iDRY Vacuum Kilns

Sponsors:

Bio mass

Started by Texas Ranger, July 23, 2014, 11:52:57 AM

Previous topic - Next topic

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Texas Ranger

Woodville, Texas, next county over, has a new biomass generating plant.  They plan to  use 70-80 vans of chips per day.  They would prefer chips, but will take stem wood, as they have a chipper/grinder on site.  The question is:  We are nut set up in the forestry community to provide this level of chip production.  They will get some from the mills, but the figure butted around is that 2/3rds or better has to come from new source.

It looks like an opportunity for some enterprising group to gear up to produce chips from tops and such left in the woods.  However, a lot of landowners want the slash left and spread on the land.  Also, generation could be sporadic as demand fluxes. 

Cost of setting up such a business has been estimated well $500,000.00, including chippers, vans, etc.  Some heavy hitters are already setting up and trying to control the flow.

It would be a very  could source to reduce heavy slash in some of the land conversions around here, land abandoned and left alone over the years that are not productive.

It could be a new era in forestry around here (we do have other biomass in the state) and the conversion is going to be interesting. 
The Ranger, home of Texas Forestry

mad murdock

Maybe an opportunity to grow some fast growing species for chip production.  Here in the PNW, companies like Potlatch Corp planted thousands of acres of hybrid poplar and expected the turn around from between 5-7 years for chip trees.  After the first rotation of trees were ready the chip market fell through, and the trees kept growing, they sold the plantations to a company that set up a milling operation in the midst of the largest plantation, to make veneer core, and other peeled wood products.  Maybe you can start growing Pawlonia(Chinese Royal Empress)? In a lot of states though, it is considered an invasive. Fun times ahead for you guys it sounds like 8)
Turbosawmill M6 (now M8) Warrior Ultra liteweight, Granberg Alaskan III, lots of saws-gas powered and human powered :D

Joe Hillmann

They had planned a bunch of heating and in some cases co power generation as well for government building/schools in this area.

It was not planned out very well.  Only a couple of them ended up being built, they ran into issues with biomass not being available on the scale they planned as well as for places such as schools they didn't have room to store the wood chips, and it was difficult to safely get semi loads in and out safely during the school year when kids were around.

dablack

They built a bio mass power gen place here in Lufkin as well.  Right after construction, either the cost of electricity went down $0.02 or the cost of natural gas went down.  Either way, that place was dead before it even got started.  I use wood chips around the garden and orchard.  It kills me because out beside the empty plant they have piles and piles of wood debris.  The stuff we pump out of the ground is energy dense and cheap.  That ground stuff would have to become much more rare before the biomass can really compete without the gov't support. 

Austin
Building my own house in East TX

HI Rancher

There's been a bit of a craze to build a biomass energy producing facility here on the Big Island in Hawaii.  Energy is very expensive here because it's mostly produced from imported petroleum.  They have the same issue about lack of availability of biomass to keep the thing fully utilized at an economical level.  They had some folks talking to landowners who might be interested in supplying large volumes of "green matter".  I gave this a thought for all of a nanosecond and then woke up.  There's no way in hell I'm getting anywhere near any energy business.  It's far too political and decisions often get made for reasons that have little to do with logic or serving the best interests of most folks. 

At the risk of grossly oversimplifying a complex problem, there's a good illustrative example here.  The southern part of this island literally has 2000° rock just a few feet below the surface.  You would think building a steam-powered energy producing facility based on this heat underfoot would be a no-brainer proposition.  Nope.  The mud-slinging spectacle at the political level has been in full swing for decades, a project like the biomass burning facility gets the go-ahead despite lack of adequate inputs for its operation and in the meantime island residents get the privilege of paying 3-4x average mainland rates for imported petro-generated electricity. ::)

Texas Ranger

DaBlack, the Lufkin biomass plant was dead from the start, they built it without a customer to buy the product.  There is, I think, an investigation going on in it right now.  However, the bank that held the note has found an operator and places to sell the power.  Hopefully, it will become efficient. 
The Ranger, home of Texas Forestry

