KiOR optimistic despite third-quarter loss

http://www.cdispatch.com/news/article.asp?aid=28655&TRID=1

William Browning
November 8, 2013 10:10:16 AM

KiOR on Thursday reported a third quarter net loss of $43.1 million, or 40 cents per share. This is a $4.6 million increase in net loss from the year's second quarter.

The third quarter ended Sept. 30. 

But the Texas-based company's president and CEO, Fred Cannon, said KiOR is seeing progress at its Columbus facility. 

"We believe that we are turning the corner toward steady state operations," he said. 

KiOR's plant in Columbus is a biomass fluid catalytic cracking unit that converts biomass into renewable crude oil to produce vehicle oil. The facility produced more than 323,000 gallons of fuel in the third quarter. With that, the year's total production of cellulosic fuel at the facility through eight months stood at 508,975 gallons. 

"The number of gallons are not huge yet, but they are coming," Cannon said. 

Cannon said the company has gotten off to a good start in the fourth quarter. Last month the facility produced 167,087 gallons of fuel, he said, noting that it is the highest amount in a single month since the facility began converting wood chips to fuel earlier this year. 

"As a result, we believe that with stable production over the balance of the year, our full year production levels will exceed one million gallons," Cannon said. 

In September, the company announced its intention to build a second biorefinery on The Island in Columbus. Cannon said the recent achievements at the current plant support that plan and the company's engineering team has been "spending time on the ground" in Columbus designing a plan for what KiOR has dubbed Columbus II. 

"Based on what we have seen over the last several weeks...we still believe that this is the right path for the company to take," Cannon said during a conference call Thursday. "Bringing the plan to fruition will, we believe, enable KiOR to achieve cash-flow profitability in 2015." 

The company has received $100 million in committed equity financing from Khosla Ventures, an investment company in California that committed $85 million, and Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, who committed $15 million. Those commitments, the company said last month, will help the company move forward with the Columbus II plan. 

The current plant in Columbus, which employees roughly 100 people, is a 500-ton per day facility. Columbus II will be built adjacent to it and also be a 500-ton per day facility that could share infrastructure and employees with Columbus I, according to KiOR. 

Once started, construction of Columbus II will take approximately 18 months. 

The company's longterm plan still involves building a 1,500-ton per day facility in Natchez. 

KiOR is facing a pending lawsuit by a group of KiOR stockholders who have complained about the company's inability to meet projected production targets.  

During 2013's third quarter KiOR's total revenues were $720,000. Total revenues for the second quarter were $239,000.

The European wood pellets market: towards a dependency on imports?

http://www.ihb.de/wood/news/European_wood_pellets_market_34659.html

• October 31, 2013

In the past few years, EU's quest to limit its dependency on fossil fuels and to cut CO2 emissions, has brought renewable energy on the peak of the European most successful market developments. While most of the wood industry was struggling with the effects of the financial crisis and a critical drop in consumption, the wood energy sector was setting new records every year.

And indeed the numbers are impressive: in just six years, wood pellets consumption has increased more than 3 times ( from 4,6 mil. tons in 2006, to 14,3 mil. tons in 2012). In the same period, production tripled (3,5 mil. tons, up to 10 million), while imports rose five times (from just 800,000 tons in 2006, to 4,4 mil. tons in 2012). But so far, the potential of the market hasn't reached its limits, as future expectations surpass any of these recent evolutions.

The annual 2013 EU biofuels report forecasts that by 2020, pellet consumption in Europe will be somewhere in the range of 50 to 80 mil. tons per year (2012: 14,3 mil.). Both the advantage of pellet use in heating systems, as well as many power plants are trying to reduce the usage of coal and switch to renewable energy are major factors that will contribute to this upsurge.

However, the European pellet market is facing a dillema: the relatively high costs of wood pellets in Europe have resulted in a massive increase in imports, especially from North America, where raw-material costs are lesser than in the EU. In addition, the two largest pellet pellet producers in the EU, Germany and Sweden, have either slowed down or decreased their production. The consequence is that, in 2012, intra-EU trade of pellets declined by -12%, meanwhile purchases from North America jumped 44%.

Recently, US and Canada have expanded their production capacities, gaining some important shares on the European pellet market. Their combined market share has jumped from 28% in 2011, to 37% in 2012, reaching an all-time record of 43% in the seven months of 2013. But clearly the US exports are rising at a higher pace than the Canadian ones. Last year, the US almost doubled its pellet deliveries to Europe becoming, in just one year, EU's main source of wood pellets. Moreover, in January-July 2013, US pellet shipments to EU further grew by 74% over the same period of 2012, totaling 1,67 million tons.

New pellet plants projects where announced during 2013 in the US, with almost 1,5 mil. tons of new pellets ready to be shipped in Europe in the next years. UK's Drax started construction of two pellet plants (one in Louisiana and the other in Mississippi) with a joint capacity of 900,000 tons per year. Also, Viridis Energy, a Canadian company, already started pellet production in August at its facility in Middle Musquodoboiin/Canada. The production will reach 120,000 tons of pellets per year.

BlueFire Renewables Inc. has integrated a synergistic wood pellet production plant to its facility in Fulton, Mississippi. The reconfigured design will be a 9 million gallon per year ethanol plant integrated with a 400,000 ton per year wood pellet plant. The company says that the pellets will be sold under long term contracts into the European mandated renewable energy market.

The outlook for the upcoming years is interconnected to some factors such as the ability of the EU countries to satisfy internal demand. Although with an expected 4-6 times rise in demand, it is obvious that EU's pellet production will not be able to keep up the pace and will become partially dependent on imports. Already, with recent new pellet plants construction announced in the US, some market predictions estimate that by 2014, the US will cover more than half of all European pellet imports, which means almost 25% of the overall consumption.

Current market shares in the European wood pellets market

TOP 10 Origins	Jan.-July 2013
Wood pellets imported by EU from	Quantity/tons	Market share%
United States	1,679,196	26.2%
Canada	1,117,162	17.4%
Latvia	657,509	10.2%
Estonia	386,055	6.03%
Russia	343,115	5.36%
Germany	302,403	4.72%
Portugal	287,018	4.48%
Austria	221,144	4.45%
Romania	197,060	3.07%
Lithuania	106,519	1.66%

European climate policy drives wood pellet boom in NC

http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2013/08/17/4244134/european-climate-policy-drives.html

By Bruce Siceloff: bsiceloff@newsobserver.com

Posted: Sunday, Aug. 18, 2013

• 
  Chris Seward - cseward@newsobserver.com

  A worker shows a handful of the finished product at the Enviva facility in Ahoskie NC on August 12, 2013. Enviva makes wood pellets from North Carolina forest products and ships them to Europe for use in power plants there. The pellets are trucked to the Hampton Roads, VA ports and then put on ships bound for Europe..

  
  

AHOSKIE In the searing August heat, big yellow logging machines pile up the harvest from 153 acres of sweet gum, red oak and maple trees.

A roaring log loader grabs the trunks to slice off 16-foot logs and stack them for one of the sawmills that provide a traditional market for Eastern North Carolina timber. These logs are worth $20 to $40 a ton and will be turned into plywood, cabinets and veneer.

In a second woodpile, there’s new money. Limbs and leafy treetops are stacked alongside trees as big as 16 inches across. They cannot be sold as saw logs because they’re forked or knotty, crooked or hollow.

