Research methodology and framework Sample Clauses

Research methodology and framework. A techno-economic evaluation typically aims to answer a number of interrelated questions about an industrial process. These usually are: 1. What is the overall economic performance of the whole project? 2. What contributions do single cost items have on the overall costs? 3. What are the total costs of the main process steps? 4. What is the economic performance of a specific product? To answer the first question, the biorefinery processes themselves can be regarded as a “black box” with certain inputs and outputs. Total revenue is calculated by multiplication of physical outputs and market prices obtained from the market research and balanced against total costs. These market prices may or may not include a “GreenPremium” (see section 3.1.3) of a certain level. Since it is likely that some of the biorefinery concepts will not be economically viable without support, this analysis includes the assessment of the necessary level of subsidies. The second question is also within the scope of Task 7.3 as will be shown below. The third and fourth question, however, would require an allocation of mass and energy flows, revenues and costs to single process steps and products. Each biorefinery scheme is a multifunctional system, i.e. one that delivers several goods and/or services, or, simplified, “co-products”. In the case of a multi-output process, the problem of allocation of costs arises if one wants to make a statement about the production costs of one single output. Since the biorefinery process streams are interrelated, it is not straightforward how to accomplish this allocation. Also a substitution approach, which requires that for each multi-product process, one of the products can be clearly identified as the main product and all others as co- products is not straightforward for the techno-economic assessment. The techno-economic assessment therefore focuses on the assessment of each biorefinery scheme as a whole.