Integrating palm oil biomass waste utilization in coal-fired power plants for meeting near-term emission targets

Biomass co-firing with coal can be adopted in the electricity sector to promote greenhouse gas reduction, renewable energy production, and resource efficiency improvement toward environmental sustainability. This realization, however, requires effective management of supply chain issues, such as the collection of biomass feedstock, the transportation of biomass, and the localization of biomass processing plants to deliver the co-firing scales needed. This work addresses these issues by providing a techno-economic assessment conducted in a spatially-explicit manner to investigate the opportunity for scaling up the co-firing deployment at the national scale. The modeling approach is applied to the case of Malaysia's coal and palm oil biomass industries. The number of cases involving the impact of energy decarbonization targets, economic policy instrument, and supply chain cost parameter variations on the co-firing scales deployed are assessed. The findings show that densified biomass feedstock can substitute significant shares of coal capacities to deliver up to 29 MtCO2/year of carbon dioxide reduction. Nevertheless, this would cause a surge in the electricity system cost by up to 2 billion USD/ year due to the substitution of up to 40% of the coal plant capacities. In facilitating the maximal deployment of co-firing at the national scale, more than 100 solid biofuel production plants would need to be built to support a maximum of 41 TWh/year of co-firing capacity. Actions to minimize the specific cost elements of the biomass cofiring supply chain are thus needed in the near term to increase the effectiveness of economic policy instrument to promote co-firing and reduce environmental emissions.

Automated summary

The study demonstrates that densified biomass feedstock can replace significant portions of coal capacity, leading to a reduction of up to 29 million tons of CO2 emissions per year. However, this will result in a substantial increase in electricity system costs, reaching up to 2 billion USD per year due to the replacement of coal-fired power plant capacity. To maximize the deployment of co-firing at a national scale, over 100 solid biofuel production plants would need to be constructed to support a maximum of 41 TWh/year of co-firing capacity. Actions are required to reduce the specific cost elements of the biomass co-firing supply chain in the short term for the economic policy instrument to effectively promote co-firing and reduce environmental emissions.