Tag Archives: biomass
Business Leader Calls For Biomass Investment To Power Forest Sector Growth
A PROMINENT South East businessman has come out in support of green energy in the form of biomass electricity as a means to boost the region’s forestry industry and local economy. Adrian de Bruin – who sold his 30.3pc share in the timber giant Auspine back in 2008 – continues to chair the Mount Gambier based de Bruin group, which has branched out to aviation and engineering. With a commitment to the region’s prosperity, Mr de Bruin has called on all tiers of government and private investors to back a biomass electricity plant, which would utilise the forestry’s wood waste to create power. “The opportunity to become a major producer of green energy based on biomass is enormous,” he said. “We are blessed with good rainfall, good soil and good growth rates, but we are just lacking a vibrant timber industry at the moment.” Mr de Bruin said while the forestry sector was suffering, there was still untapped potential. “We’ve got all this available wood fibre and no opportunity for local value adding,” he said. “We could use this surplus material and turn it into electricity that is easy to sell.” He said with significant investment, which he estimated at $150m for a 60 megawatt facility, the plant could generate up to 500 jobs for the ongoing collection and delivery of raw materials. “Collection is where the job generation is because they would need to pick the waste off the forest floor and transport it,” he said. Mr de Bruin said the popular renewable energy source could also generate hot water and steam for the forestry industry, including for kiln drying of timber. “You could place the plant at Tarpeena because it is in a rural area with plenty of land around it,” he said. “It needs a new heat source anyway because the current equipment is getting old.” Mr de Bruin believes a 60 megawatt plant would generate enough electricity for the region as well as enough to be exported outside the South East. “It would need around 600,000 tonnes of raw materials per year but there is plenty out there,” he said. He said the biomass plant, which would be considered a base load energy source, would serve the region’s ongoing energy demand at a constant rate. However with the state and federal governments unlikely to invest, he said they could assist potential investors. “The biggest issue with all green energy is that the costs are higher than it is to produce coal electricity,” he said. “The customer is not going to pay more just because it is green, but the Federal Government could underwrite the carbon credit pricing for the next 10 years so the investor has an assured income. “It is that subsidy that will bring it into a viable economic situation.” He said assisting with planning approvals and providing easy access to water for the plant’s cooling system would also offer added incentive. In addition, Mr de Bruin said a biomass electricity plant would be considered carbon neutral with the carbon dioxide emissions generated by the plant offset by the emissions consumed by the forestry’s plant material. The waste materials used for the plant would also come from existing plantations and would be sustainable and renewable. Meanwhile, the State Government is currently undertaking a $1m study by Finnish experts into the future opportunity for the region’s timber sector. Continue reading
Biomass Of Northern Hemisphere Forests Mapped
ANI inShare Washington, June 27 (ANI): Thanks to satellites, the biomass of the northern hemisphere’s forests has been mapped with greater precision to help improve our understanding of the carbon cycle and our prediction of Earth’s future climate. Accurately measuring forest biomass and how it varies are key elements for taking stock of forests and vegetation. Since forests assist in removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, mapping forest biomass is also important for understanding the global carbon cycle. In particular, northern forests – including forest soil – store a third more carbon stocks per hectare as tropical forests, making them one of the most significant carbon stores in the world. The boreal forest ecosystem – exclusive to the northern hemisphere – spans Russia, northern Europe, Canada and Alaska, with interrelated habitats of forests, lakes, wetlands, rivers and tundra. With processing software drawing in stacks of radar images from ESA’s Envisat satellite, scientists have created a map of the whole northern hemisphere’s forest biomass in higher resolution than ever before – each pixel represents 1 km on the ground. “Single Envisat radar images taken at a wavelength of approximately 5 cm cannot provide the sensitivity needed to map the composition of forests with high density,” Maurizio Santoro from Gamma Remote Sensing said. “Combining a large number of radar datasets, however, yields a greater sensitivity and gives a more accurate information on what’s below the forest canopy,” Santoro said. About 70 000 Envisat radar images from October 2009 to February 2011 were fed into this new, ‘hyper-temporal’ approach to create the pan-boreal map for 2010. This is the first radar-derived output on biomass for the whole northern zone using a single approach – and it is just one of the products from the Biomasar-II project. (ANI) Continue reading
Biomass: There’s Money in That Wood Waste