This pile will be fed into a chipper and milled at an Ahoskie factory that makes 1,000 tons, every day, of a minor American fuel product suddenly in hot demand on the other side of the Atlantic: wood pellets.

Two years ago, everything in this second pile would have been left on the ground to rot, said David Jennette, a Windsor forester who is managing this timber harvest. Now it brings $2 to $8 a ton.

“When you’re talking about 50 to 75 tons of chips to the acre, and maybe more, that’s a significant amount of money going back to the landowner that we weren’t able to get before,” Jennette said.

The wood pellet industry is enjoying a speedy, zero-to-60 growth surge across the southeastern United States. Hundreds of millions of dollars are being invested in factories – some of them converted from old lumber mills – in coastal plain forests from Virginia to Louisiana.

They are serving a market created, almost overnight, by paradoxical environmental policies that are driving European electric utilities to burn imported wood in their boilers instead of coal.

Maryland-based Enviva LP, the nation’s biggest pellet maker, opened its Ahoskie mill in 2011 and a second one in Northampton County this year. Together, they produce 865,000 tons of pellets annually to be shipped out of the port at Chesapeake, Va.

In 2015, Enviva expects to start exporting an additional million tons from a planned $40 million terminal at the Wilmington port. The company is scouting sites for two new pellet mills in southeastern North Carolina, one of them in Sampson County.

At the same time, California-based International WoodFuels has said it will produce 285,000 tons a year from a planned pellet mill in Wilson County and a new export terminal at the Morehead City port.

The pellet industry is founded on a climate-friendly, carbon-neutral rationale. Our forests use photosynthesis to soak up carbon dioxide, enough to compensate for 14 percent of all emissions in the United States. This stored-up carbon is released into the air when wood pellets are burned, but wood is called a renewable fuel because that carbon eventually is recaptured by new trees that grow in place of the old ones.

Conservationists are attacking the pellet industry’s green-energy luster on two fronts.

They worry that the booming market for pellets will encourage industrial logging and sully the sensitive ecosystems of bottomland hardwood forests. And they counter European government carbon-cycle calculations with their own assessment that burning trees is, in the words of a British environmental group’s campaign, even “ dirtier than coal.”

“It just doesn’t make sense that we’re logging the world’s forest ... burning it into the atmosphere and calling it clean, green, renewable energy,” said Danna Smith of the Asheville-based Dogwood Alliance, a network of Southern conservation groups.

A push toward pellets

The European Union and Great Britain have adopted aggressive targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming. They have created incentives for electric utilities to cut back on their use of coal and will require renewable sources to provide 20 percent of all energy by 2020. Wind and solar power are expected to meet only a small share of that demand.

Power companies are looking to close the gap with biomass – primarily with imported wood pellets. Biomass use in Great Britain, 3 million tons last year, is expected to grow tenfold over the next five years.

Britain’s biggest carbon emitter is the Drax Group, a Yorkshire utility that operates the largest power plant in western Europe. Drax is converting half its plant from coal to wood pellets. Coal is one-third the price of pellets, but Drax CEO Dorothy Thompson said her company is responding to renewable-energy credits and a British carbon tax, introduced this year at $7 a ton, that will grow by 2020 to more than $60 a ton.

“And that is very substantial,” Thompson told a BBC-TV interviewer in July. “When we burn biomass, we don’t pay that. Because biomass is carbon-neutral. When we burn coal, the cost is very high.”

With coastal forests close to its seaports, the South has become the top pellet source for Drax and other European utilities. Pellet makers also are taking advantage of declines in the region’s pulp and paper industry, which uses some of the same low-grade wood. Loggers in northeastern North Carolina lost their main buyer for hardwood pulpwood a few years ago when International Paper closed a mill in Franklin, Va.

“We generally fill that void that was historically used by the pulp and paper industry,” Thomas Meth, Enviva’s executive vice president and co-founder, said during a tour of the Ahoskie mill. “We generally site our locations where we’ve had a lot of plant closings, to avoid most of the competition.”

Enviva built on the site of a Georgia Pacific sawmill that closed in 2005. Residents of a nearby Ahoskie neighborhood say they never had problems with Georgia Pacific, but they are complaining now about noise and occasional clouds of sawdust wafting from Enviva’s pellet mill.

Anne Williams, a retired hospital aide in her 70s, said she sweeps her porch once or twice a day to clean off the fine, dark sawdust that blows from Enviva across a tobacco field to her comfortable manufactured home. Dust coats cars and clogs air-conditioners in the neighborhood, she said. She keeps her windows closed.

“They claim it won’t hurt you,” Williams said. “But the way it sticks to everything out there, you know it’s got to be sticking to your lungs.”

Meth said Enviva has reduced the dust problem and hopes to eliminate it later this year.

“We have always been within our permitted limits,” Meth said. “But in order to have a good relationship with the neighbors, we’ll take an extra step and build some extra dust protection.”

Pellet makers won’t bid against sawmills for valuable timber that has higher uses, Meth said. He guided visitors through a woodlot stacked 20 feet high with treetops and whole trees, many with crooked or diseased trunks that he said make them unsuitable for saw timber.

“We use by-products of the normal harvesting process in wood fiber,” Meth said. “And residues, in the broadest sense. There’s a lot misperception as to what we actually use. The value of what we take is 10, 20 percent of the whole harvest.”

Carbon calculations

Enviva gives delivery truck drivers a flier explaining that the company won’t accept valuable saw logs, and it rejects logs wider than 26 inches at the base.

Critics say the company uses big trees that cannot be considered mere “residue.”

“Their yard was not filled with log waste,” said Debbie Hammel of the Natural Resources Defense Council, looking at photos taken by environmentalists at the Enviva site earlier this year. “It was filled with whole trees. It meant that their sourcing activity has a bad carbon profile associated with it.”

The carbon calculations are complicated. After the pellets from a single tree are burned, Hammel and the Dogwood Alliance’s Smith said, it takes 50 years for a replacement tree to absorb enough carbon to offset the pollution.

But some economists and foresters look at this differently. They argue that a healthy demand for lumber encourages woodland owners to keep planting more trees, which will absorb more carbon from the air. A landowner unhappy with the economic return from forestry is more likely to cut down the trees and divert the land to farming or urban development.

“Losing timberland to agriculture is a worse carbon story than the cycling of trees that probably would have been harvested anyway,” said Bob Abt, a forestry professor at N.C. State University.

“The carbon accounting is messier than saying that the tree is going to take 50 years to replace.”


Enviva said switching from coal to wood pellets reduces carbon emissions by more than 74 percent.

British government standards say that pellet makers must draw only on environmentally sustainable logging sources. But Abt said he agrees with environmentalists who say “the wording there is vague.”

Meth said Enviva meets the sustainable forestry standards set by professional certification organizations, including the Forest Stewardship Council.

British officials say they are taking a closer look at their pellet policies. Ed Davey, the British energy secretary, recently called biomass an interim solution.

“Making electricity from biomass based on imported wood is not a long-term answer to our energy needs,” Davey told the BBC.

Jennette, the Windsor forester, said the new pellet market brings both economic and environmental benefits. Enviva accepts more of the logging leftovers than the hardwood paper mills did in the old days, he said.

