Biomass

Biomass plant to be online by 2013

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The F.H. Stoltze Land and Lumber mill in Columbia Falls will install a new biomass boiler.

Sent in by Smokey.
http://www.flatheadnewsgroup.com/hungryhorsenews/article_2683b66c-5267-11e1-8f28-0019bb2963f4.html

Biomass plant moves forward
The F.H. Stoltze Land and Lumber Co. will install a new biomass boiler at its mill in Columbia Falls that will generate power for Flathead Electric Cooperative Inc.

.Posted: Wednesday, February 8, 2012 8:08 am | Updated: 10:41 am, Wed Feb 8, 2012.

Biomass plant to be online by 2013 By RICHARD HANNERS Hungry Horse News Hagadone Corporation | 0 comments

Flathead Electric and Stoltze sign historic power agreement

In what is being described as a win-win deal for jobs, alternative energy and forest health, Flathead Electric Cooperative signed a power purchase agreement with F.H. Stoltze Land & Lumber Co. on Jan. 31 for biomass energy from the timber company’s mill.

In the 20-year agreement, which begins in 2013, the Co-op agreed to purchase up to 2.5 megawatts of power at 9 cents per kilowatt-hour. The Co-op will receive Renewable Energy Credits as a result of the purchase.

“Not only is this agreement great for the community, but it will provide a renewable energy source and also help manage the forests,” Stoltze vice president Chuck Roady said.

Talk about using wood waste from mills or biomass from forest thinning and logging projects to generate power has been going on since at least 2001, when the West Coast energy crisis shut down the Columbia Falls Aluminum Co. smelter.

More recently, as Stoltze moved forward with plans to replace the aging boiler system at its Half Moon mill – and to include a steam-powered electrical generator – public interest grew in the project. U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, for one, had expressed interest in a biomass generating plant in Montana, Roady said.

“This is a mutually beneficial arrangement, in which both parties have been negotiating in good faith for some time,” Co-op general manager Ken Sugden said. “Stoltze will be able to maintain and add local jobs, and Flathead Electric will be able to efficiently distribute electricity in our service area. Although a small component, this purchase agreement also adds to the Co-op’s renewable energy portfolio without financially overburdening our members.”

Flathead Electric Cooperative currently receives nearly all its power from the Bonneville Power Administration at about 3-4 cents a kilowatt-hour, which could be capped at about 169 megawatts. It also uses about 1.1 megawatts from a generator powered by landfill gas at the county landfill, and it will receive about a quarter megawatt of power from the city of Whitefish’s hydroplant when that project is completed.

According to Co-op assistant general manager Mark Johnson, the Co-op’s board set a criteria that the impact from purchasing Stoltze’s power at 9 cents a kilowatt-hour could not raise members’ retail rates by more than 1 percent. The 2.5 megawatt purchase amounts to about 1 percent of the Co-op’s total load, so there is little impact to costs.

Stoltze landed a $190,720 Woody Biomass Utilization grant last June to develop engineering, designs and permits for the project. In January, the Department of Environmental Quality announced Stoltze had requested a modification to its air quality permit so it could replace a bank of out-dated boilers rated at 60 million Btu/hour with a single boiler rated at 70 million Btu/hour.

Stoltze’s Half Moon lumber mill was constructed by the State Lumber Co. between 1918 and 1923. Five boilers were acquired from mills in Kila and Eureka – two Frost boilers, two Casey Hedge boilers and an Erie City Iron Works boiler.

“One of the boilers is dated 1905,” Roady said.

The boilers primarily burn bark but also consume sawdust, wood chips, planer shavings and hog fuel – ground up wood waste from forests and the log yard. The primary use of the steam is to heat kilns to dry finished lumber.

Stoltze initially looked at powering a 20-megawatt generator with a new boiler system, but by last June it had downsized its goals to about 2 megawatts – enough to handle the mill’s electrical load of 1.3 to 1.7 megawatts. An additional 2.5 megawatts will now be sold to the Co-op.

“The limitation is not biomass,” Roady said. “It’s the amount of biomass power the Co-op can handle.”

The new boiler will be built by Wellons Inc., of Vancouver, Wash., which has a long history building boilers and drying kilns for the timber industry – including Stoltze’s drying kilns, Roady said. Stoltze will borrow $20 million for the project, Roady said, which will start as soon as weather cooperates and take about 18 months to complete.

“We’ll tweak the system beginning in May or June, and put power on the grid by Oct. 1, 2013,” Roady said.

Social acceptance of fire needed in climate-changing forest – Climatewire interview

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Social acceptance of fire needed in climate-changing forests

From Climate wire

my comments in italics

Published: Monday, January 23, 2012

The future of managing wildfires in the face of climate change is going to require different tools and strategies, but also something a bit more difficult to swallow — encouraging burning instead of stifling it.

