A novel perspective for techno-economic assessments and effects of parameters on techno-economic assessments for biodiesel production under economic and technical uncertainties

Various parameters, such as biodiesel price, capital cost, interest rate, operating cost, feedstock price, maintenance rate, biodiesel conversion efficiency and glycerol price, may exhibit variation in the techno-economic assessments of biodiesel production within the project's lifetime due to economic and technical uncertainties. This paper first defines a new indicator for techno-economic assessments of biodiesel production when all uncertain parameters are regarded as being uniformly distributed within their variation ranges. This new indicator is named economical infeasibility probability (EIP), which defines the probability that total profit, payback period and net present value (NPV) of biodiesel production or one of them or two of them do not satisfy the prescribed requirements, and the Monte Carlo Simulation (MCS) method is employed to evaluate EIP. Based on economical infeasibility analysis, the sensitivity analysis of EIP with respect to an individual uncertain parameter is defined, and MCS is utilized to evaluate the effect. It is found that EIP for the studied biodiesel production is 0.3676 under the selected distributions of uncertain parameters, and biodiesel price, feedstock price, biodiesel conversion efficiency and operating cost have significant effects on EIP, while capital cost, maintenance rate, interest rate and glycerol price have negligible effects.