“The whole tree goes to Enviva,” Jennette said. “And the tonnage goes way up when you start doing tops and limbs and everything else.”

It can be enough money to make a difference in the profitability, and the timing, of a timber sale.

Jennette’s Hertford County client expects to clear about $1,000 an acre – most of it from valuable saw timber, but somewhere between $150 and $300 for those chips.

Replanting will be easier, too, he said.

“As clean as this site will be, we’re able to reforest for less money,” Jennette said. “As long as we reforest what we cut and we do a good job of the sustainability piece of it, we’ll never stop.”

More Information


The pellet economy:
 

Enviva estimates the economic impact of its pellet mills in Ahoskie and Garysburg and its planned export terminal at the Wilmington port:

       • Ahoskie: 74 workers, average salary $35,000. Enviva buys timber worth $21 million from North Carolina and Virginia loggers. Produces 365,000 tons of pellets for $170 a ton.

       • Garysburg (Northampton County): 79 workers, average salary $35,000. Enviva buys timber worth $35.4 million from North Carolina and Virginia loggers. Produces 500,000 tons of pellets for $170 a ton.

       • Wilmington: $40 million to build export terminal, to begin operation in 2015 with 23 workers, average salary $37,783. One million tons of pellets to be exported on 25 to 30 vessels per year.


Not included here: Two mills that will produce pellets for export through Wilmington.
 
Source: Enviva LP

Tilbury Power Station completes final day of operation

http://biomassmagazine.com/articles/9311/tilbury-power-station-completes-final-day-of-operation

By Erin Voegele | August 13, 2013

The U.K.’s largest biomass power plant is completing its final day of operation. RWE npower has announced that the 750 MW Tilbury Power Station will generate power for the last time on Aug. 13.

The facility, originally fueled with coal, operated for 46 years.

In 2008, RWE made the decision to opt out the then 1,100 MW coal-fired power plant under the E.U.’s Large Combustion Plant Directive, a regulation that aims to reduce sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and particulate matter emissions from power stations and other large industrial facilities. The decision to opt-out meant that the plant would shut down after either 20,000 hours of operation or the end of 2015, whichever was sooner. However, in 2010, RWE elected to use the remaining hours of operation to trial the use of 100 percent biomass.  The action effectively reduced the plant’s production capacity to 750 MW. The conversion was completed in late 2011.

According to information released by RWE on Aug. 12, the second phase of the conversion would have required the closure of the plant under the LCPD and the development of a full-scale biomass conversion to meet new environmental standards. It would have taken approximately two years to complete the upgrades. Information released by the company specifies the move would have allowed the plant to operate for an additional 10 to 12 years.

According to the RWE, the U.K. Department of Climate Change confirmed that the TIlbury project is ineligible for the new Contract for Difference Support mechanism for lower carbon technologies. As such, the company said it will not proceed with the second phase of the conversion. RWE attributes the decision to the fact that the conversion is not economically viable under the existing Renewable Obligation mechanism.

Recent statistics released by the U.K. Department of Energy and Climate Change indicate that power generation from plant biomass in the U.K. increased by 69 percent during the first quarter of 2013 compared to the same quarter of the prior year, rising from 1.1 terawatt hours (TWh) to 1.8 TWh. The increase is attributed to the Tilbury power plant becoming fully operational.

Data provided by RWE states that the Tilbury plant generated 1.27 TWh of power during the first quarter of this year. That is more than 10 percent of the 12.4 TWh of total renewable electricity generated in the U.K. during the same three-month period.

“This is a sad time for everyone at Tilbury Power Station, but I would like to personally thank all of our staff past and present who have contributed to the success of the station, particularly in the delivery of such a pioneering development for UK biomass,” said Nigel Staves, manager of Tilbury Power Station. “Tilbury remains an excellent site for power generation and RWE will now review future plans for the site. The lessons learned from the successful biomass conversion will be shared across the RWE Generation portfolio, as RWE remains committed to exploring new energy technologies that can provide energy solutions that are both affordable and sustainable.”

KiOR Natchez facility on hold? Second Colombus plant may come first in company's plan

http://www.natchezdemocrat.com/2013/08/13/kior-natchez-facility-on-hold-second-columbus-plant-may-come-first-in-companys-plan/#

KiOR announces Q2 financial results, discusses expansion plans

http://biomassmagazine.com/articles/9308/kior-announces-q2-financial-results-discusses-expansion-plans/

By Erin Voegele | August 12, 2013

 

• 
  
  KiOR Inc.

KiOR Inc. has released financial results for the second quarter, reporting operational progress at its Columbus, Miss., plant. The company shipped more than 75,000 gallons of cellulosic fuels during the three-month period, which ended June 30.

“I am happy to report that Columbus has made significant operational progress and is continuing to build its on-stream performance and reliability," said Fred Cannon, president and CEO of KiOR. "In addition to making our first shipment of cellulosic gasoline in the second quarter, we more than doubled the run time of our core technology, the Biomass Fluid Catalytic Cracking Unit, to 43 percent in the quarter, up from 20 percent in the first quarter."

During a call to discuss the financial results, Cannon spoke about three phases he said are necessary to bring a first-of-king facility to a steady state of operation. First, there is a reliability phase that concentrates on simply running the facility and building its on-stream percentage, he said. Second is a throughput phase, which focuses bringing the facility to nameplate capacity while maintaining the on-stream percentage. Finally, the third phase focuses on optimization, during which process efficiency is optimized, increasing yield. According to Cannon, the facility has achieved significant progress of the first phase and is beginning to work on the second stage.

Cannon also noted that the plant’s CFCC unit operated for just under 40 days during the second quarter, which doubled the quarterly on-stream percentage. “Our first run was April 22 to April 27,” he said. “We then started the BFCC back up on May 6 and rant it until May 12. We decided to terminate both of these runs due to feed synchronization issues. Nothing about the KiOR technology prevented the runs from going longer.” The BFCC was brought back online on May 30 and operated through June 29. The 30-day run more than doubled the facility’s previous longest individual run.

According to Cannon, a small repair requirement in the wood yard necessitated the shutdown of that run.

He also stressed that nothing about the KiOR technology resulted in these operational terminations.

“As has been the case since we first started the facility, these issues are not related to our core technology,” Cannon continued. “They are simply part of the break-in process, and again, let me reiterate that our goal last quarter was to keep the plant running as long as possible, not to push the plant from a throughput standpoint. Our focus was on reliability, and we typically ran Columbus at 40 percent to 50 percent of its nameplate capacity.”

Cannon said longer runs are KiOR’s main objective in the third quarter. He also stressed that the plant is currently operating, with high quality oil being produced and stored. “I anticipate that the hydrotreater will start up shortly, meaning we will have fuel ready to ship in the very near term,” he said, noting that the company’s focus will likely not shift to process optimization and increasing yield until the fourth quarter. “I look for us to achieve normal, steady-state optimal operations at Columbus in the first half of 2014,” Cannon continued.

During the call, Cannon also spoke about KiOR’s long-term business plan, highlighting two developments that have factored into the company’s strategic thinking. “First, we believe that we have made some important gains in our research and development efforts that…can have a significant impact on the operating efficiency and catalyst performance of our technology at a commercial scale.” Second, Cannon said KiOR is beginning to see traction on the commercial development of feedstocks other than Southern Yellow Pine, including hardwood, energy crops and waste products.