In the future, forest managers will need to “try to work with fire, rather than fighting it,” said David Peterson, research biologist at the Forest Service’s Pacific Northwest Station. “If we allowed more wildfires to burn, that could be beneficial,” he added. Fire is considered part of a natural cycle in forest ecology, and encouraging small fires could help prevent bigger, more damaging ones.

The U.S. Forest Service has issued a report on how to address forest management in the face of climate change, looking at resource management on national forests and, potentially, other federal lands. Fire management, pest control and watershed management are some of the areas where practices will need to change, said report co-author Peterson in an interview with ClimateWire.

Letting fires burn, instead of stifling them at all costs, is not an easy sell politically or socially, said Peterson. But those who live in the wildland-urban interface, the transitional zone between residential clusters and the wilderness, are becoming more aware.

“I think they’re getting much more savvy about the scientific concept of fire,” he said, calling the interface one of the biggest social challenges for the Forest Service.

It’s not clear what this means- if they understand “the scientific concept” does that mean they are not as interested in fire suppression around their homes? Also notice that wildland-urban is defined as “the transitional zone between residential clusters and the wilderness”. There are plenty of lands that are adjacent to communities that are “wildlands” but not “wilderness.”

More partnerships between federal, state and private lands would bring together a fragmented landscape to tackle some of the climate-driven problems that have plagued forests in the past years. These include fires, pine beetle epidemics and floods.

“They don’t care about where that dotted map is, and they don’t care about any individual ownership,” Peterson said.

Water, roads and infrastructure are also at risk, said Peterson who has seen a distinctive change in the flows, levels and patterns of rivers. Floods, mudslides and other severe events that were once considered 100-year events are occurring more frequently.
‘Forest thinning’ gets a new boost

The Forest Service compiled several existing management changes across their forests to provide examples for the framework. In Washington state’s Olympic National Park, for example, foresters took on an effort to completely redesign the roads and culverts to withstand a higher water load, expected as torrential rains become more frequent. In California’s Inyo National Forest, staff created a decisionmaking tool that offered the implications of hundreds of different possible decisions, given a likely climate change scenario.

“In taking a risk management approach to adaptation, what we are doing is preparing for changes rather than changing what’s there,” said the Forest Service’s climate change adviser, David Cleaves.

Forest thinning, part of the “fuel treatments” that the Forest Service employs to reduce fire risk, will also increase given future predictions for climate change, said Peterson. Last year, legislators in Western states expressed frustration at a perceived lack of preventive action to halt forest fires, mandated under the Healthy Forests Restoration Act. Last year saw some record-breaking wildfires, including Arizona’s 550,000-acre Wallow fire.

But forest thinning, and its possibility of increase, has come under scrutiny. A report from Oregon State University issued last May questioned the practice of thinning as an effective climate strategy, as it reduces the size of forest carbon sinks — the wood mass that absorbs and holds carbon from entering into the atmosphere.

So we are doing fuel treatments to protect communities from fire, which is expected to increase due to climate change, but doing so is not an “effective climate strategy” based on this study. So confusing as we are mixing adaptation to, and mitigation of, climate change. Also, to me it’s not that clear that we would not have to do WUI fuel treatments if there were no climate change.. in other words in the absence of climate change, given western ecosystems’ historic fire patterns, it still would be a good idea to do WUI fuel treatment.

The Natural Resources Defense Council, as well as other environmental groups, has cast doubt on the use of forest thinnings to burn for biomass electricity, saying the rising demand may soon damage forests more than help them.

Thinning forests, and thinning them and using the thinned material for biomass, are two different things. This is confusing because we should be clear on whether NRDC and others doubt thinning for fuels reduction, as perhaps needed for fires under climate change, or doubt using the products for biomass. Based on this NRDC fears are based on scale, and not the technology per se.

“There have been a number of these types of articles,” said Peterson of the study. “Some say it’s a net deficit [of carbon], some say it’s a net positive, some say it’s neutral.”

For now, the Forest Service do not consider carbon sequestration when planning fuel treatments. The risks of devastating burning and millions of dollars in damage tip the scale to meeting current needs, said Cleaves.

“You may have to incur [carbon] emissions costs to achieve risk reduction,” he said. “You don’t have to do that in every situation, but it sure is possible.”

UM Biomass on Hold as Natural Gas Prices Dip

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Thanks to Matthew Koehler for this one..

UM biomass project on hold as natural gas prices dipBy CHELSI MOY of the Missoulian | December 2, 2011
http://missoulian.com/news/local/um-biomass-project-on-hold-as-natural-gas-prices-dip/article_d266a47c-1ca1-11e1-9c21-0019bb2963f4.html

For the first time since natural gas prices began to dip, the fate of the University of Montana’s proposed woody-biomass gasification plant is clear: the project is on hold.

“It’s not financially viable at this time,” said Rosi Keller, UM associate vice president for administration and finance. “We won’t move forward until it is.”

Keller’s comments came during an open forum on campus Thursday directed at educating UM students on the $16 million industrial-sized heating plant project that UM proposed to reduce its carbon footprint.