SwampDonkey

Couple schools here are heatig with pellets I beleive. I think sometimes our government looks at what they do in Europe for ideas. At one time all our pellet production whent to Europe. Government stepped in here and subsidizes pellet plants when we had an over supply of pulpwood on the market. Last year I know tonnes of pulp was left in the woods, I don't have the DNR numbers in front of me. The government actually tried to shut pulpwood off crown right off until the mills would take private wood. But that lasted about 48 hours I think until Jim Irving told the minister there was going to be men out of work.
"No amount of belief makes something a fact." James Randi

1 Thessalonians 5:21

2020 Polaris Ranger 570 to forward firewood, Husqvarna 555 XT Pro, Stihl FS560 clearing saw and continuously thinning my ground, on the side. Grow them trees. (((o)))

WDH

Don,

In my experience, we found that on a conventional logging crew clearcutting mature pine stands, the tops, limbs, residue, etc was about 1 load of chips for every 5 or 6 loads of roundwood (sawlogs and pulpwood) produced.  The issue was was (Tom) that that (Tom again) level of production was not sufficient to cover the cost of operating the chipper.

However, running a chipping crew to clean up cull, low grade/low value sweetgum infested stands might be viable, but they would need to produce at least 10 - 12 loads a day to make it competitive.

The new power plant could always chip roundwood pulpwood since I remember that marketing pulpwood could be difficult from that region.  The issue is that these type enterprises believe that they can get the raw material really cheap or below market price if they provide the market for the junk wood, but it does not work out like that.   
Woodmizer LT40HDD35, John Deere 2155, Kubota M5-111, Kubota L2501, Nyle L53 Dehumidification Kiln, and a passion for all things with leafs, twigs, and bark.  hamsleyhardwood.com

backwoods sawyer

The school I when to had a chip fired boiler. At that time there were 18 sawmills in town with lots of excess chips then the chip market took off and the chips were hauled to the chip terminal in Coos Bay and the school changed over to a diesel fired boiler and later to a NG fired boiler.

The mill I worked at used a hog fuel boiler and added NG as a backup for when the hog fuel was wet or not being produced, they looked into a co gen plant but with having such a good chip market already that was tabled.  The plant superintendent that was hired from the inland empire region was just amazed at the chip market that we had available to us.

Down the canyon in remote they drag out truck loads of bio mass and fill up a field with it then bring in a drum chipper to process it, others set the chipper up on the landing and bring the chip trucks to the chipper.

Lot to break down on those big chippers and small profit margin according to the operator I talked with while milling on the same landing he was set up on.

Sounds like a great idea but the numbers have to be there to make it viable. 
Backwoods Custom Milling Inc.
100% portable. . Oregons largest portable sawmill service, serving all of Oregon, from our Backwoods to yours..sawing since 1991

SLawyer Dave

Quote from: HI Rancher on July 23, 2014, 04:32:54 PM
  The southern part of this island literally has 2000° rock just a few feet below the surface.  You would think building a steam-powered energy producing facility based on this heat underfoot would be a no-brainer proposition.

There has been a lot of study and potential projects looking at the geothermal potential on the Big Island, unfortunately the very presence of the very active volcanoes is the biggest problem.  Both "wet" geothermal, which comprises about 95% of the worlds current geothermal electrical production and Hot Dry Rock geothermal applications have tried to get off the ground.  All of these applications require extensive drilling down into very hot geologic structures.  Given the geologically very young and unstable rock of the southern portion of the island, such drilling and sealing of such bore holes is very problematic.  It's hard to drill 100 feet without finding lava tubes and unrestricted flow areas.  All of this means that it is almost impossible to build a "sealed pressure dome".  This is needed to cause the water to stay liquid even at very high temperatures so that when the pressure is released at the surface, the liquid will "flash steam", thereby giving you the power to turn the turbines.  Instead, what you create is an unsealed geothermal vent, wherein you don't know where the water you pump down is going to go.  Further, such unsealed bore holes, allow super heated fluids to move uncontrollably through adjacent geologic structures.  This can, (and has caused in Mexico), periodic and uncontrollable "flash explosions" and eruptions of super heated steam to occur, sometimes even up to miles away.  Obviously such explosions can be both very damaging and deadly, so until and unless such obstacles can be overcome, geothermal electrical generation on the Big Island is unlikely to prosper. 

