Burning Bio News

A new company, called Point Bio Energy, LLC, is developing a $124 million wood pellet project at the Port of Greater Baton Rouge in Louisiana. The 400,000 metric ton per year wood pellet facility will receive the feedstock for the plant from the underutilized wood basket in the Baton Rouge area as well as by barge from the Mississippi River, Atchafalaya River, Red River, and the Intracoastal Waterway.

Officials with EcoPower generation in Hazard, KY, is getting the green light from Frankfort, to construct their new proposed biomass power plant facility. The plant will be built on a 125 acre site in northern Perry County. The 50 MW generating plant will be built in the Coal Fields Regional Industrial Park. Officials say the construction could begin the end of this year and be finished as soon as 2012.

Xcel Energy Corp. is rethinking its plans to build the largest biomass power plant in the Midwest after the projected cost rose by one-third. The power company, which has a Wisconsin utility based in Eau Claire, was planning to build a biomass gasifier that would replace an existing coal-fired power plant on the shore of Lake Superior in Ashland. The company initially pegged the project at $58.1 million, but after more work it was determined that it would cost $79.5 million - an increase of nearly 37%.

Confluence Energy, Kremmling, CO, tries to rebound after tough winter for biomass industry. The company has about 2,000 tons of wood pellets are bagged and stacked at their plant. Last fall, the regional pellet markets became saturated, heating oil prices dipped — causing consumers to look less for alternative fuel sources — the economic recession struck and a mild winter dropped demand for pellets even further, creating what Confluence Energy plant owner Mark Mathis called “the worst year (the pellet industry) has ever had.”

National Grid has awarded a $750,000 grant to Newton Falls Fine Paper Co. (NY) for the mill’s $27 million biomass energy project. Switching its energy source from fuel oil to dried wood chips could save the mill $2.5 million a year and greatly reduce sulfur emissions. The company plans eventually to use the biomass boiler to power a 10-megawatt generator. Company officials have said the two projects could result in 15 new jobs at the plant and 80 spinoff jobs in the forestry industry.

Mesquite Fuels and Agriculture plans to gasify mesquite and juniper cedar wood to generate 20 MW of electricity near Brownwood, TX. This company is working to secure agreements with local land owners that allows them to clear land of mesquite trees and cedar at no cost to the owner and use the wood as fuel for their power plant. The company needs 150,000 acres of land to be available over a for harvesting through land owner agreements to enable them to secure financing from their investor. The land would not be harvested all at once, but over a 10 year period.

Morbark, Inc. now offers a second Quick Switch conversion kit, allowing grinder owners to further diversify their product offerings by simply modifying the hammermill of their Morbark horizontal grinder. This gives Morbark grinder owners the capability to produce mulch, high quality chips or sawdust – with just one machine. Markets for sawdust include animal bedding, wood fuel pellet production, cellulosic ethanol and co-firing with coal.

The Port of Greater Baton Rouge, LA, will become the site of a $124 million wood pellet-making plant. Point Bio Energy LLC of Baton Rouge will employ between 85 and 100 people and have an annual production capacity of 400,000 to 450,000 tons a year.

Green Mountain College (GMC), Poultney, VT, has established its $5.8-million novel combined heat and power (CHP) biomass facility, which is likely to generate 85% of the heat energy required by GMC and produce 20% of its electrical energy. Expected to commence operation on April 22, Earth Day, the biomass facility will use locally harvested woodchips of around 4,000 to 5,000 tons per year as its primary fuel.

HCL CleanTech has selected Southern Research Institute in Durham, North Carolina as the hosting site and operator of its first pilot plant to produce low cost fermentable sugars, high-quality lignin and tall oils from North Carolina pine trees. HCL CleanTech’s use of concentrated hydrochloric acid (HCl) efficiently hydrolyzes cellulosic materials and allows a large variety of feedstocks to be used with minimal configuration. HCL CleanTech has developed other proprietary technologies to de-acidify lignin and separate tall oils – both high quality byproducts to the sugars.

Fuel start-up Cobalt Technologies has figured out a way to use trees poisoned and killed by pine beetles in Colorado to make biobutanol. Cobalt develops biofuels that can be mixed with gas, diesel, or jet fuel, as well as used to make plastics. “If we use only half of the 2.3 million acres currently affected in Colorado alone, we could produce over two billion gallons of biobutanol–enough to blend into all the gasoline used in Colorado for six years,” Rick Wilson, chief executive officer of Cobalt, said in a statement. Cobalt launched a pilot plant in California in Janurary.

Chippewa Valley Ethanol Company (CVEC) of Benson will be paying $120,000 in fines to the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) as part of an agreement over alleged violations involving its first-of-a-kind gasifier system. According to CVEC, it reported to the MPCA that what likely amounted to one adulterated, eight-foot long, two-by-four had been chipped and shredded into a 20-ton load of wood used as fuel in the gasifier.

The city of Radford, VA, recently received a $23,400 federal grant to fund a site evaluation at the former D.E. Hammond & Co. a former recycling company that closed in the 1990s and the site of tens of thousands of abandoned railroad ties. The evaluation will use Microgasification to convert railroad ties to synthetic gas by exposing it to high heat in a down-draft gasifier, said Mary Ann Sigurdson, spokeswoman for American Cogeneration LLC.

With the uncertainty of how future United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations might affect industrial boiler emissions, Georgia Power has decided to delay the conversion of coal-fueled Plant Mitchell in Albany, Georgia to biomass until the EPA rules are better defined in April 2010.

Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley announced today a $1.6 M investment in clean energy economic development and job creation, marking another step forward in Maryland’s goal of building a vibrant clean energy sector. These awards mark the first round of the Clean Energy Economic Development Initiative (CEEDI), with applications for the second round of funding being accepted until April 30, 2010.

A recent report from the North American Wood Fiber Review confirms what many livestock producers already know. The market for wood fuel pellets is smoking hot. It has dramatically reduced local availability of sawdust and wood chips and fueled the market for one-time cheap bedding. Average sawdust prices in the U.S. Northwest were $28 per oven-dry metric ton (ODMT) in 2004, peaked at $74 per ODMT in late 2008, then declined to $64 during third-quarter 2009. Prices in other U.S. regions have followed a similar pattern.

American Process Inc. is ready to begin small-scale production of ethanol at its new Thomaston, GA plant. The American Process technology ferments sugar byproducts from the paper production industry into ethanol. With this technology, a medium-sized pulp mill could produce about 14 million gallons of ethanol.

The University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire Heating Plant will conduct test burns to replace a portion of the coal it burns with wood pellets. The test burn — replacing 10-15 percent of the coal with the wood pellets — will help the university determine if the wood pellet mix is a viable biofuel option that may help UW-Eau Claire reduce the amount of coal it burns.

APT Advanced Trailer & Equipment, a biomass processing equipment processing manufacturer in Abilene, TX, is exploring using mequite biomass in commercial biomass power applications in Texas. Randy Hill (APT) sees benefits to equipment that can dry as it delivers biomass to commercial facilities.

The California Public Utilities Commission gave its approval Thursday for Pacific Gas and Electric Co. to purchase renewable energy from Mt. Poso Cogeneration Co. LLC. Under the 15-year pact, the Mt. Poso Cogeneration plant will be converted to a facility powered with urban and agricultural wood waste. The plant currently generates electricity from coal, petroleum coke and tire-derived fuel. The proposed 44 megawatt biomass facility will be located in Bakersfield, CA.