About 45 people showed up to listen to presentations by Keller and Ben Schmidt, an environmental health specialist at the Missoula City-County Health Department. The forum, hosted by the ASUM Sustainability Center, was aimed at informing students so they could make up their minds about the project.

Recent media reports of UM’s request for an air quality permit in order to build the project have sparked increased student interest, said Stacy Boman, ASUM sustainability coordinator.

“Students have come into the center wanting to know more about it,” she said. “We hope that they understand the issue and can join the discourse surrounding the biomass project and can offer up their own thoughts and opinions.”

Most of the students in attendance at Thursday’s panel discussions were environmental studies majors or members of the UM Climate Action Now! Many support UM switching from natural gas to woody biomass.

“It’s much less controversial among the student body than with the community,” said Zach Brown, a 21-year-old environmental studies major.

Brown wants to see power generated locally, which is why he supports UM’s proposal to burn upward of 16,000 tons of biomass trucked in from local forests. UM currently imports natural gas, which means the side effects of drilling and hydraulic fracturing are left for others to clean up.

While switching to biomass in some cases would increase emissions in Missoula’s air shed above the level of natural gas, Brown thinks forcing consumers to have to deal with these issues may change their habits.

“If those side effects were in our faces, we may question our level of energy consumption,” he said.

If anything, students had concerns about the kinds of biomass that would be used and where it would come from. It’s important that the fuel is collected from areas within 100 miles of Missoula, said Alison Wren, a 21-year-old environmental studies student. And Brian Nickerson, 21, hopes UM ensures that it only uses biomass that is sustainably harvested.

However, none of this will matter if the price of natural gas continues to decrease.

The state of Montana negotiates a two-year contract for natural gas, which includes UM. Currently, UM pays $7.10 per dekatherm for natural gas. Only if the price reaches $8 a dekatherm would the university’s biomass project become financially viable, Keller said.

Since the beginning of the project, natural gas prices have decreased 15 percent, said Tom Javins, UM biomass project manager. And it’s possible that once the state renegotiates a contract for natural gas a year from now, UM may be paying a price for natural gas that biomass can’t beat.

Reporter Chelsi Moy can be reached at 523-5260 or at Chelsi.moy @missoulian.com.

Is Biocoal the Answer?

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biocoalA recent Bangor Daily News article (here) discusses how the new owners of two paper mills in Millinocket, Maine plan to use this technology to convert wood waste into torrefied wood also known as biocoal. Proponents tout the technology as carbon neutral if waste material is used as the source for the process.

Nick Sambides Jr., BDN Staff
Posted Dec. 01, 2011, at 12:56 p.m.

MILLINOCKET, Maine — Cate Street Capital has purchased for more than $20 million the North American rights to the technology to manufacture biocoal, a huge step toward adding the production of treated wood at its Katahdin Avenue paper mill and creating several hundred jobs, officials said Thursday.
Cate Street subsidiary Thermogen Industries LLC secured exclusive rights from Scotland-based Rotawave Biocoal to manufacture a type of machine — called Targeted Intelligent Energy System, or TIES — that makes biocoal, or torrefied wood, which would replace coal burned at electricity plants, Cate Street spokesman Scott Tranchemontagne said.

“It is the most tangible sign of our commitment to moving this project forward,” Tranchemontagne said Thursday of the $20 million deal. “We have the technology. We have a wonderful site at the end of the Golden Road and we have a labor force that is ready and willing to work. Those are some key pieces to any business looking to start up.”

If Thermogen’s plans reach fruition, Cate Street senior vice president Richard Cyr said, Thermogen’s production of biocoal would help transform the state forest products industry.
Thermogen and Cate Street subsidiary Great Northern Paper Co., which operates the East Millinocket and Millinocket paper mills, would also benefit from several independent and ongoing governmental and private business initiatives.

Those initiatives include the $10.5 million reconstruction of 233 miles of northern Maine railroad tracks, the expansion of the shipping port in Searsport, Gov. Paul LePage’s proposal to extend a natural gas line to the Katahdin region by 2013, and Cate Street’s own revitalization of the mills.

By acquiring the rights to TIES, Rotawave Biocoal’s microwave-based biocoal production system, Thermogen has solidified plans to install five or six TIES machines in Millinocket starting in November 2012. Creating jobs for 22 to 25 workers directly and dozens of truckers, loggers and other support providers indirectly, the first $35 million TIES machine would supply United Kingdom utilities with biocoal, Cyr said.

Millinocket would be the site of the first of four or five biocoal mills eventually nationwide, Cyr said. Rotawave’s attempt to sell its technology rights to a Vancouver company that would have built a biocoal factory in British Columbia last year fell through, he said.

“We have been looking for a home for Thermogen for two years. Over that time we have been studying a lot of technologies,” Cyr said, calling Rotawave’s “the one that created the best end product.”

