biomass magazine - april 2009

INSIDE: THE LOWDOWN ON RECYCLING ‘DIRTY’ WOOD

April 2009

www.BiomassMagazine.com

Barrels of Biogas

Distillers and Brewers Are Making Sure Their Waste Doesn’t Go to Waste

T H E U L T I M A T E S H R E D D I N G M A C H I N E

Biomass Energy & Fuel Prep SystemsFrom Concept To Completion

vecoplanllc.com

4 BIOMASS MAGAZINE 4|2009

4|2009 BIOMASS MAGAZINE 5

INSIDE APRIL 2009 VOLUME 3 ISSUE 4

FEATURES. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

24 PROFILE Wood Pellet Prowess Under Chris Sharron’s skillful watch, the output at Western Oregon WoodProducts has climbed from 300 tons of product per year to 320,000 tons. By Anna Austin

30 FEEDSTOCK The Politics of ‘Dirty’ Wood The recycling of pressure-treated and painted wood, often called “dirty” wood, is complicated—some states don’t even allow the combustion or burning of clean wood. However, as long as the construction and demolition industry churns it out, recyclers will be looking for ways to make use of it. By Ron Kotrba

36 INDUSTRY Barrels of BiogasBrewers and distillers have discovered the benefi ts of recycling their waste into renewable energy. By Ryan C. Christiansen

42 DESIGN Louisiana Paper Plant Adapts For BiomassA redesign project offers a paper manufacturing facility the opportunity to utilize a wide array of biomass sources.By Trotter Hunt

PROFILE | PAGE 24

DEPARTMENTS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

07 Advertiser Index

08 Editor’s NoteGearing Up for the Biomass ConferenceBy Rona Johnson

10 CITIES Corner

The Case for IncrementalismBy Tim Portz

11 Legal PerspectivesLoan Guarantees Under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 By John Eustermann

13 Industry Events

14 Business Briefs

18 Industry News

47 EERC UpdateFungibility 101By Ted Aulich

48 Marketplace


advertiserINDEX

2009 Fuel Ethanol Workshop 9

2009 International BIOMASS 50 & 51Conference & Expo

4B Components, Ltd. 6

Action Unloaders 27

Agra Industries 41

AMANDUS KAHL GmbH & Co. KG 35

Barr-Rosin 39

BRUKS Rockwood 38

Christianson & Associates PLLP 32

Continental Biomass Industries 4

Duratech Inudstries International, Inc. 28

Energy & Environmental Research Center 12

Ethanol Producer Magazine 46

www.ethanol-jobs.com 12

Hunt, Guillot & Associates 44

Jeffrey Rader Corporation 34

Mid-South Engineering Company 33

Novozymes 3

Percival Scientifi c, Inc. 40

Peterson 45

Quality Recycling Equipment, Inc. 29

Robert-James Sales Inc. 52

The Teaford Co. Inc. 28

Vecoplan LLC 2

West Salem 49

EDITORIAL

MANAGING EDITOR Jessica Sobolik [email protected]

CONTRIBUTIONS EDITOR Dave Nilles [email protected]

FEATURES EDITOR Rona Johnson [email protected]

SENIOR STAFF WRITER Ron Kotrba [email protected]

STAFF WRITERSSusanne Retka Schill [email protected] Bevill [email protected] Erin Voegele [email protected] Austin [email protected] C. Christiansen [email protected]

STAFF WRITER & PLANT LIST MANAGERBryan Sims [email protected]

ONLINE EDITOR Hope Deutscher [email protected]

COPY EDITOR Jan Tellmann [email protected]

E-MEDIA COORDINATORMegan Skauge [email protected]

ART

ART DIRECTOR Jaci Satterlund [email protected]

GRAPHIC DESIGNERSElizabeth Slavens [email protected] Melquist [email protected] Sitter [email protected]

PUBLISHING & SALES

PUBLISHER & CEO Mike Bryan [email protected]

PUBLISHER & PRESIDENT Kathy Bryan [email protected]

VICE PRESIDENT OF MEDIA & EVENTS Joe Bryan [email protected]

VICE PRESIDENT OF COMMUNICATIONS Tom Bryan [email protected]

SALES DIRECTOR Matthew Spoor [email protected]

SALES MANAGER, MEDIA & EVENTSHoward Brockhouse [email protected]

ACCOUNT MANAGERSClay Moore [email protected] Hanson [email protected] Shereck [email protected] Charles [email protected] Steen [email protected] Brown [email protected]

ADVERTISING COORDINATOR Marla DeFoe [email protected]

SUBSCRIPTION MANAGER Jessica Beaudry [email protected]

SUBSCRIBER ACQUISITON MANAGER Jason Smith [email protected]

ADMINISTRATIVE ASSISTANT, SALES Christie Anderson [email protected]

Subscriptions Subscriptions to Biomass Magazine are available for just $24.95 per year within the Unit-ed States, $39.95 for Canada and Mexico, and $49.95 for any country outside North America. Subscription forms are available online (www.BiomassMagazine.com), by mail or by fax. If you have questions, please contact Jessica Beaudry at (701) 746-8385 or [email protected].

Back Issues & Reprints Select back issues are available for $3.95 each, plus shipping. To place an order, con-tact Subscriptions at (701) 746-8385 or [email protected]. Article reprints are also avail-able for a fee. For more informa-tion, contact Christie Anderson at (701) 746-8385 or [email protected].

Advertising Biomass Magazine pro-vides a specifi c topic delivered to a highly targeted audience. We are committed to editorial excellence and high-quality print production. To fi nd out more about Biomass Magazine advertising opportunities or to receive our Editorial Calendar & Rate Card, please contact Howard Brockhouse at (701) 746-8385 or [email protected].

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Gearing Up for the Biomass Conference

want to remind each of you, if you haven’t done so already, to register for BBI International’s 2009 International Biomass Conference & Expo, which is being held April 28-30 in Port-land, Ore.To give you a little preview of what to expect,

Staff Writer Anna Austin has written a feature called “Wood Pellet Prowess” about West Oregon Wood Products Inc. (see page 24). The company is on the tour agenda along with Clean Water Services, which specializes in producing power through anaerobic digestion and gas recovery, and Summit Natural Energy Corp., which makes ethanol from food pro-cessing waste. West Oregon Wood Products uses waste material from sawmills to make wood pellets, fi re logs and animal bedding. The owner of the busi-ness, Chris Sharron, says the tour will give conference attendees a “good feel for what the whole process entails, from the drying operation right through to the pellet-izing operation.” Sharron has plants in Columbia City, Banks and Dillard, Ore. The tour will be held at the Banks, Ore., facility.

The conference tracks cover every type of biomass feedstock you can think of, including crop residues, dedicated energy crops, forest and wood processing resi-dues, livestock and poultry wastes, municipal and urban wastes and landfi ll gas, and food processing residues.

I know that times are tough and money is tight, but with the potential benefi ts for the renewable energy industry in the government stimulus package and in President Barack Obama’s budget, it’s more important than ever to keep abreast of new tech-nology, biomass sources and funding opportunities.

This is also a great opportunity to connect with others in the biomass business, and those who seek to get into the business and may require your expertise. You will also have access to biomass experts from academia, policymakers, technology and project developers, and the people who produce biomass.

To register for the conference, get a look at the agenda or just to fi nd out what Portland has to offer you, go to www.biomassconference.com.

I

Rona JohnsonFeatures Editor

[email protected]

editor’sNOTE

REGISTRATION IS NOW OPENw w w . f u e l e t h a n o l w o r k s h o p . c o m

June 15 - 18, 2009Denver Convent ion Center | Denver, Colorado, USA

WHERE E THANOL’S NE W ERA BEGINSNo longer is the world of ethanol confined to grain . C el lu los ic ethanol and advanced biofuels are the future, and that future

star ts now. For a quar ter centur y, the Internat ional Fuel Ethanol Workshop & Expo has del ivered not only the largest ethanol event in the world , but the finest . Jo in the industry

this summer for the FE W ’s 25th Anniversar y in Denver. I t ’s where the ethanol industr y ’s new era begins.


CITIESc o r n e r

grow increasingly troubled by the trend of public sentiment that any and all clean en-ergy developments must get it 100 percent right the fi rst time. It also seems that any

clean energy opportunity that experiences grow-ing pains becomes the target of immense criti-cism, doubt and abandonment. Furthermore, many clean energy systems that are connected to a legacy fossil-fuel-based technology are some-times painted with the same brush as the fossil fuel technology they seek to improve upon. For example, the planned coal plant with the biomass requirement in Iowa, which I mentioned in last months column. The project has been scuttled, stalling the development of a biomass infrastruc-ture within the state.

Corn-based ethanol has been the victim of a steady and unrelenting assault by a number of interests including the environmental lobby, the food industry and Big Oil. I believe that much of the doubt and negative press surrounding the ethanol industry is connected to our inability to come to terms with the incremental nature of the journey of change we are on; in this instance the evolution of a biomass-based liquid fuels infra-structure. The biofuels of today are an improve-ment upon the biofuels of yesterday, but pale in comparison to the effi ciency, sustainability and promise of the biofuels of tomorrow.

I was seven years old when my parents bought me my fi rst computer. It was a Com-modore VIC 20 and had 5 kilobytes of installed memory. Internal hard drives, e-mail, and the

Internet were barely being imagined at that time. Still, the VIC 20 was wildly pop-ular and was the fi rst per-sonal computer to sell more than 1 million units, accord-ing to Wikipedia. Now, of course, I’m able to research the VIC 20 and learn that it was the fi rst personal computer to sell 1 million units while driving down the road using a wire-less, handheld computer. Have we forgotten the steady incremental journey we experienced with personal computing? Or, is the current pace of progress with personal computing—seemingly warp speed—responsible for our more widely applied expectations—especially to clean ener-gy—for rapid change? Our collective memory is short and we struggle to remember the fi rst lap-top, much less a clunky suitcase-sized computer with barely one e-mail’s worth of memory.

Whatever the reason for our impatience, we should be mindful that while we would all wel-come an instantaneous and abrupt shift in the creation of our much-needed energy, we are more likely in for an arduous journey full of ob-stacles, some that we can anticipate and plenty that we can’t.

Tim Portz is a business developer with BBI In-ternational’s Community Initiative to Improve Energy Sustainability. Reach him at [email protected] or (651) 398-9154.

IThe Case for Incrementalism


LEGALperspectives

n Feb. 17, 2009, President Ba-rack Obama signed into law the American Recovery and Rein-vestment Act of 2009 (ARRA),

a $787 billion economic stimulus package that contains $60 billion of loan guarantees by the U.S. DOE for certain renewable energy proj-ects and transmission projects. The ARRA creates a new Section 1705 to the DOE’s Innovative Technology Loan Guarantee Program, a program originally authorized by Title XVII of the Energy Policy Act of 2005 (EPAct 2005).

Section 406 of the ARRA amends Title XVII of EPAct 2005 to add this new Section 1705 which temporarily directs the Secretary of Energy to use the $6 billion in appropri-ated funds to make guarantees under the loan guarantee program established under Title XVII of EPAct 2005 for only the following categories of projects, which must commence construction not later than Sept. 30, 2011:

Renewable energy systems, including incremental hydropower, that generate elec-tricity or thermal energy and facilities that manufacture related components

Electric power transmission systems, including upgrading and reconductoring proj-ects

Leading-edge biofuel projects that will use technologies performing at the pilot or demonstration scale that the secretary deter-mines are likely to become commercial tech-nologies and will produce transportation fuels that substantially reduce lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions compared to other transporta-tion fuels (up to a limit of $500 million).

Section 1705 effectively prevents the $6 billion under temporary authority from being

used to make loan guarantees for the innova-tive technology projects described in Section 1702 of EPAct 2005. Currently, the DOE has a pool of 16 potential innovative technology projects. This number, however, is expected to be whittled down to 11 in a matter of weeks. It is worth noting, however, that to date, the DOE has not approved and disbursed a single loan guarantee under the innovative technol-ogy program of EPAct 2005.