This ties into the reason why there are almost no rivers or really even small streams in the southern and eastern half of the island.  This young and fractured rock is so porous that when rain falls, it soaks into and through the rock strata rather than running off.  Kona Coffee is renowned for its micro climate above 1800 feet elevation, because it rains for a short time almost every day.  However, if you travel through this entire zone, (even during such rain storms), you will almost never see any flowing water.  This rain water continues to percolate down and outward and eventually returns to the ocean through the underground system of old lava tubes and fractured lava flows.   It is only in the older portions of the island, (Western and Northern), where the weathering of the rock combined with decomposed thick ash layers, has formed impermeable layers that causes the rainfall to run off the land, and create valleys, rivers and streams.  Still, even in these areas, once you punch through these rather shallow layers, you are back into fractured and lava tube structures.

Ianab

NZ has several large geothermal power stations. But they are in a very different structure to the Hawaii volcanoes, and are in an area with lots of hot springs and geysers already. I guess that's what you mean by "wet". You drill into that and you get high pressure steam. Also sulphur and assorted acids which make it interesting to put into a power plant, but that's not the point.

As far was biomass, that's usually a co-gen at a large sawmill. But with all the machinery and kilns etc they may be using most of the power they are generating from waste to run the mill. It does solve the issue of what to do with the waste, and saves the mill several million in energy, so it's practical.

The whole idea of generating power from biomass is technically practical. It's just a matter of it being commercially practical? And while natural gas keeps coming out of the ground for little cost it's not going to be worth it.

Ian
Weekend warrior, Peterson JP test pilot, Dolmar 7900 and Stihl MS310 saws and  the usual collection of power tools :)

SLawyer Dave

"Wet" geothermal is defined as an existing body of water that is at a drillable depth within a fractured geologic formation, (wherein the water can flow through the fractured heated rock).  Many times these types of wet geothermal systems do have natural occurring venting which can take the form of geysers, hot springs and mud pits.  Most wet geothermal plants use both production wells, (where the hot fluids are brought up from depth), as well as injection wells, (where water is injected into the underground system to be reheated).  While such "wet" systems occur throughout the world, most of the easiest and most profitable locations have already been tapped.  It is a pretty unique set of circumstances that create such opportunities for energy exploitation, so the growth of this energy sector is very limited.

Hot Dry Rock Geothermal, (HDR), is really the panacea of hope.  The U.S. Department of Energy back in about 2005, estimated that there is over 10,000 Terrawatts of potential HDR just within the U.S.  A Terrawatt is equivalent to all of the electrical power used by the entire planet in one year.  Given that geothermal is a renewable energy source that will continue to exist for as long as the Earth's mantle remains hot from the natural decay of uranium, (at least a few billion more years), HDR really does promise almost unlimited electrical energy.  (Well, once we figure out how to effectively mine this heat).

In an HDR application, you are drilling down into Hot Dry Rock.  Most of this potential is within crystalline plutonic (magma that has cooled underground) structures that still retain a lot of heat.  These crystalline structures are generally not fractured nor porous as they cooled very slowly.  So while there is a lot of heat, science has not found a reliable and efficient mechanism for being able to circulate fluids through this solid rock to be able to "mine" the heat trapped therein, and to then create electricity from these heated fluids when they are allowed to "flash steam" at the surface, (just like is done in "wet" applications).

There are a number of continuing research programs throughout the world, continuing to try and perfect HDR, but with only limited success to date.

Ianab

Of course the downside is that a real eruption would be global event. The last eruption of Taupo volcano was recorded in China, in the other hemisphere ...

We live ~ 60 miles upwind of Taupo, but we have a layer of ash here from ~200AD that's 12" deep.  That's the risk of living in a geothermal area.