Engineers are developing plans now to site the machines at the Millinocket mill as Cate Street assembles its financing and seeks engineers to build the Rotawave machines, Cyr said. Cate Street hopes to have the design and financing ready within four months, with mill site work possibly beginning then as well, Tranchemontagne said.

Wood Products, Bioenergy and Climate: Lippke et al. Study

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Here’s a link to the new paper Sustainable Biofuel Contributions to Carbon Mitigation and Energy Independence

Here’s the UW news release.

Proposals to remove the carbon dioxide caused by burning fossil fuel from the atmosphere include letting commercially managed forests grow longer between harvests or not cutting them at all.

An article (http://www.mdpi.com/1999-4907/2/4/861/) published in the journal Forests says, however, that Pacific Northwest trees grown and harvested sustainably, such as every 45 years, can both remove existing carbon dioxide from the air and help keep the gas from entering the atmosphere in the first place. That’s provided wood is used primarily for such things as building materials instead of cement and steel – which require more fossil fuels in their manufacture – and secondarily that wood wastes are used for biofuels to displace the use of fossil fuels.

“When it comes to keeping carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, it makes more sense to use trees to recycle as much carbon as we can and offset the burning of fossil fuel than it does to store carbon in standing forests and continuing burning fossil fuels,” said Bruce Lippke (http://www.cfr.washington.edu/SFRPublic/People/FacultyProfile.aspx?PID=11), University of Washington professor emeritus of forest resources. (http://www.cfr.washington.edu/)

Lippke is one of eight co-authors of the article in Forests. It is the first to comprehensively calculate using woody biomass for bioenergy in addition to using wood for long-lived products. The article focuses on the extra carbon savings that can be squeezed from harvesting trees if bioenergy is generated using wood not suitable for long-term building materials. Such wood can come from the branches and other debris left after harvesting, materials thinned from stands or from plantations of fast-growing trees like willow.

For the article, the co-authors looked at selected bioenergy scenarios using wood from the U.S. Pacific Northwest, Southeast and Northeast.

They considered two ways of producing ethanol from woody biomass – gasification and fermentation – and used what’s called life cycle analysis to tally all the environmental effects of gathering, processing and using the resulting fuels. Considering everything that goes into it and how it burns when used as fuel, the researchers found ethanol from woody biomass emits 70 percent to slightly more than 100 percent less greenhouse gases than producing and using the equivalent energy from gasoline.

Achieving slightly more than a 100 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions is possible using fermentation during which ethanol is produced and enough electricity is generated to offset the fossil fuel used in the fermentation process.

In contrast, producing and using corn ethanol to displace gasoline reduces greenhouse gas emissions 22 percent on average, according to the Environmental Protection Agency’s fact sheet (http://tinyurl.com/EPAFactSheetAltFuels) “Greenhouse Gas Impacts of Expanded Renewable and Alternative Fuels Use.”

While biofuels from woody biomass are carbon friendly, Lippke cautions that the U.S. should not use tax breaks or other incentives that inadvertently divert wood to bioenergy that is better used for long-lived building materials and furniture.

“Substituting wood for non-wood building materials can displace far more carbon emissions than using the wood for biofuel,” the article says. “This fact creates a hierarchy of wood uses that can provide the greatest carbon mitigation for each source of supply.”

Lippke said using wood for products and bioenergy can be considered carbon neutral because the carbon dioxide trees absorb while growing eventually goes back to the atmosphere when, for instance, wood rots after building demolition or cars burn ethanol made from woody debris. With sustainably managed forests, that carbon dioxide is then absorbed by the growing trees awaiting the next harvest.

The co-authors aren’t advocating that all forests be harvested, just the ones designated to help counter carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Older forests, for instance, provide ecological values even though they absorb less carbon dioxide as they age.

In the article the authors also urge policymakers and citizens to consider not just carbon mitigation but to also find ways to weigh the importance of energy independence from fossil fuels when considering how to use woody biomass for bioenergy.

“Simply burning woody biomass to generate heat or electricity makes sense for carbon mitigation, he says, but there’s no energy independence gained,” Lippke said.

Carbon efficiency is however only one part of the equation, the authors wrote. Transportation fuels depend heavily on imported oil and therefore biofuels that replace them make additional contributions to the domestic economy, including energy independence and rural economic development, the authors said.

Other co-authors are Richard Gustafson and Elaine Oneil with the UW, Richard Venditti with North Carolina State University, Timothy Volk with the State University of New York, Leonard Johnson with the University of Idaho, Maureen Puettmann of WoodLife Environmental Consultants and Phillip Steele with Mississippi State University.

The publication integrates findings across many previous reports generated by a consortium of 17 research institutions that have been involved in life cycle analysis of wood products for more than 15 years through the Consortium for Research on Renewable Industrial Materials (http://www.corrim.org/), based at the UW. The recent biofuel life cycle research was funded with a grant from the U.S. Forest Service’s Forest Products Laboratory.

Managing Forests Because Carbon Matters: Journal of Forestry Supplement

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Thanks to Terry Seyden for finding this; I’ve been carrying this special section around trying to find time to read it.