Shortly after the signing of the ARRA, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu stated that he was ready to put some of the stimulus package to work within months. This desire and the sense of urgency created by the fact that the loan guarantees are limited to proj-ects that commence construction by Sept. 30, 2011, suggests that the DOE will be limited as to how much time, effort and consideration can be given to time-consuming rulemaking. As such, it is expected that, although some streamlining of the application process will take place, the loan guarantee regulations of Section 1702 will likely prove to be, for the most part, the model adopted for purposes of how the DOE solicits, evaluates, approves and monitors the new loan guarantee program. One exception, however, has been established: under the 1705 program, applications shall be evaluated on a rolling basis. This is a departure from the prior program in which submission deadlines were established and applications were evaluated side-by-side against each oth-er. In light of these facts and circumstances, the project developer interested in submitting an application should consider compiling the necessary project submission materials in the manner established under Section 1702 so that upon the issuance of fi nal rules govern-

ing the new ARRA loan guarantee provisions, an advantage to being an early applicant may be garnered as fi nancially viable projects may be subject to a fi rst-come, fi rst-served evalua-tion process.

The application process, for the most part, is expected to be as follows:

Pre-application: Requires general in-formation about the project, its sponsor(s), and the fi nancing plan.

Application: Some of the pre-appli-cants will be invited to submit applications. The applications require far greater detail as to the project and the fi nancing plan.

Term sheet: The successful applicant will receive a DOE-issued term sheet setting forth the material terms and conditions of a defi nitive loan guarantee agreement.

Execution of a conditional commit-ment: Once the applicant, DOE and qualifi ed lender agree on the material terms of the term sheet, the term sheet becomes a conditional commitment.

Execution of the loan guarantee agree-ment: Once the conditions of the conditional commitment are met, the parties will execute an agreement incorporating the terms.

Although a considerable number of is-sues still need to be ironed out with regard to ARRA and the expanded loan guarantee program, the prospective borrower is wise to share in the DOE’s sense of urgency and commence pulling together key project spe-cifi c data.

John Eustermann is a partner with Stoel Rives LLP. Reach him at [email protected] or (208) 387-4218.

O

Loan Guarantees Under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009By John Eustermann

Eustermann

industry events

Sustainable Bioenergy

April 1-2, 2009American Square Conference CentreLondonThis conference will examine new trends in the bioenergy market, solu-tions to the food-versus-fuel debate, “next-generation” biofuels, biomass for power generation, and the development of biorefi neries and how they are infl uencing investment decisions in Europe. The agenda will include question-and-answer panels, and more than 30 industry experts sharing their experiences and what new opportunities are available in biomass, bio-gas and sustainable biofuels.+44 (0)20 7251-9151 www.environmental-fi nance.com/

conferences/2009/SustBio09/intro.htm

European Renewable Energy

April 2-3, 2009Hilton BerlinBerlinThis conference will give attendees an overview of each area of the renew-able energy sector: fi nance, governments, construction, operation and tech-nology. The event will also take an in-depth look at a number of case studies examining the implementation of new projects across Europe, including the opportunities and challenges of large-scale biomass power generation. +44 (0)20 7176-6226 www.platts.com/Events/2009/pc981

The Future of Biofuels

April 4-8, 2009Snowbird ResortSnowbird, UtahThe goal of this meeting, being supported by DuPont, will be to share a broad perspective defi ning the critical needs of the biofuels industry, and to highlight cutting-edge research and development efforts that are defi ning the next generation of biofuel processes and products. Agenda topics will include next-generation advanced biofuels, including cellulosic ethanol; and the feedstocks needed for those fuels.(800) 253-0685 www.keystonesymposia.org

BioPower Generation Americas

April 22-23, 2009Bourbon Convention IbirapueraSão Paulo, BrazilThis inaugural event is the fourth edition of the global BioPower Generation series. It will highlight the developments and opportunities in Latin Amer-ica’s biomass power generation market, and look at the entire biopower generation value chain to assess the main opportunities for this continually growing sector. Experts will provide insight into the biomass-for-power gen-eration industry, and international case studies will show how Latin America can benefi t from growing global markets.+55 (11) 2161-2200 www.greenpowerconferences.com/

biofuelsmarkets/biopower_generation_americas.html

BioCycle International Conference

April 27-30, 2009Town & Country ResortSan DiegoThis international conference brings together leaders in research and man-agement of projects and facilities that turn municipal, industrial and agricul-tural wastes into marketable resources, including compost and soil prod-ucts, renewable energy, biofuels and soil remediation tools. More than 70 speakers from around the world will address food-waste recycling, compost use, anaerobic digestion and more.(610) 967-4135 www.biocycle50.com

International Biomass Conference & Expo

April 28-30, 2009 Oregon Convention CenterPortland, Ore.This event, sponsored by BBI International Inc., will focus on six major biomass sectors: crop residues; food processing residues; municipal solid waste, urban wastes and landfi ll gas; forest and wood processing residues; livestock and poultry wastes; and dedicated energy crops. Attendees will also be able to tour West Oregon Wood Products Inc., Summit Natural En-ergy Corp. and Clean Water Services’ Rock Creek Advanced Wastewater Treatment Facility.(701) 746-8385 www.biomassconference.com

International Fuel Ethanol Workshop & Expo

June 15-18, 2009Denver Convention CenterDenverRegistration is now open for this 25th annual event, which will also include the second Advanced Biofuels Workshop. As a whole, the conference will once again offer business development and networking opportunities, one of the largest industry expos and an industry-leading educational forum. Agenda information will be available as the event approaches.(701) 746-8385 www.2009few.com

European Biomass Conference & Exhibition

June 29-July 3, 2009CCH-Congress CenterHamburg, GermanyThis 17th annual event will highlight the latest breakthroughs in the biomass fi eld. Agenda topics will include biomass resources; the conversion to heat, electricity and products; fuels from biomass; markets; and policy and sus-tainability. There will also be an exhibition featuring various companies and products in the industry. +39 055-5002174 www.conference-biomass.com



business BRIEFS

Alter NRG, Air Products sign joint development agreement

Alter NRG Corp. and Air Products and Chemicals Inc. have signed a joint development venture agreement to pursue renewable energy opportunities in North America and Europe. The agreement gives Air Products and Chemicals the right to license and incorporate Alter NRG’s proprietary Westinghouse plasma gasifi cation technology with its oxygen enrichment and synthesis gas pretreatment technology in renewable energy fa-cilities. Air Products and Chemicals will initially use a variety of feedstocks to create syngas for power, heat and steam genera-tion. BIO

Finnish forestry research centersto integrate operations

VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland and Oy Keskus-laboratorio-Centrallaboratorium Ab (KCL), a research facility owned by Finnish forest industry companies, have signed a letter of intent to combine their research and laboratory operations. The integration would ultimately create a strong innovation cen-ter for the forest industry and extend research into new areas of growth: bioenergy and biorefi neries. Full implementation of the project requires funding from the Finnish government, and approval from the Ministry of Employment, the Ministry of Economy and VTT’s board of directors. BIO

Joint venture to market biogas technologyGLV Inc., a Canadian-based provider of water treatment,

and pulp and paper solutions, recently announced the creation of a North American joint venture with Hong Kong-based Global Water Engineering Ltd. to market its anaerobic diges-tion technologies. The new entity, Global Water & Energy LLC, will be based in Austin, Texas. GLV will own 70 percent, while Global Water Engineering will own the remaining 30 percent. Global Water Engineering has granted GW&E an exclusive and perpetual license to market its selection of processes for the anaerobic treatment of industrial wastewater and organic waste, and for the conversion and handling of biogas to produce en-ergy. BIO

Agri-Tech Producers licensestorrefaction technology

South Carolina-based Agri-Tech Producers LLC has se-cured an exclusive license for a torrefaction technology devel-oped by North Carolina State University. Torrefaction is a pro-cess in which biomass is heated in a low-oxygen environment, which causes volatile organic compounds, water and hemicel-lulose to separate from cellulose and lignin. The process cre-ates a carbon-neutral fuel that is easier to transport and store. Agri-Tech Producers is working with manufactures to develop torrefaction machines that will utilize the licensed technology. The machines are expected to be commercially available near the end of 2009. BIO

Canadian companies to build Alberta-based biogas facility

Canadian companies StormFisher Biogas and ECB Enviro North America Inc. are partnering to construct a 3.2-megawatt biogas facility in Lethbridge, Alberta. The plant’s feedstocks will be supplied by local livestock operations, meat and food pro-cessing industries, restaurants, and schools. Once operational, the facility is expected to offset more than 17,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide while creating enough energy to power more than 3,000 homes. Construction is expected to begin this spring, with energy production beginning in 2010. BIO

Liberty Energy targets ‘biosolids’Liberty Energy Inc. is looking for $90 million to fi nance a

6.5-megawatt biomass power plant in Hamilton, Ontario, that will use “biosolids,” or treated sewer sludge, and other forms of biomass as feedstocks. The Ontario Power Authority has agreed to purchase the renewable power from the proposed plant once it’s operating. Permits are in place, according to Lib-erty Energy, and the company anticipates long-term tipping agreements with other local municipalities, as well. It aims to convert 500 metric tons (approximately 550 tons) of biosolids and 150 metric tons (165 tons) of other biomass per day. Ew-ing Bemiss & Co. will help to secure fi nancing. BIO


business BRIEFS

AllGreen develops biomass power in IndiaAllGreen Energy India Pvt Ltd. has begun construction

of the fi rst three of 10 biomass power plants to be built in India over the next three years. Each facility will produce 6.5 megawatts of electricity using pyrolysis technology patented by the Indian Institute of Science. India-based Energreen Power Ltd., which has licensed the technology, will act as the engineer-ing, procurement and construction provider. The gasifi cation technology, based on an open-top downdraft design, will use GE Jenbacher generators. ITC Ltd.’s Agri Business Division will provide the biomass feedstock. BIO

Fibre Brain hires general managerPaul Bichler has been hired as general manager of Fibre

Brain Co., a start-up company that intends to own and oper-ate a wood pellet manufacturing plant employing 30 full-time people in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. Fibre Brain submitted an application to the province of Ontario for a license to manufac-ture the wood pellets. The facility, expected to be in operation by fall, will produce approximately 32,000 tons of wood pellets annually. BIO

EPA honors Kimberly-Clark for biomass useHealth and hygiene giant Kimberly-Clark Corp. made the

U.S. EPA’s list of the top 50 largest green power users for its use of wood waste in a cogeneration boiler to produce electric-ity. The EPA estimated the company offsets the carbon dioxide emissions of 29,000 cars in producing more than 220 million kilowatt-hours of biomass-derived power, or approximately 7 percent of the company’s annual electrical use. Kimberly-Clark was ninth on the list among participating Fortune 500 compa-nies. BIO

Iowa manufacturer Vermeer passes awayIowa manufacturing veteran Gary Vermeer, 90, died Feb. 2

in Pella, Iowa, where he kept his hand in farming for more than 60 years as his company grew into an international manufac-turer of agricultural, construction, environmental and indus-trial equipment with dealerships in more than 60 countries. He is best-known for the invention of the company’s round baler. He got his start in labor-saving devices with the invention of a wagon-hoist for unloading corn. BIO

Siemens to install water treatment plantat ethanol facility in Thailand

Siemens has been awarded a $10 million contract from Advance Agro Ethanol, a subsidiary of Advance Agro Pub-lic Co. Ltd., to provide process and electrical equipment for a wastewater treatment plant at AAE’s ethanol plant in Thailand. The system includes pretreatment, using fi lter press technolo-gy to remove suspended solids; pre-acidifi cation; anaerobic di-gestion; aeration; secondary clarifi cation; dewatering; chemical dosing units; and a biogas fl are stack. Biogas generated from the wastewater is expected to save AAE more than $5.5 million per year for a three-year return on investment. BIO