Weekend warrior, Peterson JP test pilot, Dolmar 7900 and Stihl MS310 saws and  the usual collection of power tools :)

HI Rancher

Hi SLawyer Dave,

The geotechnical challenges you mention are indeed real but they're not necessarily insurmountable.  For example, we've  already got a fully functional geothermal power plant over in Puna (east side of the island).  It produces just under 40mw of power (~20% of the island's total needs) and has been doing so for 20+ years. 

The reason I used this example was to depict what can occur when something enters the political arena.  Given that 20-year track record of generating cost-effective electricity, a plan was announced to expand the infrastructure to produce an additional 50mw. That's when the fur really started flying.  It's hard to tell whose sacred cow was getting slaughtered here but the public parade of characters extolling the evils of geothermal energy was pretty relentless.  In the end, the state legislature passed a rule giving the state greater authority over these decisions and the expansion project is moving ahead while simultaneously dumping a huge load of fuel onto the raging debate over the benefits and risks of geothermal.  And, while all this takes place, the residents of this island get to continue paying some of the highest electricity rates in the nation.   

So, back at the original posting topic of biomass... as far as I see it any "opportunity" to supply "green matter" to a biomass digester that materialized as a result of this political process gets the official notgonnahappen from me.  This stuff is far too unpredictable and often the most self-evident "right thing to do" becomes yet another casualty in the sport of political warfare.
 

Ron Wenrich

I helped to site a biomass boiler back in the '80s.  It involved a resource study and finding enough biomass before the banks would write the check.  We had all the raw material lined up, a heat user, and a electricity contract all in line before any construction started.  It's now converted to natural gas.

It's hard to believe that they didn't have supply nailed down before construction began.  That's a recipe for failure.

$500,000 is too cheap for setting up a business to supply chips.  One of the bigger chip operators in our area put $1,000,000 worth of equipment on site back in the '70s.  His specialty was to clearcut in front of the strip mines.  But, he also got into large clearcuts where there was sufficient stocking.  He had a sawmill, so he was pulling the sawlogs off the jobs.  He could load a chip van in 20 minutes. 

You might be able to get started for less if you don't count the logging equipment.  But, the chip value would have to offset the increased investment.  The only way to do that is to increase production. 
Never under estimate the power of stupid people in large groups.

SLawyer Dave

Natural gas prices here in North America are so low that it certainly limits the current push for biomass and other alternative forms of energy.  However, in Hawaii, all of the economic factors are in place to make biomass a real option, (given the high cost of importing fossil fuels.  Again, however, as HI Rancher mentioned, you do have all of the politics and pollution issues to over come. 

Southside

Texas Ranger,

Funny how history repeats itself.  There is presently at 35% federal tax credit to investors in these green technologies and most also qualify for a feed in tariff where they are paid a premium for their energy until a targeted % of the grid power comes from renewables.  So those in the front end are set up pretty well.

The problem becomes in feeding the beast.  The value of fuel chips fluctuates so much and the cost of diesel, distance to harvest, etc becomes so hard to manage many of the suppliers can not stay in the black and produce for these operations.  Add to that when the premiums suddenly stop and the boiler cuts chip prices again, or goes to the PUC and says they can not produce energy at a profit and will close.  Saw that exact game played in the '80's with around half a dozen plants.  They operated for 3 years on a 10 year contract, them came back and said they could not stay open at the contracted rate as nobody would supply them with chips at the rate they could afford to pay.  Well, their contracts were bought out at something like $0.60 on the dollar.  So they got paid for 60% of 7 years of future income with no expenses.  Left with piles and piles of money.  They made so much most of the plants were simply closed and left for years.  I actually bought equipment out of one so I became pretty familiar with what had gone on. 

About 8 or so years ago, I watched a different boiler get torn out of a co-gen plant and moved about 50 miles east where it was set up for an woody ethanol experimental facility.  Well that place had all kinds of lead in the air issues as they only had dirty wood to burn so that shut down.  Yesterday I read there is a brand new co-gen facility being built exactly where the first one stood that the boiler came out of.

