Summary

The use of bioenergy requires a careful assessment of the existing biomass resources that can be utilised for energy. This session will deal mainly with estimates of forest and agricultural biomass as primary residues for energy. The assessment can be done at different levels, depending of the objective of their quantification. At a local level, the assessment should be accurate and include both spatial and time related variables. Sources of data can be based on existing or designed inventories to retrieve biomass availability for each area. The data should also include the analysis of the existing or adapted management plans to know how much, where and when biomass is produced as a result of different forest operations, such as pre-commercial thinning, thinning regimes, pruning, or clear-cuts. At a regional scale, this level of detail could be overwhelming, and often the estimates are based on existing data of, e.g. harvesting records, wood production, etc… combined with modelling approaches for biomass estimates at large areas, process models, etc… The potential biomass can be defined including several restrictions, resulting on a theoretical potential (the maximum possible) and the technical, economic, and sustainable potential (the available, subject to different restrictions). Finally, global estimates can be based on very rough estimations, which is reflected in the large variability of results among different studies.

Materials

Session slides [PDF]

Estimating biomass potentials [video]. How much biomass there is available? This depends of the scale at which it is study. There can be methods to estimate local potentials (a stand, municipality, small area), regional potentials (a watershed, a region), country level or even global level. Each would answer different questions to different stakeholders (local owners, planners, policy makers), and have different data needs and methods applied. Within our own research, yield potentials of willow in Northern Europe can be found in Mola-Yudego et al, (2016) and Mola-Yudego (2010).Ranta, T. (2005). Logging residues from regeneration fellings for biofuel production–a GIS-based availability analysis in Finland. Biomass and Bioenergy, 28(2), 171-182 [PDF]

 Readings:

Asikainen, A., Liiri, H., Peltola, S., Karjalainen, T., & Laitila, J. (2008). Forest energy potential in Europe (EU27). Finnish Forest Research Institute, Vantaa. [PDF] 

Mola-Yudego, B., Arevalo, J., Díaz-Yáñez, O., Dimitriou, I., Haapala, A., Ferraz Filho, A. C., … & Valbuena, R. (2017). Wood biomass potentials for energy in northern Europe: Forest or plantations?. Biomass and bioenergy, 106, 95-103. [PDF]