New Analysis of Carbon Accounting, Biomass Use, and Climate Benefits
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/11/111109093852.htm

ScienceDaily (Nov. 9, 2011) — A recent report provides new ideas surrounding carbon and energy benefits forests and forest products provide. The report, Managing Forests Because Carbon Matters: Integrating Energy, Products, and Land Management Policy, summarizes and analyzes the most recent science regarding forests and carbon accounting, biomass use, and forest carbon offsets.
A team of researchers from the U.S. Forest Service, several universities, and natural resource and environmental organizations coauthored the report, which appears as a supplement to the October/November 2011 issue of the Society of American Forester’s Journal of Forestry.
” This work should help policymakers reconsider the critical impact forests have on our daily lives and the potential they have to solve problems that confront our Nation,” says Bob Malmsheimer, lead author of the report and a professor at State University of New York (Syracuse) College of Environmental Science and Forestry. “We believe our science-based findings should lead toward positive reforms that encourage investment in this vital renewable resource.”

The report suggests that U.S. environment and energy policies should be based on the following science findings:

Sustainably managed forests can provide carbon storage and substitution advantages while delivering a wide range of environmental and social benefits including timber and biomass resources, jobs, economic opportunities, clean water, wildlife habitat, and recreation.
Energy produced from forest biomass returns to the atmosphere carbon that plants absorbed in the relatively recent past; it essentially results in no net release of carbon as long as overall forest inventories are stable or increasing (as with U.S. forests).
Forest products used in place of energy-intensive materials such as metals, concrete, and plastics reduce carbon emissions (because forest products require less fossil fuel-based energy to produce and they also store carbon for a length of time based on their use and disposal), and they provide biomass residuals (i.e., waste wood) that can be substituted for fossil fuels to produce energy.
Fossil fuel-produced energy releases carbon into the atmosphere that has resided in the Earth for millions of years; forest biomass-based energy uses far less of the carbon stored in the Earth, thereby reducing the flow of fossil fuel-based carbon emissions to the atmosphere.

“Perhaps this report will inspire fresh efforts to find management strategies that folks can agree on,” says coauthor and Forest Service scientist Jeremy Fried. “The forest inventory and analysis data collected by the Forest Service on all forested lands in the U.S. provided the data necessary to explore how forests can be managed to provide climate benefits. Full life-cycle analyses of U.S. forests show that the best opportunity for these forests to provide even more climate benefits requires a combination of factors. Those factors are: sustainably managed forests, a healthy market for long-lived forest products, and renewable energy generated from forest and mill residues.”

The report emerged from the Society of American Foresters Task Force on Forest Climate Change Offsets and Use of Forest Biomass for Energy. Authors include Robert Malmsheimer, State University of New York (Syracuse) College of Environmental Science and Forestry; James Bowyer, Professor Emeritus of University of Minnesota; Jeremy Fried, U.S. Forest Service; Edmund Gee, U.S. Forest Service; Robert Izlar, University of Georgia; Reid Miner, National Council for Air and Stream Improvement; Ian Munn, Mississippi State University; Elaine Oneil, University of Washington; and William Stewart, University of California-Berkeley.

Read the paper online here.

U of South Carolina’s Biomass Experiment

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The University's biomass facility will take advantage of some of the state's 21 million tons of waste wood chips each year. Photo: University Marketing and Communications

Here’s a post from Matthew Koehler.

FYI: The University of Montana’s proposed $16 million wood-burning biomass plant has been supported by the SouthWest Crown of the Continent “Collaborative” as well as highlighted by Senator Tester as he pushes his mandated logging bill, the Forest Jobs and Recreation Act. Here’s a comprehensive look at how the University of South Carolina’s biomass boiler (from the same Nexterra Corp who will build UM’s biomass plant) actually turned out. Perhaps it would be wise for the environmental community to pay attention to these actual real-world experiences with wood-burning biomass.

———————

As the University of Montana prepared to spend over $16 million installing a wood-burning biomass boiler next to the Aber Hall Dorms, it’s interesting to look at the new information coming out of the University of South Carolina and that school’s experience dealing with the same type of Nexterra biomass boiler that UM proposes to use.

Ironically, despite three “‘potentially lethal accidents’ and a host of other problems with the Nexterra wood-burning biomass boilers at the Univ of South Carolina, Nexterra still proudly features the Univ of South Carolina biomass plant on their website (http://www.nexterra.ca/industry/johnson.cfm).

In addition to the remarkable article below, make sure to check out “University of South Carolina looking for refund on $20 million biomass plant”
http://www.midlandsconnect.com/news/money/story.aspx?list=195145&id=672649

Below are a couple of excerpts from the piece

Sun, Oct. 09, 2011
USC’s biomass plant debacle
How the university’s green dream went bust after three ‘potentially lethal accidents’ and a host of other problems

By WAYNE WASHINGTON
[email protected]

On June 28, 2009, an explosion rocked the biomass-fueled power plant on the campus of the University of South Carolina.