Cannon said the company expects to be able to procure these alternative feedstocks at a lower price.

As a result of the two developments, combined with progress at the Columbus facility, Cannon said KiOR is considering an alternative growth strategy that would involve the construction of a second 500 bone-dry-ton-per-day facility adjacent to the existing Columbus plant. While Cannon stressed that the company is still in the early stages of evaluating the possible expansion, the move is exciting because it could reduce the cost and time required to design, engineer and construct the second facility. Cannon also said building a second plant adjacent to the Columbus plant would be expected to reduce start-up and commissioning risk as a result of shared experienced personnel, site infrastructure, equipment and operational knowledge. “On a preliminary basis, we expect that the total cost of this second 500 ton-per-day commercial facility in Columbus will range from $175 million to $225 million,” he said, noting that current estimates shows cellulosic gasoline and diesel could be produced at a cost of $2.60 to $2.80 per gallon at a yield of 72 gallons per bone dry ton. At a yield of 92 gallons per bone dry ton, the cost would drop to $2.20 to $2.30 per gallon.

KiOR has also continued to refine the design for its proposed facility in Natchez, Miss. According to Cannon, the current estimated cost to build that plant is $560 million to $600 million. “We also estimate that this facility will be able to produce cellulosic gasoline and diesel at a per-unit unsubsidized cost between $2.25 and $2.48 per gallon at our current yield of 72 gallons per bone dry ton, excluding cost of financing and facility depreciation,” he said. “This would decrease to between $1.81 and $1.96 per gallon at our short-term yield target of 92 gallons per ton.”

Regarding quarterly financial results, KiOR reported a net loss of $38.5 million, or 36 cents per share, compared to a net loss of $31.1 million, or 30 cents per share, during the previous quarter. During the second quarter of 2012. KiOR reported a net loss of $23 million, or 22 cents per share.
Revenues for the quarter equaled $239,000, up from $71,000 during the first quarter of the year. The company posted no revenues for the second quarter of 2012.

County takes out USDA loan to buy land for wood pellet plant

http://msbusiness.com/blog/2013/08/06/county-takes-out-usda-loan-to-buy-lans-for-wood-pellet-plant/

by Associated Press
Published: August 6,2013

LUCEDALE — George County supervisors have signed off on $1.3 million in U.S. Department of Agriculture loans to pay for land where a new wood pellet plant will go.

The Mississippi Press reports that the USDA rural development loans will be used to purchase the property that will expand the George County Industrial Park.

Green Circle Bio Energy Inc. announced in June that the $115-million plant will produce up to 500,000 tons of pellets per year.

Wood pellets are shipped overseas to European utilities plants to use as biomass energy that complies with their stricter sustainability guidelines. The pellets are made from a mix of soft and hard woods.

George County secured a $1 million loan with no interest and a $283,000 loan with 1 percent interest.

They are both five-year notes.

“It took almost 10 months to get here,” Community development and communications director Ken Flanagan told supervisors yesterday. “With any luck, this fall we’ll get everyone together for a groundbreaking.”

The money will mostly be used to purchase the land, he said, and lease payments from the company will pay the note.

Any money left over from the loans will be used for road work.

Flanagan said the county will also be responsible for upgrading wastewater lines, and upgrading drinking water and process water to the site, among other infrastructure work.

That work will be funded through additional loans and grants that will be announced later, Flanagan said.

County leaders have said the mill will create 126 new full-time jobs in George County and others at the Port of Pascagoula in Jackson County.

The facility is expected to be operational by spring 2015.

Green Circle is wholly owned by the JCE Group, a privately owned international investment company headquartered in Gothenburg, Sweden.

Judge dismisses case against biomass plant

http://www.ajc.com/news/news/local/judge-dismisses-case-against-biomass-plant/nZFKt/

Posted: 3:23 p.m. Monday, Aug. 5, 2013

By April Hunt

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution 

An administrative law judge has dismissed a lawsuit from a group of DeKalb County residents opposed to a proposed biomass plant near Lithonia.

Judge Amanda Baxter said the Citizens for a Healthy and Safe Environment, or CHASE, did not respond in a timely manner to various court orders in its challenge to a state air permit for the facility.

Green Energy Partners had secured the state permit for the $60 million facility on Rogers Lake Road, which calls for burning wood chips to create energy that it will sell to Georgia Power. County Commissioners approved a rezoning chance for the plant in 2011, and company officials plan to break ground on the facility later this year.

Pellet plant project to create 175 jobs in Selma

http://www.al.com/business/index.ssf/2013/08/pellet_plant_project_to_create.html

By Dawn Kent Azok | dazok@al.com
on August 05, 2013 at 10:43 AM, updated August 05, 2013 at 11:26 AM

Zilkha Black Pellets will be produced in Selma. (Zilkha Biomass Energy)

SELMA, Alabama -- Zilkha Biomass Energy is renovating an existing facility in Selma in a project that will produce wood pellet fuel and create 175 jobs.

The company is moving in to the former Dixie Pellets plant, which it bought out of bankruptcy in 2010.

It will become the world's first full-scale plant to produce Zilkha Black Pellets, which are an environmentally sustainable and low carbon fuel that can be transported and burned by coal plants using their existing equipment, a press release said. Unlike traditional compressed wood pellets, the hydrophobic Zilkha Black Pellets can't be damaged by water.

The facility itself is expected to have 55 jobs, with another 120 jobs in the trucking and forestry industries in the community. And during construction, about 380 jobs are expected.

U.S. Bank, Stonehenge Capital Company and AMCREF Community Capital said today they are providing $5.3 million in financing for the project through federal and Alabama state New Markets Tax Credits, a program that encourages the investment of private capital in designated low-income communities. Investors receive tax credits.

Selma is the county seat of Dallas County, which has the third-highest unemployment rate in Alabama.

Construction is underway, and the plant is set to begin operations in 2014.

"We're excited to open the world's first full-scale Zilkha Black Pellet plant in Alabama," Jack Holmes, chief executive for Houston-based Zilkha Biomass Energy, said in a statement. "Selma offers the workforce and training that will help make this facility successful. The plant will produce 275,000 tons of our Black Pellets per year, which can generate enough clean, renewable electricity to supply 50,000 homes per year."

Birmingham's Bradley Arant Boult Cummings served as borrower's counsel to Zilkha Biomass on the deal. The team was led by Birmingham partner Beau Byrd, along with Birmingham partner Paul Compton, Nashville partner Mark Miller, and Birmingham associate Jimmy Long.

Judge Rules Biomass Plants Have to Obey the Law, While Usefulness is Questioned

http://www.sustainablebusiness.com/index.cfm/go/news.display/id/25085

07/25/2013 11:16 AM

A federal appeals judge has ruled that power plants that turn biomass into energy also have to obey the Clean Air Act.

It closed a loophole under which the Environment Protection Agency (EPA) exempted biomass plants from the same emission rules that all other power plants are subject to.

“Burning trees to generate electricity is dangerous, polluting, and ought to be limited to protect people and the environment,” says Kevin Bundy, a senior attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute, which challenged EPA's policy. “This important decision will reduce respiratory ailments, protect forests and help ensure a healthier, more livable climate.” 