Steiger joins Ze-genBoston-based Ze-gen Inc. named Richard Steiger as vice

president of engineering and construction. In this capacity, he will oversee the company’s project-specifi c engineering ac-tivities, including the operation of a dem-onstration-scale facility in New Bedford, Mass., that gasifi es municipal solid waste into synthesis gas. He will also supervise the construction and operation of Ze-gen’s fi rst commercial-scale facility, which is ex-pected to come on line in the fi rst quarter of 2011. The company is negotiating two or three locations, Steiger said. BIO Steiger


business BRIEFS

Blade Energy Crops releases switchgrass guideBlade Energy Crops, a seed

brand of Ceres Inc., has released a 20-page guide, titled “Planting and Managing Switchgrass as a Dedicated Energy Crop 2009,” which summa-rizes the most recent data and expe-riences from the company’s energy crop trialing network. The free re-source details switchgrass variety se-lection and planting considerations; fertility, pest and weed management in post-established years; timing, fre-quency and methods of harvesting; and growing incentives. Ceres Communications Manager Gary Koppenjan said energy crops such as switchgrass provide new options for growers, es-pecially for underperforming acres, but there is a learning curve. “This guide seems to be a good resource to get the process started,” he said. BIO

Global Energy acquires WoodTech, plans gasifi erGlobal Energy Systems, a subsidiary of Global Energy

Holdings Group Inc., announced it has acquired wood fuel com-pany WoodTech LLC in Cherokee County, Ga., which produces 900,000 tons of biomass products annually, including wood chips and wood fuel. WoodTech will expand operations to 1.2 million tons this year, while Global Energy plans to install a wood gasifi -cation plant adjacent to WoodTech’s facility to produce synthesis gas to power a turbine that will produce 20 megawatts of elec-tricity. BIO

ADF Engineering opens Omaha offi ceADF Engineering Inc., an engineering

and consulting fi rm for the renewable fuels industry in Miamisburg, Ohio, has opened a branch offi ce in Omaha, Neb., where Mario Ancona will be the site/project manager. He previously worked for Altra Inc., where he gained experience in project management, business development, consulting, engi-neering, and design/build activities for the ethanol, corn milling and food industries. He earned an industrial mechanical engineering degree at the Instituto Tecnológico de Mér-ida in Mexico. BIO

Hayes joins USDA/DOE joint committeeDermot Hayes, a professor of econom-

ics and fi nance, and the Pioneer Hi-Bred In-ternational chairman in agribusiness at the Iowa State University College of Business, has joined the Biomass Research and De-velopment Technical Advisory Committee, jointly administered by the USDA and U.S. DOE. During his three-year appointment, he will advise the Biomass Research and De-velopment Board, which coordinates research and development activities relating to biofuels. The committee was established by the Biomass Research and Development Act of 2000. BIO

Qteros founder receives “Women to Watch” award Susan Leschine, founder of biofuel company Qteros (for-

merly SunEthanol) and a University of Massachusetts, Am-herst professor, has received a Mass High Tech: The Journal of New England Technology Women to Watch Award. The award, in its sixth year, honors women who excel in technological in-novation, entrepreneurship and community involvement. Le-schine was recognized for her discovery of the Q Microbe in a wetlands area near the Quabbin Reservoir in Massachusetts. The Q Microbe can generate cellulosic ethanol from a vari-ety of plant materials. She was honored along with nine other women at an award ceremony March 12 at the Charles Hotel in Cambridge, Mass. BIO

Dow, Süd-Chemie to develop catalystsThe Dow Chemical Co. in Midland, Mich., and Süd-Chemie

Group of Munich, Germany, will begin a joint research program in April to develop catalysts that can be used to convert synthe-sis gas derived from biomass into hydrocarbons for the produc-tion of liquid fuels and chemicals. Dow scientists in Terneuzen, Netherlands, will work with Süd-Chemie scientists in Germany and the U.S. to focus on making the process of converting syngas to hydrocarbons more effi cient and economically viable. BIO

Sud-Chemie’s corporate headquarters in Munich, Germany

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business BRIEFS

Verdezyne partners with Syngenta, adds vice president

Syngenta Biotechnology Inc., a North Carolina-based crop breeder, and Verdezyne Inc., formerly CODA Genomics Inc., signed a research and development agreement in Febru-ary, in which Verdezyne will synthesize novel genes for testing the optimized expression of enzymes in Syngenta plants. Using advanced computational algorithms, Verdezyne will design and synthesize novel gene libraries for engineering proteins, meta-bolic pathways and microorganisms that will aid in manufac-turing platform chemicals and biofuels.

Verdezyne also recently appointed Damien Perriman as vice president of business development. Previously, he was senior commercial leader for The Dow Chemical Co.’s Biosci-ence Platform. BIO

EGB, NextStep enter biomass supply agreementNebraska-based Energy Grains Biomass LLC has signed a

multi-year agreement to supply NextStep Biofuels Inc. with an unspecifi ed amount of corn stover for 40 MMgy of cellulosic ethanol production. EGB contracts local farmers for corn sto-ver, according to company President Paul Kenney. “It’s a turn-key operation,” he said. “Farmers show us where to go, and our crews come in and do everything. We will get as much as we need off the farmers’ fi elds through the winter. It will be very unique, as we will be pelletizing the corn stover.” BIO

Enerkem names vice presidentEnerkem Inc., a Montreal-based synthesis-gas-to-ethanol

company, has added Jocelyn Auger to its management team as vice president and general counsel. He has more than 10 years of corporate and legal experience, having previously worked at BCF LLP, an independent law fi rm in Canada, where he was co-chairman of the Business & Technology Practice Group and re-sponsible for the law fi rm’s information technology operations. His experience also includes intellectual property licensing, joint ventures, corporate fi nance, mergers and acquisitions, and other commercial transactions. BIO

Catalyx pilots two-way osmosis systemCatalyx Inc. is developing what it calls a two-way osmosis

system to treat diffi cult wastewater, such as what results from carpet or textile dyeing, which can have high biochemical and chemical oxygen demand. Large amounts of water are often required in carpet and textile manufacturing, and in many oth-er processes. Catalyx’s system can purify wastewater streams without chemicals, which are sometimes used in conventional wastewater treatment. Once two-way osmosis is complete, the concentrated, organics-rich wastewater could be used as a feedstock for anaerobic digestion or boiler fuel. BIO

DuPont Danisco hires fourDuPont Danisco Cellulosic Ethanol LLC added four

members to its management team recently. Kyle Althoff has become director of feedstock development. He will assist in plant siting and develop grower delivery business models, as well as help formulate feedstock strategies. Most recently, he managed client projects at BBI International Inc. Stuart Thomas was named director of technology development. Pre-viously, he was business development manager for DuPont Clean Technologies in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Barbara Fatina has joined DuPont Danisco as chief fi nancial offi cer. She most recently served as vice president of opera-tions and chief fi nancial offi cer of Verety LLC. Keith Brazzell was named site manager of DuPont Danisco Cellulosic Etha-nol’s cellulosic ethanol plant under construction in Vonore, Tenn. Most recently, he served as plant manager of Tate & Lyle’s facility in Loudon, Tenn. BIO

Engle to lead TellesMetabolix Inc. and Archer Daniels Midland Co. appoint-

ed Robert Engle as general manger of Telles, the companies’ joint venture aimed at commercializing a line of Mirel-brand bioplastics. Previously, he served as vice president of affi liate management for Ticona, an engineering polymers business. Telles’ fi rst commercial-scale Mirel production facility is under construction next to ADM’s 237 MMgy wet corn mill ethanol plant in Clinton, Iowa. Construction is expected to be com-plete by the second quarter of 2009, according to Metabolix spokesman Brian Ruby. BIO


industry NEWS

A group of academia in the U.K. has created a £27 million ($38 million) Sustain-able Bioenergy Centre through the Biotech-nology and Biological Sciences Research Council. The collaborative effort includes six research hubs at the University of Cam-bridge, The University of Dundee, The University of York, Rothamsted Research and two centers at the University of Not-tingham. Another seven universities and in-stitutes, and 15 industrial partners, are con-tributing, as well.

Research activities will encompass mul-tiple projects toward developing sustainable bioenergy production. Crop work will focus on improving yield and the quality of non-food dedicated energy crops. Other project partners will target barley straw, working on altering the lignin for more effi cient pro-cessing. One group will examine the marine wood borer as a source of robust enzymes, while others will work on optimizing pre-treatment and fermentation strategies for lignocellulosic ethanol production. Some will work toward improving the bacterial

conversion of biomass to biobutanol, while others will examine the social and economic sustainability of the various bioenergy ap-proaches.

“The U.K. has a world-leading research base in plant and microbial science,” said BBSRC Chief Executive Offi cer Douglas Kell. “The BBSRC Sustainable Bioenergy Centre draws together some of the world’s top scientists in order to help develop tech-nology and understanding to support the

sustainable bioenergy sector. The center is taking a holistic systems-level approach, examining all the relevant areas of science needed for sustainable bioenergy, and study-ing the economic and social impact of the bioenergy process. By working closely with industrial partners, the center’s scientists will be able to quickly translate their prog-ress into practical solutions to all our benefi t and ultimately, by supporting the sustainable bioenergy sector, help to create thousands of new ‘green collar’ jobs in the U.K.”

Industry partner Graham Mackay, chief executive of SABMiller PLC, called the ef-fort an important contribution to fi ghting global warming. “The benefi ts of biofuels have been somewhat obscured by the nega-tive effects of purpose-grown crops,” he said. “However, at SABMiller, we believe that the development of sustainable biofuel could prove to be one of the most impor-tant contributors to solving the energy and climate challenges.”

-Susanne Retka Schill

Collaborative effort launches Sustainable Bioenergy Centre

Miscanthus and other dedicated energy crops have been studied at Rothamsted Research in the U.K.

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Legislative initiatives benefi t biomass industryPresident Barack Obama signed the

$787 billion American Recovery and Re-investment Act into law Feb. 17. Approxi-mately $43 billion of that will be used to support energy projects that will save and create jobs, while laying the groundwork for long-term economic growth.

Many of the energy components con-tained within the stimulus package are ex-pected to benefi t the biomass industry. Perhaps most importantly, the legislation extends the production tax credit (PTC) for qualifi ed biomass and municipal solid waste facilities through 2013. The bill permits taxpayers to claim an investment tax credit (ITC) in place of the PTC for certain proj-ects that come on line between 2009 and 2013. It also eliminates the reduction of the ITC for property fi nanced by subsidized en-ergy fi nancing or tax-exempt private activity bonds. In addition, taxpayers are permitted to receive a grant from the U.S. Depart-ment of the Treasury in place of claiming

tax credits for certain properties placed in service between 2009 and 2010.

The package also provides funding for certain hazardous fuels reduction projects on federal lands, and allows the U.S. For-est Service to award up to $50 million in competitive grants as incentives to increase the use of biomass from federal and non-federal forested lands. In addition, the leg-islation provides $6 billion for the Innova-tion Technology Loan Guarantee program, which was authorized by the Energy Policy Act of 2005. This program will provide loan guarantees for renewable technologies and transmission technologies. The $6 bil-lion is ultimately expected to support more than $60 billion in loans for these types of projects.

Members of Congress are also consid-ering legislation that would create a federal renewable portfolio standard (RPS). The majority staff of the U.S. Senate Commit-tee on Energy and Natural Resources re-

cently released an outline for a proposed federal RPS that would ultimately require 20 percent of energy sold to retail custom-ers by 2020 to be sourced from renewable resources. A similar proposal was recently introduced in the U.S. House of Represen-tatives. House Resolution 890 would require 25 percent of energy to be sourced from re-newable resources by 2025.

In addition, a bipartisan group of senators has introduced legislation that aims to promote the development of bio-gas through tax incentives. The Biogas Production Incentive Act of 2009 would encourage greater production by providing manufacturers with a tax credit of $4.27 for every 1 million British thermal units of bio-gas produced. The legislation, S. 306, was introduced Jan. 22 and referred to the Com-mittee on Finance.

-Erin Voegele


industry NEWS

German biogas business, R&D continuesRecently, Biomass Magazine noticed an

uptick in German biogas projects moving forward. Here is a summary of those plans.

