic viability of utilizing biomass energy from young stands—The case of Finland

Cited by 64 publications

References 9 publications

Harvesting alternatives, accumulation and procurement cost of small-diameter thinning wood for fuel in Central Finland

Harvesting alternatives, accumulation and procurement cost of small-diameter thinning wood for fuel in Central Finland

Fast sensitivity analysis methods for computationally expensive models with multi-dimensional output

Effects of forest management and climate change on energy biomass and timber production with implications for carbon stocks and net CO2 exchange in boreal forest ecosystems

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