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Haul distance is largely outside the control of the grower and the harvesting contractor and has a
significant impact on costs (section 3.2.3 and Figure 3.9) The milling companies recognise this and
include a haulage allowance depending on the distance from the farm to the siding.
Mallee System
The dispersed layout of the mallee crops creates significant challenges for cost-efficient transport of
biomass from the harvester to the road transport receival point.
Haulout distances of several kilometres will be commonplace unless there is some careful design of an
integrated infield transport operation. Modelling the cost of biomass to the roadside landing, where
road trucks are loaded, indicates that with large capacity capital intensive machines, the addition of a
third and fourth haulout significantly increases costs per tonne. There will be a wide range of haulout
distances experienced over periods of only hours because the harvester will travel widely across large
paddocks. This will make it difficult to add extra haulout capacity opportunistically and operate
different numbers of haulouts on different days, so every haulout and operator will need to be
available every day.
The strategy that will be explored is to separate infield transport into short haul to the corner(s) of the
paddock (to the paddock landing) and then a longer haul to the roadside landing by shunt truck or
tractor. The two transport steps will allow the harvester and its attendant two haulouts to roam widely
and deliver biomass to several transient paddock landings each day, and the shunt transport provides
the flexibility required to accommodate the scatter of these paddock landings. This operation will
require sophisticated logistics management to ensure that both empty and full bins are where they
need to be on time.
Landings, both paddock and roadside, will need to be located early in the development process to
assist farmers in new planting of mallee resources. Strategic location of landings and mallee sites will
help to minimise costs to the farmer.
The infield transport routes and paddock landings will not be used often enough, or for enough
biomass per visit, to justify earthworks or other expensive preparation. The harvesters, haulouts and
shunts will need to be appropriate for operating under paddock conditions as they are. The
requirements will be determined by points along access routes where soil conditions are least
favourable, not the typical conditions of the whole paddock.
Road transport in mallee systems will need to be built for purpose and side loading and unloading
must be adopted to minimise truck terminal time for road trains. The other variables relating to road
transport efficiency, being speed and payload, are controlled by regulation. It would be an advantage
to select roadside landing positions strategically to minimise the cost of site preparation, and to space
the landings so that relocation from landing to landing occurs no more than weekly.
3.5 Discussion
Infield transport is an important part of the supply chain and has been shown to be one of the major
components in the delivered cost of other biomass supply chains. Similarly, road transport will have a
significant impact on the delivered cost.
The transport systems will be impacted by the nature of the material to be delivered (e.g. wood chip
vs. whole tree biomass with leaf material) which is impacted by biomass market. Mallee biomass will
be more difficult to move, tip and transport than other biomass products such as grain, clean wood
chip and cane billets.
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