RWE Innogy, the renewable energy subsidiary of utility RWE AG, and the West-phalia-Lippe Agricultural Association plan to build plants that would produce biogas from liquid manure. The biogas will be fed to the public natural gas pipeline and sold by RWE Innogy’s sister company RWE Ener-gy. The fi rst plant in Münsterland, Germany, will be commissioned in 2010.

KTG Agrar AG has commissioned its 11th biogas plant, bringing the company’s total biogas plant power rating to 7.5 mega-watts. Located in Putlitz, Germany, the new 700-kilowatt facility will also produce heat for drying grain, and district heating for 300 homes. The plant produces biogas from corn silage, millet, grass and straw.

EnviTec Biogas AG, headquartered in Lohne, Germany, said it expects its biogas plant sales to increase from €150 million to €200 million ($193 million to $258 million) during 2009. The company also announced that it has developed a catalytic process for

reducing formaldehyde in biogas. The tech-nology can be retrofi tted to existing EnviTec plants.

UTS Biogastechnik GmbH, headquar-tered in Munich, Germany, has spun off three divisions into separate companies. UTS Biogas GmbH, with offi ces in Saxony and Bavaria, Germany, will handle Ger-man projects; UTS International GmbH will handle international business; and UTS

Products GmbH, located in Lippetal, Ger-many, will handle product development and production.

Schmack Biogas AG has won a €10 million ($13 million) contract from Nawa-ro Engineering GmbH, a subsidiary of Nawaro BioEnergie AG, to build a plant to process 460,000 metric tons of energy crop fermentation residues per year at Nawaro’s BioEnergie Park Güstrow in Güstrow, Ger-many. The plant should be operational in November.

Finally, the Fraunhofer Institute for Ceramic Technologies and Systems has de-veloped a pilot-scale biogas plant that the institute said is 85 percent effi cient for pro-ducing heat and electricity from agricultural waste. The facility uses enzymatic hydrolysis pretreatment to speed decomposition and fermentation times by 50 percent to 70 per-cent, and produces 30 percent more biogas. A high-temperature fuel cell converts the biogas to heat and electricity.

-Ryan C. Christiansen

The Fraunhofer Institute for Ceramic Technologies and Systems has developed a pilot-scale biogas plant, which the institute said is 85 percent effi cient for producing heat and electricity from agricultural waste.

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Study: 90-billion-gallon RFS achievableSandia National Laboratories and

General Motors Corp. have released a re-port that indicates a U.S. renewable fuels standard (RFS) mandate of 90 billion gal-lons of biofuels by 2030 is achievable and sustainable.

The report, titled “The 90 Billion-Gal-lon Deployment Study,” was compiled us-ing a systems dynamic model that analyzed the complete supply chain, including land availability, transportation, storage and con-version processes.

Sandia’s Transportation Energy Cen-ter Director Bob Carling said the study was centered on ethanol, although other fuels are applicable to the model. The ethanol in-dustry was deemed more mature compared with other biofuels.

Carling said the underlying assumption of the study was that if the U.S. is going to invest in new petroleum-based domes-tic production, it would cost approximately

the same as investing in biomass-based fuel production.

The 90-billion gallon ethanol target will require approximately 60 billion gal-lons of gasoline, one-third of the projected amount of transportation fuel required in 2030. “The projections from the U.S. DOE and others say that in 2030, the country will need about 180 billion gallons of gasoline,” Carling said.

West said the purpose of the project was to assess feasibility, implications, limi-tations and enablers of large-scale biofuel production in the U.S. Middle-of-the-road assumptions were used in the study, rather than the most optimistic or pessimistic.

A key conclusion, according to West, was that the production of 45 billion gal-lons of cellulosic ethanol per year by 2030 would require approximately 480 million tons of dry biomass, less than half of which would come from dedicated energy crops.

“They can be grown on land that is current-ly idle or being used as pasture as opposed to actively being used as cropland,” he said. “This is assuming technological progress in the conversion processes, resulting in an av-erage yield of 95 gallons of ethanol per ton of dry biomass.”

West said Sandia also found that biofu-el capital expenditure necessary to achieve 60 billion gallons of total biofuel produc-tion capacity per year by 2030 would be approximately $250 billion. “This is large, but quite similar in magnitude to invest-ments required to establish and maintain the equivalent production of domestic pe-troleum,” he said.

The study concluded that cellulosic biofuels can compete with oil priced at $90 per barrel.

-Anna Austin


industry NEWSBiomass-based robot to feed, power itself

Maryland-based Robotic Technologies Inc. has contracted with Florida-based Cyclone Power Technologies Inc. to develop a biomass engine system capable of obtaining and ingesting biomass to produce energy to power itself.

The $850,000 project is a Small Business Innovation Research effort funded by the U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Ad-vanced Research Projects Agency.

Robotic Technologies President Robert Finkelstein described the patent-pending Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot, the concept of which was fi rst developed in 2003, as a biologically inspired, organism-like robotic vehicle that fi nds and processes biomass in a manner similar to eating. Therefore, it won’t need conventional refueling, but is capable of running on convention fuels when needed.

The contract with Cyclone Power Technologies consists of two phases. Within six months of the fi rst phase, Cyclone Power Technologies will build and deliver an engine containing a biomass combustion chamber for demonstration purposes. In phase two, the company will build and deliver the biomass trimmer, gatherer and feeder system to work with its engine power source.

Through the duration of the project, the EATR will be tested to demonstrate its ability to identify suitable biomass sources of energy, such as wood, grass or paper, and distinguish them from unsuitable materials such as rocks, metal or glass. Its ability to spa-tially locate and manipulate sources of energy—cutting, shredding to size, grasping, lifting and ingesting—will also be tested, as well as its ability to convert the biomass into suffi cient electrical en-ergy.

The robotic arm and an end effector will be attached to the ro-botic mobility platform directly or affi xed to a platform towed be-hind the vehicle. It will have suffi cient fl exibility, extend suffi ciently from the platform, and have a suffi cient payload to reach and lift appropriate materials in its vicinity. “The end effector will consist of a multi-fi ngered hand with suffi cient degrees of freedom to grasp and operate a cutting tool, such as a circular saw, to demon-strate an ability to prepare biomass for ingestion, and to grasp and manipulate biomass for ingestion,” Finkelstein said.

The robot may generate 1 kilowatt-hour of electricity for ev-ery three to 12 pounds of dry vegetation it ingests, which translates to two to eight miles of driving or more than 80 hours of standby. According to Finkelstein, 150 pounds of vegetation could provide suffi cient energy for 100 miles of driving.

“Our contract with DARPA requires an initial demonstration by April 2010,” Finkelstein said. “We expect to have a prototype EATR vehicle by April 2011. An operational system could be avail-able by 2012 or 2013.”

-Anna Austin

IRENA organizes in GermanyIn January, more than 100 representatives of countries world-

wide congregated in Bonn, Germany, for the founding meeting of the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), an organi-zation formed to promote a rapid transition toward the global and sustainable use of renewable energy. Seventy-fi ve countries signed IRENA’s founding document.

IRENA’s primary objectives include: facilitating access to reli-able data on the potential of renewable energy, best practices, ef-fective fi nancial mechanisms and cutting-edge technological exper-tise; providing practical advice and support for both industrialized and developing nations in order to help them build their regulatory frameworks and building capacities; developing comprehensive so-lutions that foster all types of renewable energy and consider vari-ous renewable energy policies on local, regional and national levels; considering specifi c environmental, economic and sociocultural conditions; and involving stakeholders from the energy industry, academia, institutions and civil society.

Notable speakers at IRENA’s meeting included Andris Pie-balgs, energy commissioner for the European Commission; Heide-marie Wieczorek-Zeul, federal minister for Germany’s Economic Cooperation and Development; and Sigmar Gabriel, federal min-ister for Germany’s Environment, Nature Conservation and Nu-clear Safety.

Representatives from the American Council on Renewable Energy attended the founding meeting of IRENA as an invited observer. The U.S. was represented by a member of the U.S. State Department Embassy in Berlin. Biomass Magazine was unable to confi rm whether the U.S. is considering membership in IRENA. “It is a major aim of the member states to involve the U.S. in the new agency,” according to the Federal Ministry for the Environ-ment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety.

The process of establishing key personnel within IRENA is underway. The agency is expected to be functional by summer, the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety said.

-Bryan Sims

More than 100 countries attended the fi rst IRENA meeting in Bonn, Germany. Seventy-fi ve countries signed the founding document.

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industry NEWS

Royal Cosun, Avantium to further biofuel, bioplastic development

Two Netherlands-based companies, Royal Cosun and Avan-tium, have agreed to collaborate in further developing bioplastics and biofuels from agricultural wastes.

Under the collaboration, Royal Cosun, developer, producer and seller of food products and ingredients, will manage the front-end work of selecting, isolating and purifying nonfood carbohydrate streams from unspecifi ed ag wastes. Meanwhile, Avantium will de-velop a chemically catalyzed back-end process to convert carbohy-drates and sugars from cellulose and hemicellulose into what it calls “furanics,” or furan-based compounds, which can then be used as a building block for bioplastics or biofuels production.

Gerald van Engelen, business development manager of cor-porate development for Royal Cosun, told Biomass Magazine that the joint investigation aims to identify a more specifi c ag-waste stream down the road. “There are a lot of ways to hydrolyze carbohydrates from waste streams,” he said. “We are working to fi nd the best, cheapest way.”

Royal Cosun and Avantium began initial discussions approxi-mately three years ago. Those discussions were more “explorative,” van Engelen said. “Then it went quiet for about a year, and then about a year-and-a-half ago, we met again.”

Phase one of the collaboration will take two years. Van Enge-len said developing a research and development plan will take up to six months of that time, in addition to obtaining research results and determining the feasibility of future work. He acknowledged that this won’t be a quick developmental process. “Exportation of technology resulting from this could take years,” he said.

Avantium has been working on the development of furanics for years and described them as “heteroaromatic compounds de-rived from a key intermediate molecule called HMF, or hydroxyl-methyl-furfural.” The company said HMF is the precursor to many valuable building blocks, noting that despite decades of study, an economical approach to producing HMF has yet to be achieved. Through its work though, Avantium said it has found new and im-proved catalytic routes to specifi c furanics.

The partnering companies also anticipate overcoming the food-versus-fuel issues with fi rst-generation biofuel production, in addition to solving the technical hurdles associated with second-generation biofuel production that exist today.

-Ron Kotrba

UK to divert food waste from landfi ll for bioenergy

Sainsbury’s, a U.K. supermarket chain, aims to become a zero-waste company by year’s end by processing its food and meat waste into bioenergy. The initiative began in January in Scotland with ap-proximately 42 tons of food waste per week from 28 stores being diverted to make biofuels and electricity.

In making the announcement at the Zero Waste Conference in Edinburgh, Scotland, on Jan. 21, Alison Austin, Sainsbury’s en-vironment manager, said each ton diverted from the landfi ll will generate enough power for 500 homes and save three tons of car-bon dioxide compared with fossil fuels. “Scotland is at the fore-front of our wider U.K. plan to completely cut out dependence on landfi lls,” she said. “This is the fi rst step in a plan that will see Sainsbury’s stop using landfi lls for food waste by this summer and stop using landfi lls completely by the end of the year.”

Sainsbury’s is the fi rst to sign up with long-time renderer PDM Group for both meat and food waste processing. PDM Group de-veloped biomass power technology when the country faced the bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, or mad-cow disease) outbreak a decade ago. The company developed bubbling fl uid-ized bed combustion technology capable of destroying the animal proteins in carcasses to be incinerated in BSE eradication efforts. PDM Group opened its fi rst meat and bonemeal combustion plant in Widnes, England, in 2000, and it now handles approximately 2,000 metric tons of food waste per week. The system generates eight megawatts of power to the electrical grid, and supplies steam from a combined-heat-and-power system to an adjacent chemi-cal factory. Along with generating power, the facility extracts and recycles waste vegetable oils for use in its own facility, and supplies oil for biodiesel production to U.K.-based Argent Energy Ltd.