The force of the blast sent a metal panel some 60 feet toward the control office of the plant at Whaley and Sumter streets, according to documents obtained from USC by The State newspaper through a Freedom of Information Act request.

No one was hurt, but USC officials were concerned enough about the “potentially lethal accident” that they ordered an independent safety review and, in a strongly worded letter to the company that had built the plant, made it clear that university staff would not be allowed back into the building until the review was completed.

The blast underscored what some USC officials privately grumbled about for years: That the plant has been a $20 million disaster, a money pit that was poorly planned and built by a company that had never constructed such a cutting-edge “green energy” power plant before.

Interviews with USC officials and a spokeswoman for the company as well as a review of more than 1,800 pages of documents show that:

• USC, whose officials touted the plant “as the cat’s meow” before its startup in December 2007, closed it in March of this year after it had been shut down more than three dozen times. In one two-year period, the plant only provided steam – its purpose – on 98 out of 534 days, according to a USC review.

• There was no separate bidding process for the construction of the plant. The firm that built it, Johnson Controls Inc. of Wisconsin, was the only firm that included the construction of a biomass plant as part of its effort to win a competitively bid energy services contract. JCI won that $33.6 million energy services contract, then alone negotiated with USC the added cost of the biomass plant.

• USC paid JCI an additional $19.6 million for the plant. The university was to get its money back in energy savings or payments from JCI. So far, JCI has paid USC $4.3 million because the plant did not perform as promised. As things stand now, USC will recoup its $19.6 million investment by 2020 from payments by JCI.

• Despite a relationship that was, at one point, so acrimonious that USC hired outside legal counsel, the university continues to work with JCI. One option that USC now is considering is putting natural gas-fired turbines in the closed biomass plant to produce power, and JCI may be involved, a USC official says.

• Most substantively, however, the biomass experience led USC to change its structure of governance, giving a reformulated committee of its board of trustees responsibility for overseeing and vetting projects.

Now sitting idle, with spider webs and a thin film of dust replacing a plant’s hard-hat hustle and bustle, the biomass plant stands as a monument to the university’s failed push toward new, “green” technology, inadequate oversight and naïveté, some of its own officials acknowledge in internal documents.

The plant blemishes the legacy of the late Andrew Sorensen, the beloved, bow-tied president who was in charge of USC when the plant was conceived and constructed. And it also raises questions about whether USC’s revised system of oversight will be able to prevent future instances of idealism gone wrong that marred the biomass project from the beginning.

“A (expletive) mess with many layers,” is how William “Ted” Moore, a former USC vice president of finance and planning, described the plant in an email to Ed Walton, USC’s chief financial officer.

In another email, this one to USC president Harris Pastides, who succeeded Sorensen, Moore said: “The value of this thing may be scrap metal.”

That’s not the way JCI sees the project.

“We remain committed to the long-term success of the USC project, and the university has been supportive and appreciative of Johnson Controls’ efforts to fulfill its commitment,” said Karen Conrad, the company’s director of marketing communications.

Check the whole article out here..

Here’s another quote relevant to our usual biomass discussion.

In broad terms, the idea behind the biomass plant was simple enough.

USC would take wood byproduct, plentiful in South Carolina, heat it up and create steam that would be used to supply up to 85 percent of the Columbia campus’ energy needs.

Some environmentalists have questioned whether that process is actually “green,” since it creates a demand for wood products. USC, however, saw the move as a step toward the cutting-edge future of energy production, a chance to move away from fossil fuels.

“Getting away from fossil fuels to a renewable energy source is a very positive, very green thing to do,” Kelly told The State in 2006. “We are excited about being on the leading edge of this.”

On Friday, Kelly reiterated his belief in biomass as a new and important fuel source. He and Zeigler said those who are critical of the project don’t understand the circumstances that USC faced when it sought proposals from firms that could help the university save energy and money.

The university’s energy system was inefficient, they said. Several boilers were being used past their expected lifespan, and the price of natural gas, the university’s primary source of fuel, was rising sharply.

It was in that context, Zeigler and Kelly said, that the university sought ideas from companies for how USC could save energy and money.

JCI had been working on energy projects for USC for many years before the university sought proposals to improve its energy system. “We knew them,” Kelly said. “They weren’t fly-by-nighters.”

An important bonus for USC was the belief that its energy costs would be reduced by going with biomass. JCI promised that USC would save $2.1 million a year though the biomass plant or JCI would pay the university any difference between its actual savings and that sum – a pledge USC nailed down in writing.

To help pay for the project, USC would borrow money by selling bonds, and the university would use its energy savings – or JCI’s payments – to make the debt payments.

Beetle-kill pine, other wood pushed as power source — and way to aid ailing Colorado forests

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Another fine photo by Bob Berwyn
From the Denver Post last Thursday..

