A GIS Model to Estimate a Sustainable Potential of Forest Fuel for Energy Generation in the Municipality of Växjö, Sweden

Abstract: Since the 1980s the municipality of Växjö in Southern Sweden has been increasingly focusing on using wood to produce energy for the region. A permanent and sustainable supply of wood material is therefore indispensable. The main source for this wood fuel is harvested wood from forests which can be used as energy, so-called forest fuel. The objective of this research is to develop a model to estimate a sustainable potential of forest fuel supply until the year 2050 for the municipality using a geographic information system (GIS). The model overall follows a top-down approach that consists of three sequential modeling steps which are generally applicable for biomass potential estimations: a theoretical, technical and the reduced technical potential. For input data the model uses georeferenced forest data (called kNN-Sweden) and topographic data about the study area to describe and narrow down the forest fuel potential by setting numerical or topographic (spatial) parameters for each modeling step. In this report forest data from 2005 has been used, which was obtained shortly before the storm ‘Gudrun’ hit and damaged great parts of the Swedish forest landscape. This factor might have resulted in slightly misleading estimated numerical modeling results concerning the actual future forest fuel supplies, but is not related to the overall layout of the model. The results show that the municipality of Växjö should be able to satisfy its demand for energy wood from harvested forest wood alone until around the year 2035, but might have shortages after that year until 2050 (and possibly beyond that). This thesis concludes that for the next 40 years the municipality of Växjö should not only rely on its annually available forest fuel capacity, but instead, different wood resources, such as recycled wood from constructions or furniture, have to be utilized or forest wood from years with surplus supply have to be stored for future tighter years. For more accurate results the modeling steps should be repeated with more recent forest data. The report also concludes that the estimation of the forest fuel potential in this study still lacks accuracy and that it is advised to treat the estimated numerical modeling results with caution. There’s still room for further improvement, and therefore possible error sources and suggestions for future work are listed.