(1) Even though the USA, one of the major players, withdrew in June 2017, the majority of the global policyholders committed themselves to adopting future strategies that would lead to the reduction of emissions causing climate change. The Paris Agreement on the reduction of the emissions causing climate change, which entered into force in November 2016, prompted the 155 signatories to be active in the process of the global warming mitigation. The sensitivity of the optimal supply chain on the price of local and alternative fuels as well as on the unit price of pipes and storage tanks is studied to illustrate how optimization can be used to shed light on the feasibility of investment in new infrastructure and to support the decision making processes in the energy sector. The findings also give information about the influence on investment versus operation costs on the optimal design of the supply chain. The results of the study demonstrate the role of the price of the local and alternative fuels and the price margins at which it is feasible to build an extensive pipeline network instead of supplying the fuel by trucks to storages connected to pipeline islands. The model is illustrated on a regional energy supply problem considering seasonal variations in the demands.
After linearization, the task is formulated as a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) problem and is solved by state-of-the-art software. A model for optimization of such regional gas supply chains is presented in the paper, considering a combination of pipeline and truck delivery to a set of customers with given energy demands. The gas supply may be further augmented by local biogas or synthetic natural gas. Remote or stranded areas that cannot be supplied by natural gas through transmission pipelines can access gas through terminals for liquefied natural gas (LNG), from where LNG is distributed by trucks or compressed and regasified into regional distribution networks.