Systematic screening of biorefinery technologies at the early stage of design

Improving technology readiness and government support have helped some forestry companies to continue to develop their biorefinery strategies over the past few years, including that for ethanol production in some cases. These developing technologies have been proven at various scales, and data required for their evaluation are typically scarce and uncertain. How can forestry companies select the “best” technology among the many options available to them, given this complex and uncertain landscape? The objective of this paper is to demonstrate the use of an early stage design tool for screening biorefinery technologies, using ethanol production as an example. A set of multidisciplinary criteria are defined that can be interpreted by a stakeholder panel, and calculated based on publically-available data. Then, the criteria are interpreted and weighed using multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) analysis in order to make a global evaluation of technologies relative to each other, and identify those that should not be further considered.