Biomass is traded between pairs of model countries, based on the trade patterns in the base year 2009. We assume that trade takes place between neighbouring countries and use the consumption nodes like for electricity. IEA Extended Energy Balances has information about each country’s import and export of biomass, but this does not show trade patterns between countries.
Generally there are some data limitations when it comes to biomass and it has not been possible to find a complete data set for biomass trade in Europe. However, as of 2009 Eurostat has recorded wood pellets trade in Europe. Because wood pellets currently is the main traded commodity of solid biofuels (Hoefnagels 2011), we have used the pellets trade flows from Eurostat to allocate the IEA data on import and export of biomass in the base year. This gives us a dataset with trade flows between the model countries for biomass.
The cost of international transportation of biomass is based on the cost of transporting wood pellets per kilometre within Europe from Hoefnagels et al. (2011). This is then combined with the distances between the nodes in the model countries. Only neighbouring countries are allowed to trade directly. According to Hoefnagels (2011), the majority of wood pellets is transported by truck within Europe and they estimate the cost to be 8 €/tonne per 100 km.
The distribution costs are calculated based on the difference between the end-user prices in each sector (exclusive of taxes) and the production costs in each country node.