PDM Group is expanding its renewable energy capacity in Widnes to handle an additional 100,000 tons of meat and food waste per year, doubling its generating capacity. Construction of a second energy and recycling center at the company’s rendering plant in Nuneaton, England, is expected to be complete in two years. It received permission earlier this year to construct the fi rst of a planned system of anaerobic digesters across the U.K. to handle the anticipated growth in food-waste recycling. The fi rst anaerobic digester, located in Doncaster, England, is expected to begin taking Sainsbury’s food waste in late 2009. The plant will handle approximately 45,000 metric tons of food waste per year with a two-megawatt generating capacity.

-Susanne Retka Schill

Sainsbury’s, a U.K. supermarket chain, aims to divert food waste from landfi lls for fuel and electricity production.

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industry NEWSStonehedge Bio-Resources to build hemp processing facility

Stonehedge Bio-Resources Inc. is look-ing to convert hemp into a viable biomass energy crop. In January, the Ontario-based company received $2 million from U.K. in-vestors to construct an industrial hemp pro-cessing facility in Northumberland County, Ontario.

According to John Baker, founder and chairman of Stonehedge Bio-Resources, the company has been involved in the plant ge-netics and breeding of various hemp species for more than a decade, and has been com-mercializing the crop for myriad industrial uses for the past three years. “We have found that hemp has multiple uses as a biomass crop,” he said. “It can also sequester carbon and mitigate greenhouse gas emissions.”

Baker anticipates breaking ground for the facility in April or May. Commission-ing and start-up could begin within 12 to 15 months after that. The plant may employ up to 27 people within the next two years, he added.

Hemp straw would be sourced from an

area of 15,000 to 20,000 acres within a 60-mile radius of the processing facility. The company’s equipment would be capable of processing approximately seven dry tons per hour, depending on the amount of shifts and downtime needed during its fi rst year of operation. “We are aiming at an output of about 40,000 to 50,000 tons of hemp de-

rived from 17,000 acres in our fi rst year of operation, but it will take time to ramp up,” Baker said.

According to Baker, hemp is a desir-able biomass feedstock due to its variety of applications in different industries. It could serve as a replacement for pink fi berglass insulation in houses; it could be used to pro-duce “hemcrete,” a biobased masonry com-posite containing hemp and concrete; and it could be a biodegradable and recyclable fi ber-based composite in automobile door panels.

Baker said the company will initially market hemp in Canada as a pelletized fuel that could be implemented at coal-fi red plants looking to reduce their carbon foot-prints. Stonehedge Bio-Resources may also look into hemp as a cellulosic ethanol feed-stock due to the plant’s inherently high cel-lulosic value.

-Bryan Sims

Stonehedge Bio-Resources Inc. is using hemp to produce this replacement to pink fi berglass insulation.

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New York-based energy woodchip sup-plier Green Energy Resources Inc. recently announced the signing of a two-year, $50 million contract to supply woodchips to an unnamed entity in Sweden. Green Energy Re-sources will ship the recipient approximately $2 million worth of woodchips each month. According to Joseph Murray, Green Energy Resources president and chief executive of-fi cer, the fi rst batch of woodchips would be shipped as soon as the company could secure an icebreaker, a special-purpose ship designed to navigate ice-covered waters.

Before the woodchips are exported, they must be treated to kill any pests or insects in the wood. According to Murray, the wood-chips that his company is shipping to Sweden must be heat-treated as chemical fumigation is not currently permitted for woodchips bound

for Europe. Green Energy Resources has de-veloped a process to do this. While Murray said he can’t share specifi c details about the process, he said the real advantage is “it’s rela-tively inexpensive.”

Regulations require that wood bound for export must be heated to a temperature of 56 degrees Celsius (132.8 degrees Fahrenheit) for a period of 30 minutes, Murray said. In ad-dition, each export shipment of woodchips must gain federal approval from the USDA. “Each time you make a shipment, you have to go through the [approval] process,” he said. According to Murray, the USDA recently ap-proved the company’s fi rst shipment of treat-ed woodchips.

Green Energy Resources currently ships woodchips out of Linden, N.J., and has plans to activate its Baltimore port within the next few months. The company is also considering the purchase of at least one woodchip carrier ship

-Erin Voegele

Green Energy Resources exports woodchips to Sweden

Green Energy Resources Inc. prepares woodchips for shipment.

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industry NEWS

Genetic sequence of brown-rot fungus reveals enzymesPostia placenta, more commonly known

as brown-rot fungus, an organism that ef-fi ciently colonizes and decays wood, is unique in the way it breaks down woody biomass, according to the U.S. DOE Joint Genome Institute. The fungus can rapidly depolymerize the cellulose in wood without removing the lignin.

Now, researchers at the Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, Calif., and the USDA Forest Service Forest Products Lab-oratory in Madison, Wis., have translated the genetic code of the fungus so that its biomass-degrading enzymes might be lever-aged to pretreat biomass for the production of biofuels, such as ethanol.

According to the institute, the fi nd-ings explain the biochemistry that makes the thread-like fungi uniquely destructive to wood. The genetic sequence provides

researchers with a detailed inventory of its biomass-degrading enzymes.

“P. placenta has, over its evolution, shed the conventional enzymatic machinery for attacking plant material,” said Dan Cullen, a scientist at the Forest Products Labora-tory. “Instead, the evidence suggests that it utilizes an arsenal of small oxidizing agents that blast through plant cell walls to depo-

lymerize the cellulose. This biological pro-cess opens a door to more effective, less-energy intensive and more environmentally sound strategies for more lignocellulose de-construction.”

The DOE and USDA laboratories pre-viously sequenced the genome of white-rot fungi, which simultaneously degrades lignin and cellulose. “For the fi rst time, we have been able to compare the genetic blueprints of brown-rot, white-rot and soft-rot fungi, which play a major role in the carbon cycle of our planet,” said Randy Berka, director of integrative biology at Novozymes Inc. in Davis, Calif., a participant in the study. “Such comparisons will increase our un-derstanding of the diverse mechanisms and chemistries involved in lignocellulose deg-radation.”

-Ryan C. Christiansen

Biomass projects receive fundsMany different U.S. and Canadian bio-

mass-related projects received funding from governments or private organizations re-cently.

In Wisconsin, the state Focus on En-ergy’s Renewable Energy Program awarded a $200,000 grant to Action Floor Systems LLC, maker and distributor of wood fl oors such as basketball courts, to replace its natu-ral-gas-fi red boiler and old wood boiler with a new wood-fi red biomass boiler. Installa-tion, provided by Pennsylvania-based AFS Energy Systems Division Inc., was recently completed. The company uses wood waste from its fl oor manufacturing business as boiler fuel.

The Energy Harvest program and Al-ternative Fuels Incentive Grant program contributed $7.2 million and $6.5 million, re-spectively, in grants to fi ve biomass projects in Pennsylvania. Southern Alleghenies Con-servancy Inc., on behalf of Pleasant View Farms, will receive $480,479 for an anaero-bic digester and electrical generation systems. The Indiana County Conservation District will receive $46,950 to increase capacity

of the Brookside Diary anaerobic digester from 80 to 107 kilowatts. The Lackawanna River Basin Sewer Authority will receive $397,961 for two 65-kilowatt micro-turbines to produce electricity from unused anaero-bic digestion gas at a wastewater treatment facility. Glendale School District will receive $350,000 for a biomass boiler, and the Sny-der County Conservation District will re-ceive $61,356 on behalf of Windview Farm for a manure-combustion, hot-water boiler for poultry barn heating.

In Colorado, New Energy Economic Development grants were dispersed through the state Clean Energy Fund. The city of Greeley received $82,489 to perform a fea-sibility study of the development of a clean energy park that would employ anaerobic digestion, taking in food and ag-processing wastes from businesses in the Western Sug-ar Tax Increment Financing District. The Colorado Brownfi elds Foundation received $25,000 to model the use of multiple renew-able energy technologies, including biogas generation, from an old landfi ll in Colorado Springs. The Greater Arkansas River Nature

Association and The Global Biomass Net-work Project Inc., two Salida, Colo.-based organizations, received $100,000 in matching funds to develop a gasifi cation project at the Chaffee County landfi ll.

The Maine Technology Institute award-ed $20,750 in grants for pellet projects, in-cluding $12,000 to X Café LLC, which is seeking to pellet leftover coffee grinds from its roasting and extraction facility in Port-land, Maine. Thermal Closure LLC received $8,750 to develop a new method of drying wood prior to pelletizing the material.

In Canada, the Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry Community Futures Develop-ment Corp. will receive $63,000 under the regional development component of the Eastern Ontario Development Program for a pilot project to produce pellets from agri-cultural residues and switchgrass for use as industrial boiler fuel. In addition, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada is investing $116,375 to research ways that farmers can convert crop residues such as straw into new uses such as fi re logs.

-Ron Kotrba

The thread-like Postia placenta fungus ramifi es through wood cells.

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PROFILE

Wood PelletProwess

The owner of Western Oregon Wood Products

discusses his wood pelletizing process with

Biomass Magazine, as a prelude to the tour of

his Banks, Ore., facility at the upcoming 2009

International Biomass Conference & Expo.

By Anna Austin


PROFILE


hen opportunity knocked, Chris Sharron opened the door—and pelletized it. Through sheer motivation and dedication, he has mastered the industry and cre-ated a successful business model.

In 1981, 18-year-old Sharron and his brother, Francis, moved from Massachusetts to Oregon. His reasons for moving didn’t in-clude an interest in what would eventually become his career. “My dad told me the fi shing was great,” Sharron says with a chuckle. “And there was nothing tying me to the East Coast.”

After the move, he began working at a forest products equip-ment manufacturing company that was using some equipment manufactured by Western Oregon Wood Products Inc. “In 1985, the owners of WOWP were talking about getting out of the busi-ness and selling it,” Sharron says. “My brother and I, at 22 and 23, had an interest in buying the business. Since I was working for a related business, I came to know them and had the opportunity to purchase it.”

The brothers bought the business in 1986 and, since 1999, Chris Sharron has been the sole owner of the company, and now has three manufacturing facilities; two in Columbia City and Banks, Ore., and another in Dillard, Ore., that he owns jointly with Rose-burg Forest Products. WOWP has grown from producing 300 tons of products in its fi rst year, to 320,000 tons per year currently.

Sourcing Specifi cs The WOWP Columbia City operation has annual capacity of

50,000 tons of fi nished pellets, which requires 100,000 green tons of material coming into the plant for processing. The company uses waste residuals such as saw dust, planar shavings and wood chips from saw milling operations to produce the 120,000 tons of products it annually manufactures, which includes wood pellets, high-energy fi re logs and animal bedding.

Although WOWP still sources from sawmill operations, the lackluster U.S. housing market has prompted them to be on the lookout for other woody biomass sources. “Considering where the sawmill industry is today because of the slump in the housing mar-ket the past couple of years, there has been a lot of sawmill clo-sures or curtailments,” Sharron says. “So there is a lot less of the residual product available. We’ve had to start looking—but haven’t had to implement it yet—into other sources, or streams of product directly coming out of the woods such as thinnings or slash from logging operations.”

Sharron says used pallets and other urban waste stream wood could also be used in the future. “If the sawmill industry doesn’t get healthy sometime soon, we will be forced to go in that direc-

PROFILE

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This trailer tipper is used to dump trailers that are not self-unloading.

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tion,” he says. “And even outside of wood, there are other types of products we could use to make pellet fuel.”

The Pelletizing ProcessThe wood pelletizing process begins when the wood is hauled

to the plant site in tractor-trailer loads. Although some tractor-trail-ers have live bottoms and are self-unloading, most of them aren’t self-unloading and require the use of a tipper, Sharron says. “This basically takes the trailer, lifts it up and dumps it.”