The ruling reflects recent research that finds biomass-fueled power plants emit significantly more carbon per kilowatt than fossil fuel power plants - even coal. It can take decades before that excess carbon is “re-sequestered” by subsequent plant growth, explains the Center for Biological Diversity.

“Today’s ruling upholds EPA’s authority to regulate pollution that drives climate change. The court’s decision is grounded in an understanding that the science shows that biomass fuels, including tree-burning, can make climate disruption worse,” says Ann Weeks, legal director of the Clean Air Task Force, who argued the case for petitioners, which include the Conservation Law Foundation and Natural Resource Council of Maine. “The court clearly noted that the atmosphere can’t tell the difference between fossil fuel carbon dioxide and carbon dioxide emitted by burning trees.” 

"The court's decision is particularly important for the Southeast. Now we have an opportunity for a more sensible, science-based policy, one that avoids clearcutting the region's wildlife-rich forests for energy while intensifying climate change impacts," says Frank Rambo of the Southern Environmental Law Center, which represented the Dogwood Alliance, Georgia ForestWatch, South Carolina Coastal Conservation League and Wild Virginia in the case. 

In the case of wood, the adverse impact is exacerbated because of the large amounts of carbon released from deep forest soils as a result of disturbances such as logging, finds research released in June by Dartmouth College. Most global atmospheric studies don't consider deep soil, which could store up to half of all carbon in forest soils. 

"Our paper suggests the carbon in mineral soil may change more rapidly, and result in increases in atmospheric CO2, as a result of disturbances such as logging," says Dartmouth Professor Andrew Friedland. "Increased reliance on wood may have the unintended effect of increasing the transfer of carbon from mineral soil to the atmosphere." 

Woody biomass including trees grown on plantations, managed natural forests and logging waste, is used for 75% of global biofuel production. 

“If we are going to start changing recommendations and tell people to leave oil and coal in the ground, and burn more wood, we first need solid science behind that recommendation,” says Friedland. “Wood still might be a green choice, but let’s know all the consequences of everything that we do—and some of these consequences are not currently being discussed or appreciated or evaluated.” 

Next-Generation Biofuel Investments in Doubt 

 

Meanwhile, Europe’s biggest oil companies, BP and  Shell, are scaling back investments in biofuels because they don't see them becoming economical to produce until at least 2020. Exxon (remember all those algae TV ads?) and Chevron gave up several years ago, when they didn't see enough profit.

Why bother with these longer term investments when they're making a killing on their core business, oil and gas?

 

Both Shell and BP, however, continue to expand in their sugarcane ethanol businesses in Brazil. Shell has 23 refineries there and BP is spending $350 million to double production.

Global investment in biofuel production was $57 million in the first quarter, the lowest since 2006 and off significantly from a peak of $7.6 billion in the last quarter of 2007, reports Bloomberg. 
 

“Progress in deploying these technologies has been slower than many had anticipated and what’s needed to keep on track with our aspirations,” Maria van der Hoeven, executive director of the International Energy Agency (IEA), told Bloomberg. “Many potential producers have found it difficult to secure the capital they need.” 

"This is very capital intensive," Phil New, head of BP's biofuels program, told Bloomberg. "There's lots of difficult engineering. It will take time for scale-up."

Last year, BP scrapped plans for a $300 million refinery in Florida, although it just opened a $520 million wheat-to-ethanol facility in the UK with DuPont. Shell canceled plans in April for a straw-to-ethanol facility and also pulled back funding for biofuel enzymes at Codexis and an algae venture with HR BioPetroleum.

"All of these technologies are capable of working technically," Matthew Tipper, Shell's head of alternative energy, told Bloomberg. "It was purely on cost that this technology couldn't be taken forward. Fuels have to be cheap enough to burn. Otherwise no-one will buy them."

Both the US and Europe are counting on biofuels to help reduce emissions that contribute to global warming. To meet climate targets, biofuels must account for 27% of transportation fuels by 2050, up from just 3% in 2012, says IEA. 

Last year, ethanol made from sugar or corn was the major source of biofuels - almost all of the 1.9 million barrels produced a day. Next-generation technologies are focused on supplies that don't compete with food, such as switch grass, corn stalks, jatropha and algae, as well as wood waste from the lumber and paper industries. 

The first commercial-scale cellulosic biofuels plants are coming online, from companies like KiOR, Abengoa Bioenergy, BlueFire Renewables, Mascoma and Fulcrum Bioenergy. The plants will boost US cellulosic biofuel output 20-fold this year. At an anticipated 9.6 million gallons of production, it falls short of government’s target of 14 million gallons.

Big oil has basically decided to let these smaller firms develop the technologies and then surely they'll step in.

Last year, the EU set limits on crop-based biofuels because of rising food prices worldwide and shifted the focus to agricultural residues like straw, and potentially algae.

Central Louisiana making gains in biomass industry

http://www.thetowntalk.com/article/20130723/BUSINESS/307160021/Central-Louisiana-making-gains-biomass-industry

 Written by Jeff Matthews

Jul. 23, 2013   |   

 

Sundrop Fuels CEO Wayne Simmons (center) announces in 2011 that his company would build a $450 million biofuels plant in Rapides Station. The plant is expected to employ about 150 people and begin operation in late 2015. / Town Talk file photo

Central Louisiana appears to have struck gold, and workers don’t even have to dig for it. It’s just lying on the ground.

The area has very quickly grabbed a significant share in the emerging biomass manufacturing market, with three large plant projects announced in the past 19 months.


Local economic developers are optimistic that more activity is on the horizon.

“We’re still seeing an unusual amount of opportunity in that area,” said Jim Clinton, president and chief executive officer of Central Louisiana Economic Development Alliance. “I don’t think this will be the last opportunity we see.”

All three projects are manufacturing plants that use wood products — mostly things that have been looked at as waste, such as leftover shavings or parts of the tree unsuitable for making lumber — in some way to create fuel that is more environmentally friendly than traditional fossil fuel.

Colorado-based startup Sundrop Fuels. Inc. announced in late 2011 that it is building the pilot plant for its “green gasoline” in the Rapides Station area near Boyce. The plant is expected to employ about 150 people and begin operation in late 2015.


The fuel can be used like normal transportation fuel, but instead of being refined from petroleum, it is produced in a unique gasification process using natural gas and woody biomass.


The plant is expected to produce about 60 million gallons of fuel per year. But that’s just the beginning. Sundrop is hoping its new technology takes off and the company can follow through on building as many as four more plants, each producing more than 200 million gallons of fuel per year. 

Local economic developers would love to see one of those “megaplants” going up next to the pilot plant off Interstate 49.


In April, wood pellet manufacturing giant German Pellets breathed life back into the tiny LaSalle Parish town of Urania when it announced a $300 million plant there.

The plant will be on the site of the former Louisiana Pacific and Georgia Pacific plant that closed in 2002. It is expected to create 500 jobs and come online next spring.

Wood pellets are used extensively in other parts of the world, particularly Europe, to generate electricity and heat. They are most commonly made by pressing wood shavings and sawdust into a globe or cylinder shape.

The facility in Urania is billed as the world’s largest pellet plant. It is expected to produce one million tons of pellets per year.

Most recently, Hinterland LLC announced plans to build a pellet manufacturing plant in Vidalia.


The facility at Vidalia Industrial Park is expected to cost more than $100 million and employ more than 50 people. It has access to the developing Port of Vidalia.