Ibeadrola came into town back in our little town of Lakeview, Oregon about 5 years ago with a big dog and pony show about how they were going to put in a co-gen plant using forest floor debris that was going to be hand collected and put into trucks - yes they really said that - from the Forest Service and BLM lands.  Claimed all kinds of jobs would be created, it would reduce the need for prescribed burns, improve air quality etc.  I knew it was a crock, but did not know their angle.  They bought 40 acres of land on the edge of town, put a dozer in there for a week, pushed some dirt around, then stopped everything.  Claimed the timing was not right, eventually it came out that they did not qualify for the federal tax credit, nothing has happened since. 

I am not sure if these would really work in the long run even if they were attached to a big chip and saw operation as the pulp value of the chips and clean bark exceeds the value of a dirty chip.  I am not opposed to finding every way possible to become energy independent and love the idea of a new venture guys can piggyback off of and become successful, just my experience tells me this is not the way.   
Franklin buncher and skidder
JD Processor
Woodmizer LT Super 70 and LT35 sawmill, KD250 kiln, BMS 250 sharpener and setter
Riehl Edger
Woodmaster 725 and 4000 planner and moulder
Enough cows to ensure there is no spare time.
White Oak Meadows

delvis

Texas,

I live in Maine and a lot of loggers switched to mechanized equipment in the 80's to convert to whole tree chipping to supply the biomass power market and it was profitable until the price of power dropped to the point where biomass cost more than coal etc.  I would say if you're going into that market with a new harvester, skidder, and chipper at a minimum you're looking at over a million dollars just to get started.  Even buying used will cost you hundreds of thousands.  80 loads a day sounds like a lot but that's only a few operators with a few trucks each making multiple runs when it gets right down to it. 

I'd want a contract that guaranteed I could haul x number of loads in per week without being shut off before I spent the cash that will be required for start up. 
If I never saw another board I will at least die happy having spent the last few years working with my dad!

SwampDonkey

They do work, but in special circumstances. There is one plant in Fort Fairfied, Maine. Most of the chips comes from NB off crown lands. That means the residue is about free at the source, the cost is the chipping operation. And there is mostly one operation feeding it. It's a 45 MW plant owned by a Quebec company. Been there for over 20 years now, always running. I think Central Maine Power buys all the power.

There was talk of biomass collecting here and they even came up with the rules for crown land. But I don't know how much is done. I see chippers on cut blocks, using the tops. They are not debarked so it much be fuel. Years ago, you had whole tree chipping operations here mowing down the hardwood forest. They debarked before chipping for clean pulp chips. Most pulp mills use wood waist for power onsite.
"No amount of belief makes something a fact." James Randi

1 Thessalonians 5:21

2020 Polaris Ranger 570 to forward firewood, Husqvarna 555 XT Pro, Stihl FS560 clearing saw and continuously thinning my ground, on the side. Grow them trees. (((o)))

WDH

Much of the residue from logging (tops, limbs, leaves, needles, etc) is high in silica (dirt), and the plants do not like the dirt.  There are many many issues with supplying these type enterprises, and if I had a million dollars to invest, the last thing that I would do would be to invest it in equipment to supply these facilities.  The track record is very poor, and many are sited based on supply data that is way overly optimistic. 
Woodmizer LT40HDD35, John Deere 2155, Kubota M5-111, Kubota L2501, Nyle L53 Dehumidification Kiln, and a passion for all things with leafs, twigs, and bark.  hamsleyhardwood.com

thecfarm

There is a bio mass plant about 15 minutes from me. There are a few that chip the tops,but I don't see many just chipping in this area. Now maybe 2-3 hours from me that may be diffearant. I seem to see more chip trucks coming from the North.
The guy that logs for me has been appoached by the bio mass place. They will "give" him a chipper and they take some off each load to pay for it. But he like the slash to hold him up.
Model 6020-20hp Manual Thomas bandsaw,TC40A 4wd 40 hp New Holland tractor, 450 Norse Winch, Heatmor 400 OWB,YCC 1978-79

Thank You Sponsors!