In view of the biomass-based procurement organizations, the extensive changes in the amounts of biomass available with respect to the county are observed and there­fore, it may be more advantageous if one can estimate the biomass availability and costs associated with its supply to each selected power plant. Goerndt et al. (2013) estimated the biomass amounts and its delivered costs for a simulated concentric procurement radii (R) from 10 to 100 km by 10 km intervals around the selected powerplant locations in Northern America using the ArcGIS software (Environmental Systems Research 2013; http://www. esri. com). In the study while dealing with large procurement radii, they observed that the total procurement area around the major power plants is consisting of several counties of varying sizes. Hence based on this, Goerndt et al. (2013) anticipated that it is of extreme importance to estimate the total woody biomass (B) which can be available annually from each procurement area at a county level of any size. The following Eq. 12.7 can be used to estimate the total amount of annually available woody biomass per county and is based on an assumption that the biomass resources are distributed uniformly across the county.

m

B = Yjaibi (12.7)

i=1

where ai is the percentage of the area of a county i and bi is the total annually available woody biomass for the same county i that falls within the procurement area under study.