“I tell people wood is our oil,” said Rick Ranson, vice president of the regional development alliance in Alexandria.
 

“Biomass certainly going back several years has been identified by state and local entities as a target,” Clinton said. “Our wood base, our resources give us a position of strength in the field.”

Keeping Pace with Pellet Trade

http://www.biomassmagazine.com/articles/9238/keeping-pace-with-pellet-trade

The Port of Brunswick is one of many upgrading and expanding to meet Europe’s surging pellet demands. 

 

By Tim Portz | July 22, 2013

U.S. Highway 82 follows a predominantly western course, away from the port complex at Brunswick, Ga., running first slightly northwest and then doglegging to the southwest. It ambles through Glynn, Brantley and Ware counties before arriving in Waycross, Ga. This 60-mile stretch of highway traces a path through some of the densest stands of southern yellow pine in the country. Together, these three counties boast nearly .5 million forest acres, most of them privately owned and actively managed for delivery to the area’s forest products complex, including area pellet mills. East of the Port of Brunswick lies the Atlantic Ocean, and the world’s fastest-growing pellet market. Linking this incredible forest biomass resource to power generators in the United Kingdom and northern Europe, which seek a less carbon-dense fuel are port terminals like the East River Terminal at the Port of Brunswick.

In August 2011, the Georgia Ports Authority and Logistec, a Montreal-based stevedoring and terminal operations company, announced a shared investment in the East River Terminal to facilitate the rapidly growing export market for wood pellets. Commenting on the project, Curtis Foltz, GPA executive director said, “The significant expansion and installation of new infrastructure at East River Terminal will accommodate Georgia’s export for biomass fuels and create jobs throughout Georgia’s transportation, logistics and forest industries.”

Investing in this critical piece of infrastructure has proven to be wise and timely, as the demand for wood pellets has increased as predicted, contributing to the highest cargo levels the GPA has ever experienced. In April, 2.4 million tons of cargo passed through Georgia’s ports, a new record. Tonnage moving through the East River Terminal increased 14 percent over the same time frame in the previous year, reaching nearly 670,000 tons. The growth in East River’s tonnage was led by biomass fuels, validating the 2011 investments.

A critical component of the investments was a deepening of the shipping channel from 30 to 36 feet.  Expounding on the ramifications of that improvement, David Proctor, Logistec terminal manager, says, “The GPA also dredged from 30 to 36 feet, which will increase our capability of bringing in larger vessels for pellet exports. With a 30-foot-depth, you can only get maybe 15,000 or 16,000 tons of any kind of cargo into the Port of Brunswick. With the expansion and the deepening of the channel down to 36 feet, we are capable at this time of moving close to anywhere from 35,000 to 40,000 tons of wood pellets in a vessel. “There are economies of scale with the larger-size vessels, and this additional draft allows us to attract a new target market when serving the large-size utility companies overseas.”

Already a significant piece of Georgia’s forest products industry, pellet producers in the state manufacture over 1 million tons of pellets each year. Current production levels, however, pale in comparison to the nearly 3 million tons of production capacity currently planned or under construction. Virtually all of this new capacity is being developed to serve the growing European market. Georgia’s port operators are feeling the momentum, too, and Proctor notes, “We continue to prospect for new opportunities, and there are many interested parties that we are pursuing.”

As production capacity in Georgia increases, its ports are keeping pace, ensuring the critical market access necessary to maximize the opportunity that fuels growth in both the state’s forest products and port sectors.

Report details NC forestry resources

http://biomassmagazine.com/articles/9239/report-details-nc-forestry-resources/

By Staff | July 22, 2013

 

The Biofuels Center of North Carolina has completed a statewide woody biomass assessment in cooperation with Gelbert, Fullbright & Randolph Forestry Consultants and North Carolina’s seven economic development regions.
The resulting report, titled the “Statewide Woody Biomass Project,” outlines three areas of analysis for each of the seven economic development regions. First, it quantifies wood resources on a county-by-county basis, including price points, land use changes and regional competition for woody biomass. Second, the analysis determines the best location for biofuels industrial sites and assesses the infrastructure available at each site. Finally, the report refines the wood resources to support bankable data for each location.

On a statewide basis, more than half of North Carolina’s land is forested, with approximately 90 percent of its 17.6 million forested acres under private ownership.

Policy changes should not affect wood-pellet plans at port

http://www.starnewsonline.com/article/20130722/ARTICLES/130729922

By Wayne Faulkner, Wayne.Faulkner@StarNewsOnline.com

Published: Monday, July 22, 2013 at 3:14 p.m.

A worker piles wood pellets at a holding facility at the Georgia Ports Authority in Brunswick, Ga., in 2011. Courtesy photo

 

Energy policy changes across the Atlantic could affect how long the boom in the U.S. wood pellet industry will last, forestry experts and industry opponents say.

But the company that plans to invest millions into building a pellet-exporting facility at the Port of Wilmington says those changes were long anticipated and have provided certainty for the industry to continue rapid growth.

The United Kingdom, where North Carolina's pellets will be shipped, is changing some of its rules that favor use of pellets in place of coal. It is cutting out subsidies for new power plants that would burn pellets while eventually ending them for plants that are converting from coal to pellets, according to news reports. 

The U.K.'s decisions "give certainty to the major utilities there so they can make good investments in converting existing coal-fired plants to biomass (wood products) plants," Enviva Chairman and CEO John Keppler said Monday.

"We have some pretty aggressive plans under way" for the Port of Wilmington and elsewhere in North Carolina, he said.

Enviva has two pellet-producing facilities in North Carolina, at Ahoskie and Northhampton, and has identified several sites in the state for a possible third facility, Keppler said.

Enviva plans to build two concrete storage domes, rail and truck unloading stations and a ship loader/dock-conveyer system at Wilmington. Enviva is not involved in pellet-exporting plans at the Port of Morehead City, which have been scaled back. The cutback is unrelated to European environmental policies, said Laura Blair, spokeswoman for the N.C. State Ports Authority.

U.S. production of pellets is expected to increase from 3 million tons in 2009 to 10 million by 2015, according to a study by Daniel Saloni of the Department of Forest Biomaterials at N.C. State University. 

There are or will be six Atlantic ports handling wood pellets between Norfolk and Brunswick, Ga., according to the Southern Environmental Law Center, an environmental advocacy organization based in Charlottesville, Va.

Pascagoula, Miss., is joining the push, planning to spend $30 million to accommodate future pellet exports.

Viable business?

But some question the limits of the wood-pellet export boom.

Opponents of the industry are arguing that burning wood pellets to produce energy not only doesn't make environmental sense but that it eventually won't make economic sense, either.

In addition to the U.K.'s new biomass subsidy policy, Europe is looking at whether it will require stricter requirements that the wood it receives from the United States is third-party-certified as sustainable, according to Dennis Hazel, associate professor and extension specialist for the Department of Forestry and Environmental Resources at N.C. State University.

One of the largest certifying groups is the Forest Stewardship Council, which originated from the Rain Forest Alliance, Hazel said.

"If your forest is certified, every product" that comes from it is certified, including pellets, he said Monday.

Problem is, there is little third-party-certified land in North Carolina, Hazel said.

