And the struggle for the Holy Grail of use of fuel treatment material continues… interesting article from the Colorado Sun. Shout-out to Jason Blevins!
The story starts with the closure of the biomass plant in Gypsum.
The pioneering biomass plant in Gypsum — the first in the state to begin converting shredded beetle-kill trees into electricity — has shut down and its owner has filed for bankruptcy protection citing more than $40 million in debt.
There’s a discussion of why that happened. But the reporter, Jason Blevins, also talks about some other current efforts of interest.
Still, there are innovations and opportunities circling Colorado’s forest trash.
Xcel Energy wants to convert the coal-fired power plant in Hayden — which is set to retire in 2028 — into a 19-megawatt biomass facility that would burn forest waste and pine beetle-kill wood to generate enough electricity for 36,000 homes a year.
California-based Charm Industrial in July opened a facility in Fort Lupton that processes agricultural waste and wood slash collected from Front Range forests into a biomass liquid called Bio-oil, which it then injects into orphan oil and gas wells. The company has collected more than $100 million from investors and partnered with companies like Google, J.P. Morgan, Meta and Stripe that paid $53 million to reduce their carbon footprints by permanently removing carbon from the atmosphere.
The Loveland-based Biochar Now burns shredded trees collected from forests in 40 high-heat, oxygen-deprived kilns at a facility in Berthoud to create biochar, a sort of charcoal that is used for improving soil, adding to livestock feed and filtering water. The process captures carbon dioxide before the wood rots on a forest floor and releases greenhouse gases. And like Charm Industrial, the innovative Biochar Now sells carbon offsets to companies seeking to green up operations.
The newly formed Colorado Mass Timber Coalition works to encourage timber products in new buildings and bolster the economics around local timber harvested from on the state’s forests. The group has 280 members, up from 70 in April.
The growing number of members reflects interest and opportunity in finding uses for forest products in Colorado, said Will Lepry, the first director of the coalition who took over in April.
“The more end markets we have the cheaper it is to manage the forest to make them healthy,” Lepry said. “It’s not good that the Gypsum plant is shut down. That’s one less place for slash to go. That means it’s going to be left in place or burned in slash piles instead of being used to create energy.”
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As to the oil sequestration, whatever works to get the material used… But will Google and Meta still want to do it when they are running their own nuclear plants?
I’m generally not a fan of carbon offsets either, seems like excessive analysis and accounting for any actual climate benefit.. the hot air to actual sequestration ratio seems too high, but again, whatever works, and if big companies want to pay for it, more’s the better.
Anyway, here’s Scott Fitzwilliams’ perspective:
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Looking at biomass as an energy source is the wrong perspective, said Scott Fitzwilliams, the head of the White River National Forest.
“This is not about making energy. It’s about treating forests,” Fitzwilliams said.
The 2.28 million-acre White River National Forest uses mechanized timber harvesting to treat about 2,000 acres a year as part of its fuel-reduction wildfire mitigation and vegetation management program. It pays contractors as much as $2,500 an acre for that work. About 45% of the slash and scrap wood harvested by those contractors was delivered to the Gypsum plant for biomass-generated electricity.
“The loss of this plant is really disappointing for our vegetation program,” Fitzwilliams said. “We are not exactly sure if there will be someone else to fill that void and take that material.”
Wait, with Forest Range Products, has ongoing mitigation projects on public land around Summit County, Vail, Eagle, Glenwood Springs and the Roaring Fork Valley. He charges the Forest Service cost plus 10% and the bankruptcy of the Gypsum biomass plant will end several of his company’s wildfire mitigation projects. Without the contract with Holy Cross, “the power plant is not worth anything,” Wait said.
As the bankruptcy sale moves through the process, Wait hopes Holy Cross members can urge the co-op to keep biomass in the energy provider’s renewable portfolio.
“Biomass has always been expensive,” Wait said. “But the price for this plant is cheap and the benefits are just so huge.”
Trying to make biomass energy economical is a challenge as the cost of wind and solar energy drops. Burning slash for energy should be seen as a tool for reducing the cost of wildfire mitigation, Fitzwilliams said, not as a rival for cheaper natural gas, solar and wind energy. He toured Europe a few years ago to study the vibrant biomass industry in places like Germany and Austria, “where it is heavily, heavily subsidized,” he said.
“It’s just too labor intensive and equipment intensive — with very technical machinery — to not have that subsidy,” Fitzwilliams said. “In Europe, where freezing to death or not depends on (Russian President Vladimir) Putin, the incentives to subsidize other energies like biomass are very high.”
In the Western United States, those incentives should include reducing the threat of a wildfire that costs $20 million to $50 million to fight, Fitzwilliams said.
“Our public policy folks should focus on forest health and whatever beneficial consequence is great,” Fitzwilliams said. “Spending $600,000 on a treatment that prevents a $50 million wildfire is a good investment and it protects watersheds for so many rural communities. I think we need to look at biomass in a different way.”
