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Power From Wood, Wood-Derived Fuels Up In June
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Berlin Biomass Plant Gets First Wood Delivery
Published Date: Tuesday, 27 August 2013 By Barbara Tetreault BERLIN — The Burgess BioPower plant hit a new milestone last week with the first delivery of wood as the facility advances through its testing and commissioning stage. Cate Street Capital vice president Alexandra Ritchie said the 75-megawatt biomass plant is scheduled to come on-line by the end of the year. Part of the wood processing structure for the Burgess BioPower biomass plant is this steel A-frame conveyor that sits about 60 feet high. Burgess BioPower has a 20-year purchase power agreement with Public Service of New Hampshire. Last Wednesday there were 398 people employed on site, down from the over 500 employed during the peak of construction. Ritchie said the construction phase is winding down as Cate Street hopes to get the plant operating by late November. She said the construction phase originally was projected to take 25.5 months but will probably end up taking closer to 27 months. On hand to witness the wood delivery were the state’s top energy officials participating in a tour arranged by state Senator Jeff Woodburn. Meredith Hatfield, director of the state Office of Energy Planning, Karen Cramton, deputy director of OEP, and Molly Connors, Gov. Maggie Hassan’s energy adviser along with Rob Riley and Jessica O’Hare of the Northern Forest Center spent about an hour walking the site and climbing to the top of the overhead conveyor for the plant’s wood handling system. Ritchie said the project has already had a significant impact on the local economy. She said the unions involved have worked hard to hire local people for the project. Site manager Carl Belanger estimated as many as half those hired were from the North Country. In addition, Ritchie said local hotels and food establishments have benefited from workers brought into the area to work on the project. Once the plant is operating, it will employ 30 to 40 people. Ritchie said Delta Power Services, which will operate and maintain the biomass plant under a six-year contract with Cate Street Capital, has already hired the majority of those full-time employees. Training for new employees is being done at White Mountains Community College. Beyond those hired directly, she said the project should stimulate hundreds of jobs in the wood products industry through the purchase of 750,000 tons of biomass annually. Ritchie said Cate Street Capital has a 20-year agreement to sell the power generated the plant to Public Service of N.H. which should provide security to logging contractors. Ritchie told the group the biomass plant is Cate Street Capital’s flagship project. “It is a project we are very proud of because of what it means to the area,” she said. Belanger explained the wood processing system for the plant. Truck dumpsters tilt the logging trucks and dump the biomass onto a reclaim conveyor, which transports the wood into the wood processing structure where it is screened and ground. The ground biomass is then fed into an A-frame conveyor that moves back and forth, depositing the wood in a pile under the conveyor. Under conveyors feed the biomass into a transfer conveyor that goes into the main boiler feed conveyor. The tour also went into the turbine building where the 265,000-pound turbine is housed. Ritchie called the turbine the most critical part of the facility and reported that Cate Street Capital actually ordered the turbine before it had final approval for the project because of the lead time involved. The turbine was built in Japan by Fiji and its delivery to Berlin last December was a major undertaking. Belanger also pointed out the bag house — called that because it contains 4,000 filter bags that screen out dust and particulates. A catalyst removes nitric oxide gas. A cooling tower cools the water from the turbine to allow its reuse. The plant will pull water from the city’s system to replace that lost in vaporization. Paving is under way at the site, and Ritchie said Cate Street Capital will also put in a community parking lot near Community Field as part of the public benefit of the project. The highpoint of the tour was to watch the first wood delivery. A load of wood chips harvested at a site in Canaan, Vt., was delivered by Hicks Logging of Jefferson. As the truck dumpster tilted the logging truck, biomass workers could be seen taking pictures of the wood chips emptying out. Continue reading
COLUMN-Biomass Burners Beware New EU Oversight: Wynn