CARBONDALE — The Roaring Fork Valley lies close to abundant coal and gas fuel sources. But wood is the fuel that has a local consortium — and a state senator — fired up as an energy source that also would aid Colorado’s ailing forests.

A Roaring Fork Valley consortium found through a two-year study that there is plenty of wood in the form of drought- and beetle-killed pine, fire-stoking brush, aged aspen and construction scraps to make it a feasible adjunct to traditional fossil-fuel energy sources. Burning wood for fuel also is viewed as a potentially important part of saving the state from a conflagration like the one that ravaged Arizona forests this summer.

The Roaring Fork Biomass Consortium took the lead on the issue this week by releasing its study, which included trips to Europe to inspect biomass heating systems there and detailed analysis of the carbon footprint of trucks that would be needed to haul wood from forests in the valley.

The consortium also held a bio-mass “summit” Wednesday that brought together experts from across the state and from the East Coast, where a biomass project at Middlebury College in Vermont is looked at as an example for what might be done in Colorado.

State Sen. Gail Schwartz, D-Snowmass Village, said using wood to generate heat is more than an environmental dream. “This is not just another nice renewable thing to do. Colorado needs this,” she said.

Schwartz sponsored forest-health legislation in the last legislative session that created a working group to look at Colorado’s ailing forests and at solutions, such as reducing the amount of dead or diseased wood by using it as a fuel source.

She said that, so far, the forest problem has been looked at piecemeal on a statewide level — not comprehensively as the Roaring Fork consortium is doing.

White River National Forest supervisor Scott Fitzwilliams told Wednesday’s gathering that his agency has plenty of forest available for the collection of woody biomass but noted it would be a byproduct of forest restoration — not the object of such a project.

Like Schwartz, Fitzwilliams stressed the importance of promoting biomass now.

“I think we have a moral obligation to do this,” he said.

One biomass project already is in the planning stages for nearby Eagle County. Eagle Valley Clean Energy LLC is focusing on Gypsum as the site for a $46 million biomass plant that annually would consume 1,200 acres of wood — mainly waste such as branches, thinnings and dead trees. The Forest Service routinely stacks such materials in slash piles and then burns them.

Holy Cross Energy is on board with this project, which is projected to be operational in 2013. The company has committed to buying power for customers who are demanding that some of their power come from renewable sources, said Holy Cross chief executive Del Worley.

Consortium speakers did point out that Colorado faces some drawbacks in moving into woody biomass power. The timber in Colorado is dry because of the climate and thus burns faster. And energy costs are lower in an oil- and gas-rich state, so the savings from using biomass would not be as large as in other places.

Schwartz said she will be working on further legislation that will remove governmental obstacles to creating biomass facilities.

Green Building with Wood: USDA Report

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photo by Derek Weidensee


Forest Service Report Documents Environmental Benefits of Wood as a Green Building Material
Agriculture Secretary Vilsack urges US builders to prioritize wood in green buildings

WASHINGTON, Sept. 29, 2011 – The findings of a new U.S. Forest Service study indicate that wood should factor as a primary building material in green building, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced today.

The authors of Science Supporting the Economic and Environmental Benefits of Using Wood and Wood Products in Green Building Construction reviewed the scientific literature and found that using wood in building products yields fewer greenhouse gases than using other common materials.

“This study confirms what many environmental scientists have been saying for years,” said Vilsack. “Wood should be a major component of American building and energy design. The use of wood provides substantial environmental benefits, provides incentives for private landowners to maintain forest land, and provides a critical source of jobs in rural America.”

The Forest Service report also points out that greater use of life cycle analysis in building codes and standards would improve the scientific underpinning of building codes and standards and thereby benefit the environment. A combination of scientific advancement in the areas of life cycle analysis and the development of new technologies for improved and extended wood utilization are needed to continue to advance wood as a green construction material. Sustainability of forest products can be verified using any credible third-party rating system, such as Sustainable Forestry Initiative, Forest Stewardship Council or American Tree Farm System certification.

“The argument that somehow non-wood construction materials are ultimately better for carbon emissions than wood products is not supported by our research,” said David Cleaves, the U.S. Forest Service Climate Change Advisor. “Trees removed in an environmentally responsible way allow forests to continue to sequester carbon through new forest growth. Wood products continue to benefit the environment by storing carbon long after the building has been constructed.”

The use of forest products in the United States currently supports more than one million direct jobs, particularly in rural areas, and contributes more than $100 billion to the country’s gross domestic product.

“In the Rockies alone, we have hundreds of thousands of dead trees killed by bark beetles that could find their way into the building supply chain for all types of buildings,” said Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell. “Taking a harder look at wood as a green building source could reduce the damages posed by future fires, maintain overall forest health and provide much-needed jobs in local communities.”

The U.S. Forest Service report identifies several areas where peer-reviewed science can contribute to sustainable green building design and decisions. These recommendations address the following needs for use of wood as a green building material:
• Information on environmental impacts across the lifecycle of wood and alternative construction materials needs to be updated and revised;
• Green buildings codes and standards should include adequate provisions to recognize the benefit of a lifecycle environmental analysis to guide selection of building materials; and
• A lack of educational, technology transfer, and demonstration projects hinder the acceptance of wood as a green building material.

