Cellulosic biofuels are a potentially large scale, environmentally superior alternative to petroleum-derived fuels. However, in order to produce large quantities of cellulosic biofuels, biorefineries handling enormous tonnages of a large variety of feedstocks are required. Under current thinking, biorefineries are fully integrated operations in which all processes (e.g. size reduction, pretreatment, hydrolysis, fermentation, distillation) of biomass conversion to fuels are present. This implies contracting with literally thousands of individual farmers, potentially interrupted feedstock supplies, large transport and storage costs of feedstock and other business and market power issues.We believe these and other drawbacks of fully integrated biorefineries can be addressed by network of facilities called “Regional Biomass Processing Depots” (RBPDs) which could bridge the gap between feedstock suppliers and biorefineries In its simplest configuration, an RBPD would procure feedstock, pre-process/pre-treat it, deliver it to the biorefinery in an arrangement that satisfies the biorefinery requirements and return by-products to the appropriate end-user. We envision RBPDs that are configured to provide benefits in all three major sustainability criteria: environmental, economic and social.

Specifically, the aim of this study is to allocate land usage in a landscape to various feedstocks based on their sustainability and ethanol/animal feed-yield characteristics, to delineate the operation of an RBPD, to estimate the total energy consumption and emissions generated due to the operation of the system that consists of feedstock suppliers, the RBPD and all related transportation activities and to assess the sustainability of this distributed processing system by comparing it with a fully integrated biorefinery