When the company purchases materials the price is based on weight, not volume. Trailers are weighed on industrial scales upon arrival, and are weighed once again after dumping. This is done to calculate the net amount of material that was received, so the com-pany only pays for the wood. Samples are taken from each load and are tested for moisture to determine how much it will cost to dry the green load. Often, the wood residuals that are purchased from green saw milling operations contain some of the natural moisture they held as trees, which can be 50 percent or higher. “On a green ton basis, sometimes we have to buy twice as much tonnage of raw material to get the desired amount of fi nished product,” Sharron says. “We also burn a portion of that wood at the facilities to gen-erate heat for the drying process, so every bit of wood that comes in is used.”

After the weighing process, front-end loaders are used to scoop up the raw material and feed it into bins then the pelletizing process begins. From the bins the material goes onto a conveyer where it’s exposed to large magnets that remove any ferrous metal. The next step is the drying process. “The material enters a rotary drum dryer, which is heated by natural gas, wood or a combination of the two,” Sharron says.

Material that exits the dryer is passed over a screen system to pull out chunks of materials that are too large for pelletizing. The

larger chucks fall into a hammer mill and are ground into smaller sizes and the “accepts” in the middle portion of the screen are ready to go right to the pellet mills, Sharron says.

The fi ne portion, which is used to fuel the dryer, is re-circu-lated to the burner on the dryer and used for in-house fuel. The accepts and hammer-milled material are mixed together before they enter the mills where the pellets are formed.

The pellets are formed using heat and pressure. No additives, binders or glue are used in the process, Sharron tells Biomass Maga-zine. “They exit the mill hot and rather fragile, until we put them through a cooler,” he says. “It’s basically just a system to draw ambi-ent air through the pellets to cool them, and allows them to bind up and prepare them to be packaged.”

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Pictured is a bulldozer at WOWP’s Columbia City, Ore., plant’s pile management operations.

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to all of the energy that goes into mak-ing pellets, and relative to its weight in the end,” Sharron says. “You make some money by producing volume, and this means being in production all the time. So that’s where the challenge is, not un-like any other manufacturing processes, whether you’re making widgets or choco-late chip cookies. Work has to be done minute after minute.”

The other big challenge that some wood pelletizing companies face is prod-uct seasonality. Most of the products that WOWP sells are used in residential heating applications. “Although we hope to see them develop, our markets are not yet commercial or industrial applications for process steam or power, where every day a customer needs a certain amount of fuel,” Sharron says. “Right now we’re coming out of our season, and we’ll have a long dry spell until next September when that market starts calling for our product again.”

To maintain the company’s sources of raw material, keep employees work-ing, and build enough product and in-ventory to meet the demand in the next season, facilities must run year-round, even in the spring and summer. “Cash

After the cooling process, the pellets are screened to sift out the fi ne materials such as dust and small pieces of pellets, which are re-circulated through the mills. The fi nished pellets go through the packag-ing system where they are bagged, placed on pallets, stretch-wrapped, put into inventory and ready to be sold.

Simple, Yet Challenging Although the pelletizing process is rela-

tively simple, there are several underlying challenges, Sharron says. “Pelletizing pro-

cesses in general are the same,” he says. “A few small things might be done a little bit differently, but it’s essentially the same.” The process involves a series of many compo-nents, and material handling between each of those components. The challenge in-volved, according to Sharron, is to keep all of the components working and moving in the right direction every second, every min-ute and every hour of every day. All of the WOWP plants operate 24 hours, seven days a week. “It’s an energy-intensive process that results in a rather low-value product, relative

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The fi nished pellets are bagged, placed on pallets , stretch wrapped and ready to be sold.

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PROFILE

fl ow becomes an issue during those times of year, because we can’t call up sawmills and say we’re done for now, but will call again next September,” Sharron points out. “They’ll fi nd somebody else who will take the stuff year-round, so we have to be consistent—and we can’t lay our people off and expect them to come back the next season.”

Furthermore, competition to ob-tain raw materials can be stiff. “Finding enough raw material to work with every day, with all the sawmill curtailments and closures—it has always been a challenge,” Sharron says. “These markets have always been kind of up and down, and there are competitors for these residuals—not just pellet plants, but particle board plants, pulp mills, nurseries, animal and livestock raising facilities, and horse barns and stalls, which use that type of material. That’s always been a challenge—meeting daily and seasonal needs.”

Meeting DemandNot surprisingly, demand fl uctuates

year to year and infl uences how much product a pellet producer manufactures. “The residential pellet market has been around since the mid-80s,” Sharron says. “It goes through cycles and has not expe-rienced very steady growth over the past 20-plus years.”

When fossil fuel costs rise, people are driven to look for alternative fuels, such as pellets, to heat their homes. Dur-ing those times, the demand for wood fuel rises. “The next year or the year after that, fossil fuel costs may level out and there isn’t a lot of interest anymore, so things will slow down,” Sharron says. “If someone is looking at getting into this business, they need to consider this.” Sharron remembers when they had a pel-let shortage in the western U.S. because some producers expanded their markets and shipped a lot of product to the Mid-west and the East Coast. Although the market quickly corrected itself, the next season, fuel was kept closer to home. In the meantime, many new pellet produc-ers came on line basing their decisions on

the pellet shortage headlines. That in turn created a surplus. “It’s frustrating, because the shortage wasn’t as big of a problem as it was made out to be,” he says. “There are cycles that suggest that people need do their homework and make sure there is a market, or they will really suffer with those cash fl ows and trying to penetrate the market.”

Tour of the Banks Facility Attendees of the 2009 International

Biomass Conference & Expo in Portland, Ore., April 28-30, will have the opportunity

to get a fi rst-hand look at WOWP’s pellet plant in Banks.

The plant is near a sawmill that is cur-rently not in operation during the off-sea-son. “Attendees will be able to see a rather unique design—the way this plant is so compact—and they will get a good feel for what the whole process entails from the dry-ing operation right through to the pelletizing operation.” Sharron says. BIO

Anna Austin is a Biomass Magazine staff writer. Reach her at [email protected] or (701) 738-4968.


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Pressure-treated and painted, or what is commonly referred to as “dirty” wood, is often off limits for productive reuse and relegated to landfi lls. Stakeholders in the construction and demolition industries talk about the politics and economics holding back the potential these prolifi c waste streams possess in the renewable energy sector and, more importantly, what can be done to make use of this resource.

By Ron Kotrba

THE POLITICS OF ‘DIRTY’ WOOD


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ew Hampshire banned the use of construction and demolition (C&D) waste, whether it’s clean, unadul-terated wood waste generated at construction sites or “dirty” wood—the pressure-treated and painted variety

of lumber. In Massachusetts there is a moratorium on using C&D waste. In Portland, Ore., the city prohibits any use of painted or pres-sure-treated woods except in “incidental” quantities. In New York, the state court of appeals shot down an appeal from a biomass plant that wanted to burn clean wood chips in the case of Laidlaw Energy & Environmental Inc. v. Town of Ellicottville. The appellate court upheld the trial court’s refusal to accept the biomass plant status in permitting as being “carbon neutral” because the company did not have a “sustainable fuel source management plan” in place; and the court argued that the distance the chips had to be transported hadn’t been considered in the company’s revelation of the plant’s carbon footprint. Obstacles exist prohibiting the use of dirty wood—and in the Laidlaw case clean wood—in local and state regulations across the United States. Despite these prohibitions on the combustion or burning of these types of materials, the C&D industries keep gener-ating it. So what should be done with all this wood?

According to Jim Taylor, president and chief executive offi cer of Taylor Biomass Energy LLC and head of the Construction Ma-terials Recycling Association, the material received by a C&D facil-ity, where sorting and separating mixed debris occurs, on average is about one-third clean and unadulterated wood; one-third glued and pressed boards; and one-third pressure-treated and painted woods. For Taylor, the politics behind the limited outlets for dirty wood are more than just regulatory in nature. As a businessman, Taylor has personal politics to contend with, and as president of the CMRA he must consider the politics of the industry he represents.

His company is expecting to break ground this spring on a state-of-the-art biomass gasifi cation plant in Montgomery, N.Y.

Unlike the oxygen-rich combustion of dirty wood for energy in a boiler or incinerating it at a burn plant, gasifi cation holds a lot of promise for increased utilization of dirty woods. The anaerobic or oxygen-free environment signifi cantly reduces emissions, which is much less costly than controlling emissions at the back end of the plant. “I know many of my industry counterparts are capable of burning or combusting painted or pressure-treated wood,” he says. Even so, Taylor says he’s made a personal choice not to use dirty wood to fuel his new gasifi cation facility. “We wanted to develop the most environmentally sound process out there today and, by keeping pressure-treated and painted woods out, we believe we can do that,” Taylor says. “From our approach, we are voluntarily staying out of the pressure-treated and painted woods market.” He says it’s not a decision based on regulations, or policy. “It’s a personal decision,” Taylor tells Biomass Magazine. “Our waste chronology is to reduce, reuse, recycle and recover the energy content, and landfi ll or inciner-ate last. That’s how I drive my business.”

Dangerous Emissions?Shane Carpenter with Continental Biomass Industries Inc., a

company in New Hampshire that engineers and sells industrial bio-mass processing equipment, says even though emissions from gas-ifi cation are much less abundant and dangerous than effl uent from

N ‘From a [British thermal unit] basis, you need 2 tons of whole tree chips per 1 ton of C&D. So there’s actually the potential for more emissions using whole tree chips,’ because twice as much needs to be burned to produce the same amount of energy.


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combustion or incineration, there is a defi ciency in gasifi cation tech-nologies proven to work on a large enough scale to process more than a thousand tons a day. And, with a growth-stunting recession in full swing, the cost is defi nitely a concern. Tad Wollenhaupt, presi-dent of Massachusetts-based Air One Inc., a company that develops industrial dust and odor control systems, says to build a 200-plus ton per day gasifi cation plant it could cost more than $100 million.

“For these projects it is about economics—that’s my opinion,” Wol-lenhaupt says. Carpenter adds to this, saying, “Economics is a big factor, yes, but we probably have not focused enough on the politics involved, the local politics. People are saying, ‘I don’t want this stuff being burned in my backyard.’ I think there’s this feeling that the emissions coming from utilizing this type of dirty wood are very dangerous.”

Continental Biomass Industries classifi es C&D wood into “A” and “B” wood categories. “A” is clean, unadulterated wood, and “B” is the pressure-treated or painted, “dirty,” wood. Shown above is the interior of a C&D processing facility where “B” wood is isolated.

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In September 2007, the University of New Hampshire published a comprehen-sive paper on the life-cycle analyses of C&D woods, in which the authors leveraged ex-isting research along with data from Greg Wirsen of Green Seal Environmental Inc. to profi le the emissions from clean and dirty C&D woods in different applications. “A fa-cility with an advanced air pollution control system combusting 10 percent C&D derived biomass mixed with virgin wood had lower dioxin emissions than a facility combusting 100 percent virgin wood,” the authors wrote. “Furthermore, the levels of arsenic and di-oxin emissions were well below levels found at municipal solid waste combustors and be-low all applicable regulations.” Arsenic is used when manufacturing pressure-treated wood, and is one of the concerns about using that material. In addition, the UNH study cited University of Maine test data that compared emissions from burning three different con-coctions of fuel: 100 percent clean wood; 90 percent clean wood with 10 percent C&D wood and “penta (PCP)-treated” wood; and

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“Hogged” fuel is shredded up wood that gets its name from the hog grinder that processes it.

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50 percent “penta (PCP)-treated” wood and 50 percent C&D wood. “In all cases, the stack emissions during the trial burns were far below Maine’s ambient air guidelines and New Hampshire stack emission limits,” the UNH paper states. A facility equipped with an advanced emissions control system com-busting 10 percent C&D wood with 90 per-cent virgin wood had levels of arsenic and dioxin emissions “well below” levels detected at municipal solid waste (MSW) combustion plants “and below all applicable regulations.”

“From a [British thermal unit] basis, you need 2 tons of whole tree chips per 1 ton of C&D,” Wirsen says. “So there’s actually the potential for more emissions using whole tree chips,” because twice as much needs to be burned to produce the same amount of energy.