By Gerard Wynn Aug 21 (Reuters) – Utilities planning to invest in wood-fired power plants beware: the European Commission’s draft green standards for burning biomass would regulate carbon emissions from burning wood for the first time. At present, EU laws favouring green energy have led countries to pay generous subsidies for burning biomass, but in the future developers would have to meet the new standards to get those incentives. (For draft copy, see Chart 1) Greater scrutiny is appropriate, given the present assumption that burning wood produces no carbon emissions at all, under renewable energy and carbon trading laws. Biomass including wood, energy crops, food crops and waste is the main source for renewable energy in Europe, and accounts for 7 percent of all EU energy consumption. Until now, only biomass used to make liquid biofuels for road transport has been subjected to “sustainability criteria” – a check list to make sure they are environmentally friendly. The Commission will now propose to widen similar, binding criteria to biomass used to generate heat and power, which accounts for more than four times the energy of biofuels. It is only a first step, and will probably take several years to legislate. But the direction is important: the Commission’s track record is to toughen environmental regulation over time, and the case of biofuels is illustrative. As a directive, the proposals need backing from the European Parliament and member states, where the haggling will start. Academic literature suggests that there is room for argument that many existing sources of biomass would fail to meet the new criteria, with implications for biomass demand, project returns and rival low-carbon electricity technologies. *************************************** Chart 1: link.reuters.com/jep52v Chart 2: (page 238) link.reuters.com/nep52v Chart 3: (page 6) link.reuters.com/pep52v *************************************** DRIVE EU countries face a collective target to get a fifth of all energy, including power, heat and transport, from renewable sources by 2020. Member states have published details of how they will meet their 2020 goals, which the European Environment Agency (EEA) aggregated into EU-wide data. Burning biomass to produce heat and electricity would together account for 44 percent of all EU renewable energy consumption in 2020, according to the EEA report, “Renewable Energy Projections as Published in the National Renewable Energy Action Plans of the European Member States”. (Chart 2) That is far ahead of higher profile sources, such as wind power (18 percent of all renewable energy in 2020); biofuels (13 percent); and solar power (4 percent). The new regulations will therefore no doubt be bedded in softly, initially, not to upset the bloc’s entire green energy strategy. Britain, for example, has been especially active lately in supporting biomass power – faced with concern about a blackout risk due to coal plant closures. It has recently granted planning approval for 6,940 megawatts of dedicated biomass power plants, refusing just 209 MW, with a further 456 MW in the application pipeline, planning data show. Electric utilities involved in various stages of planning approval include E.ON, GDF Suez, RWE , Scottish Power. EU DRAFT The EU’s 2009 renewable energy law required the Commission to investigate possible oversight of biomass, beyond biofuels. The Commission said in 2010 that it did not then see the need for binding rules, making recommendations instead. The Commission has now had a change of heart, arguing that it is better to have a single set of binding obligations for all biomass across all 28 member states, to avoid confusion. The new rules for biomass heat and power broadly follow the existing guidelines for biofuels. They would require a minimum greenhouse gas saving of 60 percent compared with fossil fuels (including the carbon emissions from burning the fuel to generate electricity or heat); particular emissions values for biomass feedstocks and processes; and protection of forests with high conservation value. It may safeguard existing investments by applying the new criteria only to new installations, but the draft does not spell that out. DEBATE The new proposals do not list greenhouse gas savings for various types of biomass compared with fossil fuels – perhaps because that will be the most contested item. But in its note three years ago, the Commission cited its own in-house research (the Joint Research Centre) calculating savings for 20 different sources of biomass for heat and power. Regarding electricity generation from biomass, the research showed that 11 sources would fail the proposed 60 percent threshold; for heat generation, five would fail. (Chart 3) The JRC numbers show two critical factors determining greenhouse gas savings: first, the fuel used for processing the biomass, whether natural gas or less carbon-emitting wood and other forest residues. And second, the source of the biomass, whether from the EU or from tropical sources, where the latter may be primary rather than managed forest, and with higher transport emissions. No doubt, environmental and industry lobbies will haggle over the numbers. More important is the direction. The European Commission has in the past shown a bias towards making environmental legislation tougher, once it is introduced. The biofuel rules are illustrative. The EU approved biofuel consumption targets and sustainability criteria in the 2009 renewable energy law. Next month, the European parliament will vote on halving the previously agreed target for food-based biofuels, shifting support towards fuels with much lower emissions. “The Commission is of the view that in the period after 2020 biofuels which do not lead to substantial greenhouse gas savings and are produced from crops used for food and feed should not be subsidised,” the Commission says, in a policy shift on biofuels which the biomass industry should now be wary of. (Reporting by Gerard Wynn; Editing by Jeff Coelho) Continue reading