If Europe decides to require strict certification, it may cloud the long-term viability of the pellet industry in the state, he said.

Lack of certification by either independent or industry groups is not to say the state's forests are managed badly.

The U.S. Forestry Service thinks "we do forestry pretty well in the Southeast. Most of our land is adequately regenerated" after trees are cut, Hazel said. That means that most cutting, even clear-cutting, allows the forests to come back. That, in turn, shrinks the relative carbon footprint of using North Carolina pellets for power production, he said.

But the forest watchdog group Dogwood Alliance says using the state's forests to produce pellets for power production is far from the European goal to be carbon neutral – producing no more carbon dioxide than is absorbed by regenerated forests.

The alliance's executor director, Danna Smith, said burning pellets for electricity may actually increase carbon emissions compared to coal. 

But she also argued that pellet companies are limited in their ability to make money from selling to the United Kingdom.

"It is not a long-term strategy for (the companies)," Smith said. "This is not going to be a long-term development opportunity.

"The justification for this (pellet) market is emission reductions. When you burn a tree that is, say, 20 years old, all that carbon is going into the atmosphere. If that tree had not been logged it would have been storing that carbon plus absorbing more carbon from the atmosphere."

In other words, the forests just can't regenerate fast enough to make the harvesting-burning process carbon neutral, she added.

But the pellet-burning process is never going to be carbon neutral, Hazel said. It, however, can be relatively beneficial.

In the short term, burning pellets may be less advantageous than burning coal. But in the long term it looks good compared to coal, because the forests have time to regenerate, he said.

Regardless of the arguments, Keppler is confident in his company's and the pellet industry's course of high investment and growth.

Nothing, he reiterated, has changed in Enviva's ambitious plans for the Port of Wilmington.

Sundrop Fuels selects contractor for inaugural plant

http://www.biomassmagazine.com/articles/9189/sundrop-fuels-selects-contractor-for-inaugural-plant

By Sun Drop Fuels Inc. | July 12, 2013

Sundrop Fuels Inc., a privately-held advanced biofuels company, announced that it has engaged international engineering and construction firm IHI E&C International Corporation, a U.S. subsidiary of Tokyo-based IHI Corporation, as contractor of choice for its inaugural facility near Alexandria, La.

The combined commercial and demonstration plant will annually produce about 60 million gallons of finished gasoline from natural gas while providing the platform for Sundrop Fuels to prove its proprietary gasification technology for making renewable “green gasoline” from woody biomass.

The success of Sundrop Fuels’ integrated commercial and demonstration plant will put in motion the company’s plan to build a series of renewable gasoline “megaplants,” each producing more than 200 million gallons of drop-in cellulosic biofuel annually. Sundrop Fuels expects to eventually have four such facilities in operation, representing a combined production capacity of more than one billion gallons – a significant percentage of the total cellulosic advanced biofuels goal set by the nation’s Renewable Fuels Standard (RFS).

“With IHI E&C’s talent and resources, Sundrop Fuels looks forward to formally breaking ground on the final stepping-stone toward becoming a major producer of affordable, drop-in biofuel,” said Sundrop Fuels CEO Wayne Simmons. “It has extensive experience and a long history of successful project execution in plants with similar configurations and process units.”

”We are very excited to be involved in this gas to gasoline commercial project that utilizes proven technologies for the conversion of natural gas, first to methanol, and then to gasoline,” said Glyn Rodgers, IHI E&C President.

Located one mile west of Alexandria in Boyce, Louisiana, Sundrop Fuels has begun site preparation on the combined commercial and demonstration plant, which will occupy approximately 100 of the 1,213 acres that the company purchased in February. Formal construction is scheduled to begin late this year, with operations expected to begin at the end of 2015.

Once powerful logging region getting back to its roots with biomass fuel source

http://www.sunherald.com/2013/07/09/4785036/once-powerful-logging-region-getting.html

Published: July 9, 2013

By Mike Lacy — The Journal of South Mississippi Business

 

South Mississippi has found itself on the edge of an industrial opportunity that could literally light a fire in its the economic engine and put it on the world stage for decades. Wood pellet manufacturing appears to be a nice fit for a region long known as a logging powerhouse. Proponets promise infrastructure renewal, employment opportunities, tangential small business growth and a clear conscious that comes from creating a long-term, self-sustaining, eco-friendly fuel for the world.

Trouble is, a lot of other people want a piece of the action, and some neighboring states may already be ahead in its plans to capitalize. In wood pellet manufacturing, companies take forest junk that doesn’t meet milling specifications and make it into what could be the next big not-really-so alternative fuel source.

“Other Southern states — Louisiana, Georgia and Florida — are on board and building wood pellets and ports to handle them,” said Ken Flanagan, community development director for the George County Board of Supervisors. “They are moving very quickly. Georgia may be a little ahead of the curve. It’s very obvious to us that this is a competitive business market. Our sister states are getting into this game.” But, he said that South Mississippi is “definitely on the forefront” of the battle.

“You’re going to hear about wood pellets for years to come.”

In late June, Green Circle Bio Energy, Inc., announced plans to build a $115 million wood pellet manufacturing plant in George County’s Industrial Park, which it says will create 126 full-time jobs and produce about 500,000 metric tons of pellets to be shipped to European markets. Construction of the plant on a 120-acre site is expected to begin this fall.

It was the second plant in five months to announce plans to build in the George County Industrial Park and one of four wood pellet producers to have considered George County as home for their plants. Gulf Coast Renewable Energy announced plans in March to build a 320,000 metric ton-plant that would create 40 jobs and 288 indirect jobs. But, so far, plans have not yet materialized.

Green Circle’s arrival has also spurred infrastructure development for the George County Industrial Park as well as the Port of Pascagoula to support the industry.

In April, the state House of Representatives and Senate authorized a borrowing bill that included $10 million for the Port of Pascagoula. The port will put the $10 million toward the development of a specialized facility to support the state’s wood-pellet industry.

Port Director Mark McAndrews said at the time of the announcement that the center will be built in a terminal in its Bayou Casotte east harbor and will have a conveyor system, storage silos and a ship loader for receiving and shipping wood pellets.

The total cost will be $28 million to $30 million. The port and the terminal’s operating partner will pay the balance after the state’s $10 million, McAndrews said.

When Green Circle was in negotiations with George County, it was also in negotiations with the Port of Pascagoula. “The port authority wanted to make sure we were on the same page as they were,” Flanagan added. “They have to act independently, but it was a good, open relationship.

“For us, keeping this inside Mississippi is very important,” he said. “If we produce it in Mississippi, we want to ship it out from Mississippi.”

The product

Wood pellets are a refined biomass fuel. By “pelletizing” residual forest waste, sawdust and used wood pallets, millions of tons of waste can be put to work for the economy while enhancing the environment. The process utilizes parts of trees that do not meet sawmill specs — like the trucks or the tops.

Biomass energy proponents say wood pellet energy is carbon neutral, largely because regrowth of vegetation was believed to recapture and store the carbon that is emitted to the air. But some environmental groups have questioned the simplistic claim arguing that it depends on how the fuel is harvested, from what forest types and what kinds of forest management are applied.

Wood pellets pose no soil or water contamination risks. The Mississippi Biomass Council also states that a typical wood pellet plant will produce 70K tons of pellets per year, enough to supply one 250 MW generating plant with 5 percent of its fuel as co-fired biomass.