New Ways to Use an Old Problem

Taylor, who has decided to exclude pressure-treated and painted woods from his commercial-scale gasifi cation plant once

it is operational, says he will still use woods with creosote and glue, and he has a plan to deal with the dirty wood. “We’re going to fi nd new uses for pressure-treated and paint-ed wood in a new wood product,” he says. “We’re fi nding another recycling avenue for pressure-treated and painted woods.” When asked for specifi cs, Taylor says, “Talk with me again in three months.” Perhaps one av-enue for these materials is to chip them up and, with the application of glue, make press board.

In places like Maine, where Wirsen says some pulp and paper mills with the right pollution controls can burn dirty wood—“hogged fuel” as it’s called because the wood is ground up in a “hog” grinder—the solution could very well be dilution. Wol-lenhaupt backs this up in reference specifi -cally to MSW-to-energy plants. “You could mix C&D wood into these trash-to-energy plants and gain some energy value out of it,” Wollenhaupt says.

“That’s a whole different industry,” Car-penter says, referring to MSW plants. “May-

be they’re slow in wanting to commingle their solid waste with the wood we’re talking about but I think a mixture would be great. And I think it would really alleviate a lot of questions as to where this wood should go. Ultimately we could really sort of loosen up some of the restrictions and get some of these MSW plants onboard—and there’s like 70 or 80 of them around the country. If we started looking at what they could do with some of this material, it would help to alleviate some of the strain these C&D pro-cess facilities have on them; specifi cally the transportation costs that are included with having to get rid of this material—it’s huge. But we’re not there yet. It would be great to create some conversation between these waste-to-energy facilities and the recycling associations—the CMRA—about creating a fuel that would make sense for both enti-ties.” BIO

Ron Kotrba is a Biomass Magazine senior writer. Reach him at [email protected] or (701) 738-4942.

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INDUSTRY

BARRELS OF BIOGAS BARRELS

PHOTO: BACARDI LIMITED


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There has never been a prohibition against innovation. Breweries, distilleries and related industries are using biomass and waste to produce renewable energy.

By Ryan C. Christiansen

BARRELS OF BIOGAS OF BIOGAS


hirty miles north of New Or-leans, the Tammany Trace rec-reational trail with its 31 bridges travels over bayous, streams and

rivers, marking the path of the former Illi-nois Central Railroad along the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain. One stop along the trail is Abita Springs, La., the home of Abita Brewing Co., where you can pass through French doors to the tasting room to enjoy sample quaffs of Abita, Jockamo, Purple Haze, Restoration, Turbodog, Andyga-tor, Abbey Ale, or one of several seasonal brews, a choice of harvest brews, or even root beer—all brewed using natural spring water from the Southern Hills Aquifer. If you choose to tour the 49,000-square-foot facility, brewery President David Blossman might show you how the brewery makes its beer—and how it converts brewery waste into renewable energy.

Founded in 1986, Abita Brewing says it is the 30th largest commercial brewer in the nation. In 2008, the company expected to exceed 85,000 barrels of production and $16.5 million in revenue.

Beer is brewed by fi rst milling malted barley into grist to expose starches in the grain. The grist is then mixed with warm water to make mash. Enzymes in the mash convert starches to sugars. Sugary wort is then drained and the leftover mash is sprayed with hot water to sparge the remaining wort from the mash. The wort is then boiled with hops and run through a whirlpool to remove solid proteins and hops fi bers. The wort is then cooled and fermented into beer using yeast. As the beer ages, the yeast settles and is drained off. Finally, the beer is fi l-tered to produce a fi nished product.

During the brewing process, anything that isn’t put into a keg or bottled is considered waste, includ-ing spent grain, spent hops, sugars, proteins and yeast.

“We have a lot of yeast because we make a lot more yeast than we can use,” Blossman says. Specialty brews that rely on raspberry puree or strawberry juice for fl avor also produce waste from those ingredients. “And when we’re fi ltering and fi lling, we lose actu-al beer, too,” he says. But one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, which is why Abita Brewing is turning waste into energy.

A portion of the waste Abita Brewing produces is turned into energy in the form of animal feed. Proteins from the brew-ery waste are mixed with spent grains and sold to a local dairy farmer. The rest “goes down the drain,” Blossman says, but not into a sewer. Instead, the waste is fed to a 570,000-gallon Siemens Water Technolo-gies anaerobic digester, which can convert 75,000 gallons of brewery waste per day into biogas. The methane-rich gas is then fed to the brewery’s boiler, displacing the need for fossil fuel natural gas. Installed in April 2008, the system currently processes 45,000 gallons of brewery waste per day and produces 490 million cubic feet of biogas each month.

Blossman says he is pleased with how well the digester works. “So far, we have been very successful in the qual-ity of the gas,” he says. “We have tested it three or four times and every time it shows us that we have about 92 percent methane, which is in-credible. We have a very clean gas.” Blossman notes that biogas can be very corrosive. “Ours isn’t, but we still go through the steps of

drying it and putting it through an iron sponge, which is de-signed to take out any of the natural acids that are in the gas, which keeps it from pit-ting the steel of our boilers,” he says.

Prior to installing the digester, Abita Brewing used an aerobic system to treat wastewater, Blossman says. “It was a good system and it worked,” he says, “but we were outgrowing the system pretty quickly, and so we

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needed to add capac-ity. And when we de-cided to add capacity, we decided to change technologies and go to an anaerobic system.”

Besides being able to capture and use biogas, moving to

an anaerobic digester has provided Abita Brewing with additional benefi ts: the system requires less manpower, less energy and it smells better, too.

“In an aerobic system, you have a popu-lation of bugs that actually grow a lot more,” Blossman says. “It’s like yeast, it keeps grow-ing and growing and you have to constantly take solids out of the system and dewater them, whereas in the anaerobic system, you don’t have nearly the growth of the bugs.

“The other thing is that it requires a lot less energy,” he says. “The aerobic system had these huge air blowers to stimulate the aerobic bacteria and that required energy.

“And I like the fact that it is totally sealed and we have an odor recovery sys-

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Blossman

Anaerobic digesters are also be-ing used at much larger breweries. The MillerCoors LLC Shenandoah Brewery in Elkton, Va., produces 7 million barrels of beer annually. The brewery also produces waste, which is fed to two ADI Systems Inc. an-aerobic digesters at the facility. The fi rst 6 million gallon digester was built in 1994 and the second 12 mil-lion gallon unit was built in 2000, ac-cording to Graham Brown, president of ADI Systems. Brown says the biogas produced by the digesters is fed to the brewery’s boilers and heat is recycled back into the digesters, “which makes the digesters work better,” he says, “and which reduces energy requirements. The beauty of it is they don’t use conventional fuel to supply the heat to the digesters. They use the digesters’ own energy to do that.”

MillerCoors completed a $300 million upgrade and expansion of its modern brewery in 2007 and has now awarded a contract to ADI Sys-tems Inc. to design and build an aer-obic membrane bioreactor there to treat the effl uent from the digesters. The new system, which will replace the existing conventional activated sludge system at the site, will help MillerCoors meet new, stricter ni-

trogen and phosphorous discharge limits that are being established to reduce the nutrient load on nearby Chesapeake Bay. The new biore-actor will be able to treat 2.5 million gallons of effl uent per day and is ex-pected to be fully operational by the fourth quarter of 2009.

Brown says the membrane bio-reactor is smaller, more reliable, and produces cleaner effl uent than conventional aerobic treatment sys-tems. While conventional systems rely on gravity to separate bacteria from water, the new system fi lters bacteria out of the water by pulling effl uent through membranes. “When you rely on gravity, occasionally, the solids don’t separate well,” Brown says, “because they weigh slightly more than water, and so you’re talk-ing about a delicate balance in the settling velocity inside the tank. [A membrane] is more reliable, be-cause you’re relying on a physical barrier that bacteria can’t penetrate. You get a very clean discharge.”

The polished water produced using a good conventional aerobic treatment system might have 20 milligrams of solids per liter, Brown says. Using membranes, “you have essentially zero,” he says.

BeautyMillerCoors Sees the of Anaerobic Digesters


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tem, and so we’re better neighbors now,” he says. “When an aerobic system is operating perfectly, you won’t have much of a smell, but inevitably you do—I know from experi-ence that you do—whereas with this system, we haven’t had one complaint from a neigh-bor. You just don’t smell it, because everything is enclosed. Anything that you’re losing, you don’t want to lose, because that’s gas and you want to keep it.”

Switching from an aerobic to an anaero-bic treatment system wasn’t cheap. Blossman says the anaerobic digester cost Abita approxi-mately $1.5 million, whereas a similar-sized aerobic system would have been $900,000 or less. “But in the long run, we thought it was a better fi t for us,” Blossman says. “We liked the idea of using our own gas. We try to be as green as we can around here and we have had the luxury of being in business for 23 years and so we can do these kinds of things. If we had tried to do it 15 or 20 years ago, we

wouldn’t have had the resources to do it. But now, we don’t have to be as picky about our payback.”

Bacardi LimitedBreweries aren’t the only ones recycling

waste for energy. Distilleries, too, are produc-ing energy along with spirits. Bacardi Limited, which has 31 plants around the world, makes Bacardi rum, Grey Goose vodka, Dewar’s blended scotch whiskey, Bombay Sapphire gin, Cazadores tequila and more. The com-pany also produces energy. According to Ste-phen Harvey, global environment, health and safety director for Bacardi, the company has patented its own technology for using anaero-bic digestion to treat rum distillery wastewa-ter and to produce energy from biogas. The company has licensed its technology to several other companies, including Cervecería India Inc. in Puerto Rico and Brugal & Co., C. por A. in Santo Domingo.

Harvey says the company’s fi rst anaero-bic digester was commissioned in 1982 at Bacardi’s largest distillery in Cataño, Puerto Rico, with additional digesters built in 1992, 2000 and 2003. The system, engineered by Black & Veatch Holding Co., treats 1.2 mil-lion gallons of still bottoms, unfermented molasses and water from the distillery each day and has the capacity to treat 2 million. The 7 million cubic meters of biogas pro-duced annually is fed to boilers to make steam, which is used in the distillery to make rum.

“Last year, the Cataño plant derived more than 30 percent of its energy require-ments from naturally created biogas,” Har-vey says. “[We] avoided consuming more than 5 million liters of nonrenewable fuel oil, which would have generated more than 16,000 metric tons of CO2. The distillery is currently investing nearly $7 million to build a cogeneration facility, which will produce electricity from the biogas, to further en-hance the site’s energy effi ciency and lower its carbon footprint.”

Another Bacardi facility that uses anaer-obic digestion is the Martini & Rossi plant in Pessione, Italy, near Turin, which produces 12 million cases per year and is Bacardi’s largest bottling operation. Harvey says the system, which was engineered by Biotechnical Pro-cesses International Ltd., was commissioned in 1998 to treat wastewater produced during blending, fi ltration, clarifi cation and bottling operations, mostly from washing equipment. The wastewater contains sugars, vermouth, alcohol and other dissolved organics. The system treats 200,000 gallons per day at ca-pacity. The 180,000 cubic meters of biogas produced annually is fed to a cogeneration facility that produces electricity and hot wa-ter. The electricity powers the wastewater treatment system and also the production area. The hot water supplies 50 percent of the heat for the treatment system.

Overall, the Martini & Rossi operation is renewable intensive, where “92.5 percent of operational waste is recycled,” Harvey says, “including solids such as paper, wood, glass, cartons, metal and plastic.”

A third Bacardi facility with an anaero-bic digester is Gemini Distillers, a Bacardi


INDUSTRY

partner, in Nanjangud, India. Gemini sup-plies alcohol to Bacardi, and Bacardi owns and operates a distillation unit there to produce rum. The anaerobic digester was commissioned in 1990 to treat 110,000 gal-lons of still bottoms per day, with capacity to treat 130,000. The 3 million cubic meters of biogas produced annually is burned to generate high-pressure steam to power a turbine to generate 90 percent of the dis-tillery’s electricity. Exhaust steam is used to distill rum. The system originally was a fi xed-fi lm, random media technology built by Shakthi Sugars Ltd., later changed to an

arranged media technology built by Lars Enviro Pvt. Ltd.