Research recently initiated by the wood products industry in partnership with the U.S. Forest Service Forest Products Laboratory will enable greater use and valuation of smaller diameter trees and insect and disease-killed trees. Research on new products and technologies has been initiated including improved cross-lamination techniques and the increased use of nanotechnology.

These developments are especially important amidst a changing climate because forest managers will need to increasingly thin densely forested areas in the coming years to reduce the impacts from longer and more severe wildfire seasons. Continued research of wood-based products and technologies will contribute to more environmentally responsible building materials and increased energy efficiency.

The mission of the U.S. Forest Service is to sustain the health, diversity, and productivity of the nation’s forests and grasslands to meet the needs of present and future generations. Recreational activities on our lands contribute $14.5 billion annually to the U.S. economy. The agency manages 193 million acres of public land, provides assistance to state and private landowners, and maintains the largest forestry research organization in the world.

To view the full Green Building report please click here.

UM’s Proposed Biomass Plant: Questions and Concerns

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By Matthew Koehler, Ian M. Lange and John Snively

Last fall news broke that the University of Montana was planning to construct a $16 million wood-burning biomass plant on campus next to the Aber Hall dormitory. UM officials claimed the biomass plant would save UM $1 million annually and protect Missoula’s air quality by reducing emissions over the existing natural gas heating system.

As interested citizens, we attended the university’s biomass “poster presentation” last December, which, unfortunately, raised more serious questions than it answered. So we continued to ask questions and research the proposal. In March, we even conducted an “open records” search of UM’s biomass project file, pouring over hundreds of documents and emails between UM officials and representatives of Nexterra, a Canadian biomass boiler manufacturer, and McKinstry, a Seattle energy services company. Suffice to say, our records search turned up even more troubling questions, especially related to costs, maintenance and emissions.

As the Missoulian reported last month (April 20), information in UM’s air quality permit application to the Missoula City-County Health Department showed that “Contrary to previous claims by UM administrators, the university’s proposed biomass boiler will not reduce emissions to levels below that of natural gas. In fact, UM’s proposed state-of-the-art biomass gasification plant will produce nearly twice as much nitrogen dioxide as its existing natural gas boilers – and in some cases, will release three times as much particulate matter.” The emissions are higher than what McKinstry’s feasibility study predicted.

Our records search also turned up a document showing that the biomass plant would also increase emissions of carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds by 40 percent or more over the existing natural gas system.

Obviously, Missoula is prone to severe inversions and air stagnation, especially during winter, when the greatest load would be on the biomass system. We found a UM biomass grant application that stated, “The Missoula Valley’s constrained topography presents ideal research conditions for long term analysis of environmental impacts of efficient woody biomass boiler combustion.” Do we really want to risk Missoula’s air quality for the sake of research?

It’s also been difficult to get an accurate assessment from UM of the biomass plant’s up-front and long-term costs, something all Montana taxpayers deserve. For starters, we noticed in the project file that in April 2010 the cost of the biomass plant was $10 million. By July, the cost went to $14 million. Now it sits at $16 million. UM’s financial pro forma also shows that during the first 20 years the biomass plant would need nearly $10 million for additional operation and maintenance expenses over the existing natural gas system.

The pro forma is also troubling in other aspects. It over-estimates the cost of natural gas, while under-estimating the cost of biomass fuel trucked to campus, especially given rising diesel costs. The pro forma also completely zeros out all natural gas expenses and maintenance costs, even though UM now admits that a natural gas boiler would be used during cold winter days to augment the biomass system, and also used from May to September, when the biomass system is too powerful to use.

Further complicating the picture, UM realized during the permitted process that its existing natural gas boilers are in violation of air pollution limits. The fix will cost around $500,000. And UM’s contract with McKinstry was amended recently, meaning that UM is already contractually committed to McKinstry for $532,000 just for project development.

It is our belief that all of these significant issues need to be fully analyzed and rechecked, not just by the biomass project’s supporters, but also by the Board of Regents, independent of McKinstry and UM. Guarantees of performance by McKinstry need to be carefully scrutinized, as other colleges have paid the price for poorly written contracts or poorly vetted companies.

At the end of the day, Montana taxpayers deserve to see accurate, updated financial information from UM concerning all aspects of the biomass plant, including the initial $16 million price tag and $10 million needed for additional operation and maintenance expenses. And Missoula’s citizens have a right to expect that the University of Montana would not risk Missoula’s fragile air quality by needlessly increasing emissions over present levels.

Matthew Koehler is executive director of the WildWest Institute; Ian M. Lange is a professor emeritus, Department of Geosciences at the University of Montana; and Dr. John Snively is a retired dentist. All three live in Missoula.

Here’s the U of M Biomass website.