Posted: 06/24/2013 One country’s demonstration project is another country’s established technology. When Sherwood Park in Alberta built a demonstration biomass district heating project they bought the equipment from Lambion Energy Solutions of Germany. Axel Lambion is the CEO and he chuckles at project’s demonstration status. In his charming, German accented English notes that his company has built over 3,400 of these projects throughout Europe and around the world. In fact, his great, great grandfather was building biomass energy systems for sawmills at the end of the 19th century. “His slogan was take useless waste and make high quality energy out of it. Energy at that time was very expensive, it seems like we have forgotten this in the last decades,” says Lambion. And that’s exactly what the project in Sherwood Park does. Its feedstock is waste wood, ground up wooden pallets and crates, of which there is a plentiful supply garnered from nearby pallet manufacturing operation North Star Pallets . They’re also planning to burn agricultural residues, like barley straw or oat hulls, on a research basis. The project was commissioned in September of 2012 and came in at $3.2 million with the federal government putting in $1.5 million, $350,000 coming from the Federation of Canadian Municipalities and Strathcona County (Sherwood Park is in Stathcona County) filling in the rest with along with expertise supplied by the Resource Industry Suppliers Association . And while we kid about its demonstration project moniker it is well deserved, it is the first project of its kind in Alberta. The project itself is quite similar to the one we profiled at UBC , it burns biomass and uses the energy to heat several different buildings. Like the UBC project it was an add on to an existing natural gas district heating system. District heating is a simple idea. Produce the heat in a large centralized plant and then pipe it to nearby customers, but it still hasn’t cracked into the mainstream in Canada yet ( despite this awesome typewritten report from 1975, PDF ). However, the list of benefits from district heating is worth remembering Customers no longer have to worry about maintenance Space savings with the removal of furnaces and chimneys in each building Less risk of fire Improved air quality Flexible – can add absorption chillers for cooling or electricity generation depending on demands More efficient Less greenhouse gas emissions The efficiency of the one-megawatt biomass heating plant of the demonstration project blows away all of the little furnaces and boilers that would have been used out of the water. It heats a recreation centre, numerous county buildings, a large theatre space and even nearby condos. The economies of scale are impressive. A condition of receiving its grants meant it had to meet or exceed air quality and emissions requirements. The government wanted this project to be replicable in other urban sites and it ensures it’s a good neighbour with scrubbers, multiple monitors and something called an electro-static precipitator. According to Harry Welling of Kalwa Biogenics, another partner on the project, the heating provided by the biomass project can cover half of the heating load on the coldest prairie winter day of the year and the vast majority of the heating loads the rest of the year. To use utility company jargon, it provides the base-load heat and the natural gas boilers provide peak demand and backup. The system also reduces greenhouse gas emissions by 1,200 tonnes a year compared to the natural gas system it was added to. It also burns 12,000 tonnes of biomass a year. To avoid noise the project uses a modular container system to haul the biomass in and take the empty containers away. Each container carries 3.5 tonnes of biomass Bucolic little biomass boiler It’s tucked into an area of town called Centre in the Park featuring green space, couples walking their dogs and fountains. The containers only get replaced on weekdays and during daytime hours. Except for the sign telling you so you’d hardly know there was a large wood-fired boiler in this bucolic little area. Welling was also instrumental in assessing the economics of the project. The big factor in deciding to build a system like this is the cost of fuel. While the price and volatility of natural gas has declined over the years the cost of the commodity has been steadily inching up since early 2012 . Welling has crunched the numbers and found that with biomass at $40 per tonne, the cost of a gigajoule worth of heat is $2.20, or roughly half of the current price of natural gas. Chopping the fuel cost in half is quite the accomplishment, but with a biomass system comes other costs – mostly labour and transportation. Those “liabilities” are actually anything but, they’re local jobs that are filled by people who live in the county. And when you start talking about economic opportunities for biomass the lowest hanging fruit is the forestry and lumber processing industries. This is an area of the economy that has been depressed for quite some time. Burning biomass for heat or power means new economic opportunities. When Axel Lambion looks at Europe he sees a saturated market. Everyone and their dog has a biomass system, they’re taking old coal plants and co-firing them with wood pellets . Lambion has even installed systems that run on left-over grapes from the wine-making process and left-over potato skins from a French fry operation – they’re not very efficient but they do deal with waste effectively. By comparison Canada is a land of opportunity, with only a few similar systems installed across the country. “That’s why I’m here. In fact it’s very interesting for us,” says Lambion. “We are very proud that we are doing a project for Vanderwell Contractors up in Slave Lake which is a big privately owned saw mill. We’re doing a project where we burn 50,000 to 60,000 tonnes of hawk fuel (waste wood) which we convert into electric energy.” The project could generate 3.6 megawatts of electricity and it could save the sawmill hundreds of thousands of dollars in electricity costs each year. Canada has the biomass. And we need to reduce our waste and our greenhouse gas emissions. We need the jobs and the heat and power. Once companies like Lambion and others prove their mettle in the North American market expect Canadian and U.S. companies to get a lot more involved with biomass energy systems. We’d love to hear your biomass story in the comments. Continue reading