Sidenote: I don’t know if Scott is using LCOE (Levelized Cost of Energy) or just generalized info to say that wind and solar are cheaper and decreasing. Doomberg has an excellent critique of LCOE but is sadly paywalled. If folks are interested, I can excerpt in another post.
When Holy Cross partnered with the plant in 2013, the energy provider was hoping to have 20% of its power coming from renewables. Now, the nonprofit electric co-op serves its 45,000 members with about 90% of its electricity coming from clean energy, and most of that is coming from solar and wind farms. The Gypsum biomass plant provided about 7% of the co-op’s energy and was among the first renewable providers enlisted by Holy Cross. The co-op paid a lot for biomass electricity back then.
“It was great because it was a consistent supply but it was our most expensive source. Because it was built 20 years ago and renewable was expensive at the time and we chose to spend more at that time because we thought renewables were important,” said Jenna Weatherred with Holy Cross. “At this point, renewables are our cheapest form of energy.”
Weatherred said the Gypsum plant cost a lot to run, especially compared to solar and wind energy generators.
“It’s really expensive to cut down beetle kill and drive it over to the plant,” she said.
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The Cost Problem
I wonder in what sense solar and wind are cheapest. Conceivably they need batteries, or natgas or coal backup when “the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing.” Whereas conceivably woody material is available all the time and could serve as backup to intermittent renewables? But maybe they are talking about the price at a certain amount of time that the utility pays? When some people say this, they mean the Levelized Cost of Energy calculation. Doomberg, being of the financial mindset, had a comprehensive piece on this, but is paywalled, so if folks are interested, I’ll excerpt the main points.
We all know “it’s expensive to cut down beetle kill and drive it to the plant.” It’s also expensive to burn slash in piles and conceivably add to CO2 in the atmosphere (social cost of carbon, which I think is a bogus number, but the USG has spent a great deal of $ figuring out how to calculate it, and I think judges have required it on EIS’s), or the costs of escaped pile burns, or the health costs of smoke from the piles.. So I guess it’s another one of the those trade-off problems, where financial calculations are not necessarily holistic about considering the options. Certainly there are costs and benefits that accrue to energy from wood waste that aren’t accounted for in the utility’s analysis. If I recall correctly, in my interview with Brad Worsley of BioNova Power in Arizona, utilities want the cheapest source (and may be required to use it by regulation), and h was arguing for a Production Tax Credit to help it pencil out.
It’s not the first time a biomass processor has shut down in Colorado. Earlier this year Greenbacker and its subsidiary Eagle Valley Green Energy filed for bankruptcy in U.S. District Court in Denver. The Rural Utilities Service in the Department of Agriculture is cited as the top creditor with secured claims, owed $35.4 million from a 2013 loan. The filing includes $4.6 million in unsecured claims from dozens of contractors and service providers. The filing cites $3.2 million owed to the Greenbacker Renewable Energy Corp. The filing also notes more than $630,000 owed to West Range Forest Products. The Gypsum-based West Range has long-term stewardship contracts with the Forest Service, tasked with logging operations across several regions.
We’re in rare agreement, Professor Friedman.
Millions of acres are being farmed for ethanol by burning diesel fuel. Logging is diesel fuel-intensive. Diesel can be distilled from wood waste ground in the landing processing some with mobile pyrolysis systems.
The cost of subsidizing, manufacturing, transporting, erecting, maintaining then removing and disposing of just one wind turbine eyesore bat and bird killer would take a thousand subscribers to energy self-reliance. Microgrid technologies are destined to enhance tribal sovereignty, free communities from electric monopolies and net-metering only gives control back to utilities enabled by moral hazard.
Utilities are not your friends so don’t tie your photovoltaic system to the grid but if you use it as a backup keep your own electricity completely separate from the utility that reads your meter.
“Fitz” is by far one of the best the FS has in a leadership position. The dude is smart, experienced, able to walk the talk and does not shy away from controversy! If he talks, I certainly listen!
The power plant at Snowflake Az (Worsley’s plant) is a good example of how bioenergy can work, and make a profit. It helps to have very close hauls, subsidized bioenergy credits and buy a plant from bankruptcy for Pennie’s on the dollar. However, White Mountain Stewardship used the Worsley plant to take the slash and small diameter logs to make the power. It was not really “cheap” for the FS to treat NFSL, but the Wallow fire alone was a 130 + million dollar cost to the government. And, it came in the wake of the Rodeo-Chedeski fire that claimed over 450 homes!
I stood and watched the small town of Alpine AZ, the communities of Nutrioso and Greer AZ as the Wallow roared into town. White Mountain Stewardship had treated around those communities and no doubt, kept them from incinerating. I do agree, biomass power is a secondary benefit, and most often in need of subsidy. Unless of course biomass treatments prevent 400+ homes from going up in smoke.