Basically, the wood is processed, ground into a paste and squeezed into pellets. In doing so, the moisture content is reduced from 50 to 60 percent down to about 5 percent, making it dense, stable for long-term storage and easily shippable. There are no additives.

Why now?

Wood pellet manufacturing has been around for years, but what’s driving the market right now is a mandate to reduce carbon emissions from power plants in Europe by 2020. When mixed with traditional coal, wood pellets can burn at the same heat and rate, but with a reduced carbon emission.

But while Green Circle is the latest news, Enviva Pellets has been operating an industrial plant in Wiggins since 2010, replacing Piney Wood Pellets, which produced more for residential use.

Enviva owns one other plant in Amory (Monroe County) and a third plant is operated by New Biomass Energy in Quitmann.

Enviva Wiggins is a 150,000-ton wood pellet manufacturing plant. It operates 24 hours a day, 365 days per year.

Elizabeth Woodworth, director marketing communications for Enviva, said the Wiggins site was the “right opportunity” and the “right combination.”

“It is a good business environment, has incredible forest resources that are robust and healthy for us and it’s also located near a deep-water port,” she said.

Enviva Pellets exports through the Port of Mobile and has no immediate plans to change.

Why here?

According to a study commissioned by the Mississippi Development Authority, forestland dominates the Mississippi landscape, covering about 65 percent of the state. This coverage provides an excellent woody biomass supply to support the bioenergy and biochemical industries. It is estimated that about 6.5 million dry tons of unutilized pulpwood and woody biomass residues are available for new bioenergy and biochemical development in Mississippi. In addition, annual timber growth exceeds harvests in the state by a ratio of 1:13:1, meaning that 1.3 units of timber are added to the state’s stocks for each unit harvested each year.

“This immediately struck me that here is an emerging energy market — there’s no better way to say it,” Flanagan said. “It will never be like coal or oil, but in the recycling energy market, wood pellets do not have a rival.”

Europe makes wood pellets as well, but its “wood basket” — the area of harvesting wood within a 50- to 70-mile radius — is not as big as it is in the certain areas of the United States. In choosing a potential site, manufacturers consider how many years one can harvest, replant and harvest again.

Green Circle President and CEO Morten Neraas said it was important in the process to have more trees growing than what are being taken.

“But you’ve got to have more than wood,” Flanagan said. “You don’t want to be too far away from the Coast.” And he said the combination of rail and highway transportation to the Port of Pascagoula put George County in a good position. Is it good for Mississippi?

Nash Nunnery with the MDA said it has been estimated that nearly 100 new jobs are created by a typical pellet plant, including plant operators and workers, loggers, landowners and truckers. Each plant requires delivery of up to 6,000 truckloads of wood biomass equating to around 2,500 truckloads of wood pellets to customers each year.

The latest figures from a 2010 report from the Mississippi Department of Employment Security found that biomass industry-related jobs, not just those involving the wood pellet industry, directly or indirectly employed nearly 187,000 Mississippians.

Woodworth said in addition to direct and in-direct jobs created, it also adds an incentive for forest owners to keep their forests intact “rather than using it for agriculture — or worse — developing into strip malls.”

She said her company “goes through the supply chain” to obtain the raw material — sometimes through sawmills and sometimes on private forestland.

“It (the industrial process) helps promote bio diversity and value to the forest owner,” she said. “Maybe that will help him decide to keep his forest a forest. Over history, we’ve seen direct a correlation.”

Pricing

Woodworth said that wood pellet relative cost is one of the lowest, second only to onshore wind sources.

“But because wood pellets uses current utility infrastructure, it saves the utility on capital costs to retrofit,” she said.

But while Europe is the company’s primary business partner, she hopes that domestic acceptance of biomass fuel sources and, in turn, domestic business will increase.

“In Europe, it’s not a political matter. It’s a given,” Woodworth said. “Here, it’s divisive. I’d love to see biomass take off. It’s good for the environment and it’s part of the puzzle to use.

“When we talk about the impact of Enviva, we don’t focus on the fact that it’s a new green economy,” Woodworth said. “We’re connected to managing jobs and getting the forest industry back on its feet.

“We’re excited to be in the South Mississippi business region,” she said. “ The area has high quality labor in manufacturing. “And what’s cool about Wiggins, is that this facility is part of a global energy future.”

Read more here: http://www.sunherald.com/2013/07/09/4785036/once-powerful-logging-region-getting.html#storylink=cpy

RWE npower closes Tilbury biomass power station

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/jul/05/rwe-npower-tilbury-biomass-power-station

The blow to the UK's renewables industry was welcome news to some green campaigners who argue biomass is unsustainable

Fiona Harvey and Natalie Starkey
The Guardian, Friday 5 July 2013 08.11 EDT 

 

The closure of the Tilbury biomass power station will result in the likely loss of 220 jobs. Photograph: Alamy

 

RWE npower is halting operations at its Tilbury biomass power station, with the likely loss of 220 jobs, in a blow to Britain's renewable power industry.

But some green campaigners welcomed the closure, which will take effect from the end of October, as they argue biomass use on a large scale is environmentally unsustainable.

The closure will also raise further concerns over the ability to "keep the lights on" as an increasing number of ageing power stations are taken out of service.

The German electricity generator blamed a lack of investment capacity and the difficulty in converting the plant – the world's biggest biomass power station, with a planned capacity of 750MW – to use wood, waste oil and other organic materials in place of coal.

Biomass investors have also been rattled by the government's planned changes in subsidies for biomass and other renewable forms of energy. Drax, Britain's biggest coal-fired power station, last year shelved plans for two new biomass power stations.

Tilbury has a complex history that closely reflects the developments in energy and environment policy over the past decade.

Originally a coal-fired plant, it fell foul of EU regulations intended to cut airborne pollutants such as sulphur, and was intended in 2008 to be gradually run down, with a closure date of 2015.

But in 2010, the station was given a new lease of life as RWE announced its intention to experiment with biomass, sourced from sustainable forests, energy crops and waste.

Last year, RWE applied for environmental permits that would have kept the plant open as the world's biggest biomass burner. The investment required would run to the low hundreds of millions of pounds, less than building a new power station but a sum that would require considerable confidence in the future of biomass, as coal is now at its lower price for years.

Now, the company has decided it has other investment priorities.

However, RWE is open to selling the power station to another operator, if a buyer can be found. The company is only mothballing the plant, not dismantling it.

Roger Miesen, chief technical officer at RWE Generation, said: "It is with regret that we are announcing the decision to halt the Tilbury biomass project. This decision has not been taken lightly. Tilbury remains a good site for future power generation. RWE still believes that biomass has a role to play in future power generation and will continue to progress options at strategic sites."

The closure has reopened debate over the future of biomass power generation in Britain.

The government supports biomass, as a low-carbon form of power generation compared with fossil fuels – the trees and plants used as fuel take up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as they grow, so if they are regrown under environmentally sound conditions, burning them results in a net carbon saving as it displaces coal and gas.

However, that is not the whole story, according to many green campaigners. They point to problems with sourcing sufficient quantities of biomass, much of which has to be imported, and say that without strict regulations, growing trees and crops for biomass can lead to deforestation in developing countries. There are also concerns about the effects of the soot that comes from burning the organic fuel.