Tag Archives: alternative
Finding a Niche in Pellets
Last month, I was talking to Ontario Power Generation’s Director of Business Development Brent Boyko about the conversion of Atikokan Generating Station (from coal to wood pellets) and he mentioned that part of the wood pellets that will fuel the AGS plant after its conversion will come from Rentech Inc. Turns out, they have acquired Georgia-based Fulghum Fibers, the leading provider of contract wood chip processing services in the U.S. Fulghum has a total of 32 mills, 26 in the U.S. and six in South America, that process 15 million metric tons of wood and bark annually. A notice released from the company discusses how the acquisition provides a platform to launch into the growing and complementary global wood pellet industry. With the acquisition, it has also entered a joint venture with Graanul Invest, a European pellet producer, for development and construction of U.S. pellet plants. Graanul has designed, built, and operates six pellet facilities in Europe, which produce 830,000 tons of pellets annually. I think the stories you will find in this month’s Pellet Mill Monthly newsletter—as well as in the Q2 issue of Pellet Mill Magazine , which is just around the corner—further back that assertion up. Continue reading
Biomass: Wood Pellets Muscle In On Old Role Of Coal
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/b83d5050-c3a3-11e2-aa5b-00144feab7de.html#ixzz2VGGRqFHl By Guy Chazan Drax, the UK power supplier, is pushing ahead with what is shaping up to be a huge bet on biomass. The company, which has a big coal-fired power plant in Yorkshire, has launched a £750m investment programme to convert three of its six units to wood pellets, a renewable source of energy. It started commissioning the first converted unit in April. For Dorothy Thompson, chief executive, the attraction of biomass is obvious. “It’s a lot cheaper than offshore wind, there is security of supply and it’s more flexible,” she says. The pellets burnt in biomass boilers are made from the “cheapest part of the forestry industry product – harvested residues and thinnings” – and a “supply chain is developing”. Drax’s interest in biomass is part of a wider industry trend. New EU emissions regulations have put pressure on many of the continent’s old coal-fired power stations but some operators have realised they can keep the plants alive by converting their boilers from coal to wood pellets. The discovery of biomass has given a new lease of life to ageing coal assets that would otherwise have been shuttered. Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) says between 3.6 and 6.8 gigawatts of biomass generating capacity could be commissioned between 2012 and 2016, though it warned that slow governmental decisions on future subsidies “risks unnerving manufacturers and investors”. Interest has been driven by EU laws that stipulate member states must source 20 per cent of their energy from renewables by 2020. That will not present much of a problem for Germany, with its massive investments in wind and solar power. But the UK and others may struggle, hence the embracing of coal-to-biomass conversion. “It’s an easy, quick and capital-lite way to meet the renewables targets,” says Harry Boyle, an analyst at BNEF. “Coal plants are already connected to the grid and what’s required are relatively minor modifications to an existing asset.” Biomass is also a consistent source of supply, in contrast to the intermittency of wind and solar. Such considerations have pushed the UK to create a generous subsidy regime for the fuel. Previously, developers were awarded half a renewables obligation certificate (ROC) for co-firing coal with biomass. Now, the government is offering operators a whole ROC if they fully convert their boilers to biomass from coal. It was this decision that underpinned Drax’s big investment programme. As a result of this and other subsidies, generating capacity is expected to grow quickly across Europe. BNEF says European pellet demand will rise to 25m-30m tonnes by 2020, up from about 12m tonnes now. Most of that will be imported from outside the EU. Yet biomass remains much more controversial than wind and solar. This is partly because when wood is burnt, it releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere – just like fossil fuels such as oil, gas and coal. Advocates like Ms Thompson stress that these emissions are neutralised by regrowth in the forest from which the wood was harvested. “You’re not using trapped carbon.” Partly because of that, she says, the carbon footprint of biomass is “70-80 per cent smaller than that of coal”. Environmentalists are unconvinced. A recent study put out by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds together with Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth says it may take “many years for the end-of-pipe emissions to be neutralised” by regrowth of forests. It disputes the industry’s assertion that pellets used in power generation are made of residues from timber production, saying there is evidence that whole trees are often used. The study claims that the UK government’s proposed sustainability standards for biomass will not prevent wood being used that comes from forests “where management regimes cause problems for biodiversity”. The report’s authors say there is a risk the UK will be “locked into financially supporting an industry that results in increasing greenhouse gas emissions and other serious sustainability issues”. Biomass developers face other difficulties, aside from the objections of green groups. A big challenge is finding enough pellets to supply their hungry biomass boilers. “It takes time to build up the supply chain,” says Ms Thompson. “Each [converted] unit requires 2.3m tonnes of biomass a year – and the total global cross-sea trade is only about 7m tonnes.” So a chunk of Drax’s £750m investment will go on building a wood pellet factory in the southeast of the US to fill Drax boilers. Some people worry about the carbon emissions involved in transporting pellets from the US to Europe. BNEF’s Harry Boyle says the problem is not necessarily the emissions released by tankers bringing huge cargoes of pellets across the Atlantic, but those of trucks transporting the wood from pellet factories hundreds of miles to ports in the US. Continue reading