“All three sites benefi t from deriving a stable source of energy from what would otherwise be a waste stream,” Harvey says. “Biogas is a sustainable form of renewable energy that helps Bacardi reduce its carbon footprint with the added benefi t of provid-ing the sites cost stability at a time when fos-sil fuel prices have seen considerable fl uc-tuation.” BIO

Ryan C. Christiansen is a Biomass Magazine staff writer. Reach him at [email protected] or (701) 373-8042.

City Brewing Co. LLC: This bev-erage production and packing com-pany in LaCrosse, Wis., packages 50 million cases of beverages each year. Work began in January to in-stall a $3 million, 3 million kilowatt-hour combined-heat-and-power-unit to generate electricity from biogas produced by the brewery’s existing anaerobic digester, used for wastewater treatment. Histori-cally, the biogas has been fl ared. Electricity will be fed to the grid and used to offset power needs for the Gundersen Lutheran health system facility. Heat will be used to heat the digester.

Combination of Rothes Distill-ers Ltd.: This consortium of Scotch whiskey companies—with brands including Cutty Sark, Chivas Re-gal, Glen Grant, Old Pulteney, Crown Royal and Ben Riach—is planning to build a £35 million ($45 million), 7.2 megawatt biomass-fi red combined-heat-and-power-plant in Morayshire, Scotland. The plant will be built around Helius Energy PLC’s proprietary Green-Fields- and GreenSwitch-branded processes to convert draff, pot ale and woodchips into heat and elec-tricity. The target for completion is late 2010 or early 2011.

Koda Energy LLC: A coopera-tive venture between Rahr Malt-ing Co., which produces malts for the brewing industry, and the Min-nesota-based Shakopee Mdewa-kanton Sioux Community, started producing energy in February at its $60 million, 24-megawatt biomass power facility in Shakopee, Minn. The primary feedstock is oat hulls from General Mills Inc.

Sierra Nevada Brewing Co.: This Chico, Calif., brewery has partnered with E-Fuel Corp. to use Efuel 100 MicroFuelers to make ethanol from brewery waste. Test-ing will begin in the second quarter of 2009.

The Edrington Group: Distill-ers of The Famous Grouse, Cutty Sark and other brands, are backing Scottish Bioenergy Cooperative Ventures Ltd., a company in St. Cyrus, Scotland that builds, sells and operates photobioreactors for capturing carbon dioxide emis-sions to grow algae feedstock for the production of biodiesel. Scot-tish Bioenergy plans to build a pho-tobioreactor at Glenturret Distillery in Crieff, Scotland, capable of con-verting 20 metric tons of carbon dioxide into 6,000 liters (1,600 gal-lons) of biodiesel per year.

A Cocktail of Renewable Energy Projects


DESIGN


Louisiana Paper Plant Adapts For BiomassThe complete replacement of a fuel delivery system provided a Louisiana paper manufacturing facility with the biomass-based renovation it needed.

By Trotter Hunt

The claims and statements made in this article belong exclusively to the author(s) and do not necessarily refl ect the views of Biomass Magazine or its advertisers. All questions pertaining to this article should be directed to the author(s).

A biomass boiler at a Loui-siana paper manufactur-ing facility was recently renovated. The project

included the complete replacement of the fuel receiving, storage and retrieval systems for a wood-fired boiler.

The four-year project began by

performing a study of the existing fuel delivery system at the plant. Material handling specialists analyzed the capa-bility of the existing system, identified the bottlenecks and recommended so-lutions to increase the ability to deliver more fuel to the boiler while providing better storage and material retrieval options.

While there were some gains to be had by modification of the exist-ing system, the long-term solution to meeting the client’s desired feed rate to the boiler was a complete replacement of the fuel delivery system. This study formed the basis of a funding grade

scope and estimate, which culminated in the client obtaining the necessary funding to proceed with the project.

In addition to the project’s de-tailed engineering, Ruston, La.-based Hunt, Guillot & Associates, through its on-site services division, also pro-vided construction management and

start-up expertise to the client’s proj-ect management team.

The Project’s ScopeHunt, Guillot & Associates was

selected to perform the detailed engi-neering for the new fuel handling and delivery system. As the facility was an existing operation, the site selected for the new system was remote from the boiler, thus necessitating long conveyor lengths to deliver material to the boiler. The design was for the system to be able to process and store 150 tons per hour of incoming wood material, in addition to handling and

storing the plant-generated material on a 2 million-cubic-foot storage pile. The storage pile was sized to provide the plant with approximately 10 days of onsite storage, available to be pro-cessed and ready for retrieval for the boiler.

The plant’s owners stipulated the ability to be able to process a wide variety of incoming quality of materi-als. The facility was already receiving material from in-woods grinding op-erations, bark from offsite wood yards, saw mill waste and wood chips. The facility owners believe that as biomass fuel use increases, the ability to re-ceive rougher or less-processed mate-rial will allow it to obtain fuel at com-petitive prices. Engineers successfully designed the receiving system to be able to handle the receipt of materials ranging from finely ground sawdust to blocks 108 inches long. The chains in the oversized truck dump hopper were equipped with a variable speed drive that allowed the unloading time to be decreased when better quality material was received.

Engineers also specified wide con-veyor belts with skirted side boards to minimize spillage. Conveyor head boxes were sized to allow the extra length materials the ability to transi-tion between the conveyors. A scalp-ing screen was installed ahead of the grinder. However, the grinder was

DESIGN

The facility owners believe that as biomass fuel use increases, the ability to receive rougher or less-processed material will allow it to obtain fuel at competitive prices.

DESIGN

sized to process the full 150 tons per hour of material. Metal detection and removal capability was designed into the system.

The major components of the system included a new truck dumper, screen and grinder, a circular stacker reclaimer and all of the interconnect-ing conveyors to supply the biomass to a new fuel bin in the boiler build-ing. The reclaim system was designed to retrieve, weigh and deliver 80 tons per hour of fuel to the boiler, utilizing an over-pile chain reclaimer, and con-ventional idler belt and air-supported belt technology. The bark reclaim con-veyor, at 750 feet long, also provided an emergency feed hopper to allow the plant to continue to feed fuel to the boiler. It also provided a magnet for secondary tramp metal removal and the scale to provide the weight of the material supplied to the boiler. The foundation design included provisions for the 2 million-cubic-foot stacker reclaimer that

was supported on 70-foot deep auger cast piles.P

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The 1,250-foot long air-support-ed belt is one of the longest continu-ous spans in the country. It was routed through the middle of the operational pulp and paper mill. Air-supported belt technology utilizes a cushion of air to support the belt and the conveyed mate-rial on the carry side of the belt. It also uses a cushion of air on the return side of the belt, resulting in a conveyor with only five rollers for its entire length.

The cable tower technology that is utilized to support the air-supported belt allows for a maximum of 250 feet between towers. This allowed the entire 1,250-foot length of the conveyor to be installed with only six intermediate sup-ports between the heat and tail. Use of this technology resulted in substantial savings to the plant in reduced amounts of support steel and installation labor.

Hunt, Guillot & Associates’ engi-neering and purchasing groups issued equipment specifications, proposed bidders lists and inquired the equipment for the plant, supplying bid tabulations and recommending vendors. The proj-ect’s foundation design included an el-evated concrete structure to support the 800 horsepower grinder, the foundation and access ramp for the 75-foot truck dump platform, and the foundation de-sign for the 2 million-cubic-foot stacker reclaimer that was supported on 70-foot deep auger cast piles.

Plant power was received at 13,800 volts at a new electrical control room and distributed to end users. Program-mers supplied the necessary program-mable logic controllers (PLC) program-ming to operate the systems, interfaced with other PLC-based systems, designed the graphics for the operator control station and interfaced with the plant’s existing distributed control network.

ConstructionExpertise in construction man-

agement was provided to the project

management team at the beginning of the construction phase of the project. The primary effort was to provide for coordination of the multiple contrac-tors and sub-contractors involved in the construction, thus ensuring that the project schedule would be met and result in a successful start-up. An on-site controls engineer and programmer were also provided during the start-up sequencing to immediately resolve any control issues. The efforts resulted in

the project being completed with no unplanned operational interruptions to the facility. Start-up was on schedule and done safely. BIO

Trotter Hunt is the relationship manager at Hunt, Guillot & Associates LLC. Reach him at [email protected] or (318) 251-5929.

DESIGN

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EERCUPDATE

Fungibility is a word rarely heard on the street, but it is common verbiage in the oil refi ning indus-try. It refers to the ease with which two fuels can be blended together without raising concerns about how the blended fuel will behave in pipelines, tanks and engines. Two fuels with similar chemistries are likely to be fungible with each other, while two fuels with different chemistries are less likely to be fungible.

For an example of how fungibility plays out in the marketplace, consider ethanol and gasoline. While they’re both viable spark ignition engine fuels, each has its own unique set of properties. Gasoline is a mixture of hundreds of individual molecules con-taining carbon and hydrogen, and ethanol is a single molecule containing carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. The presence of oxygen—in combination with etha-nol’s small molecular size—gives ethanol chemical properties that differ suffi ciently from those of gaso-line to result in a major fungibility issue. Although we’ve got lots of favorable experience with gasoline-ethanol blends in automobile tanks and engines that were designed to accommodate these two fuels, pipe-lines were designed to accommodate only gasoline and other hydrocarbon fuels. Pipeline operators are generally reluctant to transport ethanol because of the possibility that its unique chemistry may pose a corrosion risk.

The viability of pipelining ethanol has been stud-ied and debated for years, and defendable arguments have been made on both sides of the issue. However, until suffi cient data and experience are acquired to defi nitively establish its viability, pipelining ethanol is unlikely to be as widely practiced as pipelining gasoline. Regardless of how the issue is eventually resolved, it vividly illustrates the diffi culty of intro-ducing a new, chemically different fuel into the com-mercial marketplace, and the importance of real and/or perceived fungibility issues with the new fuel.

Because resolving fungibility issues is expensive and time-consuming, many renewable fuel devel-opers are focused on the development of biofuels that match the chemistry of their petroleum-derived counterparts as closely as possible. Petroleum refi n-

ers interested in biofuels are also interested in fun-gibility, because fungible biofuels enable maximum leverage of high-capital-investment fuel production and distribution infrastructure. One example of the fungibility-driven biofuels development work ongo-ing around the world is a part-nership between the Energy & Environmental Research Center and Tesoro Companies Inc., a San Antonio-based oil refi ner with seven refi neries in the west-ern U.S. One of Tesoro’s refi ner-ies is located in Mandan, N. D. The EERC and Tesoro recently initiated a project to fi gure out how best to integrate renewable oil- and petroleum-refi ning technologies at the Mandan refi nery.

The project will utilize upper Midwest-grown crop oil feedstocks including crambe, a drought-tol-erant oilseed with demonstrated viability throughout western North Dakota and the surrounding region. Unlike soybeans, canola and other oilseeds, crambe produces an industrial (non-food-grade) oil, and it grows well with lower fertilizer and pesticide inputs. Another feedstock to be utilized is camelina, a low-input oilseed well-suited to the more arid regions of the northern Great Plains and an excellent rotational crop with a short growing season.

The project goal is to tailor EERC-developed renewable oil-refi ning technologies as necessary to achieve maximum effi ciency compatibility with Tes-oro’s petroleum refi ning technologies, thereby help-ing to reduce Tesoro’s carbon footprint by producing commercial, renewable, fungible fuels. While fungi-bility is important in automobile fuel, it’s even more important in aviation fuel. In the words of an old stunt pilot, “When your engine stops on the highway, you pull over onto the shoulder and call somebody. When your engine stops in the air, it can ruin your whole day.” BIO

Ted Aulich is a senior research manager at the EERC. Reach him at [email protected] or (701) 777-2982.

Fungibility 101

Aulich


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