Gas From Woody Biomass Promising Way To Reduce Emissions
Two processes that turn woody biomass into transportation fuels have the potential to exceed current Environmental Protection Agency requirements for renewable fuels, according to research published in the Forest Products Journal and currently featured on its publications page. The Environmental Protection Agency’s standard for emissions from wood-based transportation fuels requires a 60 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions compared to using fossil fuels. The standards don’t just concern greenhouse gases generated when biofuel is burned to run vehicles or provide energy: What’s required is life-cycle analysis, a tally of emissions all along the growing, collecting, producing and shipping chain. The special Forest Products Journal issue does just that for energy produced in various ways from woody biomass. For instance, two processes for making ethanol reviewed in the issue – one a gasification process using trees thinned from forests and the other a fermentation process using plantation-grown willows – reduces greenhouse gas emissions by 70 percent or better compared with gasoline. In contrast, producing and using corn ethanol reduces greenhouse gas emissions 24 percent compared to gasoline, according Argonne National Laboratory research published in 2011. For the publication, researchers from the 17 research institutions that make up the Consortium for Research on Renewable Industrial Materials determined the life-cycle emissions of 15 processes where woody biomass was turned into liquid fuel, burned directly to create heat, steam or electricity, or processed into pellets for burning. The common advantage of these processes over fossil fuels is that trees growing in replanted forests reabsorb the carbon dioxide emitted when woody biomass burns as fuel in cars or other uses, said Elaine Oneil, a University of Washington research scientist in ecological and forest sciences and director of the consortium. While fossil fuels cause a one-way flow of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere when they burn, forests that are harvested for wood products or fuels and regrown represent a two-way flow, into and back out of the atmosphere. The processes reviewed have the added advantage of using woody debris not only as a component of fuels but to produce energy needed for manufacturing the biofuel. The fermentation process to produce ethanol, for example, ends up with leftover organic matter that can be burned to produce electricity. Only one-third of the electricity generated by the leftovers is needed to make the ethanol, so two-thirds can go to the power grid for other uses, offsetting the need to burn fossil fuels to produce electricity. This is among the reasons that ethanol from plantation-grown feedstock using the fermentation process approaches being carbon neutral, that is, during its life cycle as much carbon is removed as is added to the atmosphere, according to Rick Gustafson, UW professor of environmental and forest sciences and a co-author in the special issue. The researchers looking at the fermentation process also took into account such things as water consumption. They found that the process – which among other things needs water to support the enzymes – uses about 70 percent more water per unit of energy produced than gasoline. A biofuel industry using woody material will be a lot less water intense than today’s pulp and paper industry – still, water use should be taken into account when moving from pilot biofuel production to full-scale commercialization, Gustafson said. “The value of life-cycle analysis is that it gives you information such as the amount of energy you get in relation to how much you put in, how emissions are affected and the impacts to resources such as land and water,” Oneil said. In the U.S. last year, some 15 facilities produced about 20,000 gallons of fuels using cellulosic biomass such as wood waste and sugarcane bagasse, according to a U.S. Energy Information Administration website. The administration estimates this output could grow to more than 5 million gallons in 2013, as operations ramp up at several plants. In the special issue, the biofuels analyzed came only from forest residues, forest thinnings, wood bits left after manufacturing such things as hardwood flooring or fast-growing plantation trees like willow. That’s because, from a greenhouse emissions perspective, it makes no sense to produce biofuels using trees that can be made into long-lived building materials and furniture, said Bruce Lippke, UW professor emeritus of environmental and forest sciences, who oversaw the contents of the special issue. “Substituting wood for non-wood building materials such as steel and concrete, can displace far more carbon emissions than using such wood for biofuels,” Lippke said. “It’s another example of how life-cycle analysis helps us judge how to use resources wisely.” The modeling and simulations used for life-cycle analysis in the special Forest Products Journal issue can be used to evaluate other woody materials and biofuel processes in use now or in the future, with the models being refined as more data is collected. The data also will be submitted to the U.S. Life Cycle Inventory Database of the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory, which has data available for everyone to use on hundreds of products. Read more at http://scienceblog.com/63592/gas-from-woody-biomass-promising-way-to-reduce-emissions/#RumeUVbtlPtxkUoF.99 Continue reading
