Hype is running well ahead of reality regarding the use of forest industry co-products to generate heat and power.
That is the view at co-products market leader AW Jenkinson Forest Products, which is responsible for handling around 750,000 tonnes of woodchips, sawdust and bark per year. The company collects from around 100 sawmills across the UK and Ireland, and has also imported bark from the Baltics.
Many heat and power generation projects have been mooted but most are still in the early planning stages, the company says. Also, it has been “wrongly” assumed that an inexhaustible supply of suitable co-products exists.
Attributing such misconceptions largely to a lack of cohesion between government departments and insufficient consultation with leading industry enterprises, AW Jenkinson’s company secretary David Wood acknowledged “continual interest” from firms wanting to use co-products in power and heat generation. While anticipating a decent future for the biomass sector, he warned against excessive expectation and argued, for example, that co-firing “will not be the answer to our industry’s low profitability”.
Dr Wood is joined by AW Jenkinson’s materials manager Richard Palmer in believing that co-firing and freestanding biomass plants will emerge generally “in locations where everything aligns”. As energy costs continue to rise, more biomass producers will consider installing their own heat and power generation facilities.
Dr Wood insisted that the established sales route into the UK board industry should not be compromised for other end uses – including heat and/or power generation – but had some sympathy with the claim that the government had “distorted” the market through fiscal measures such as Renewable Obligation Certificates (ROCs). “The government wants 10% of fuels to come from renewable sources by 2010, and that’s laudable – but it shouldn’t come at the expense of existing markets,” argued Dr Wood.
He explained at a recent FTA conference: “The majority of co-firers require a small particle-size fuel, some down to 3mm, which limits their choice to sawdust. Perhaps as many as 15 power stations have trialled sawdust co-fired with coal, and have been awarded clearance by the Scottish Environment Protection Agency or the Environment Agency.” If all of these projects were to go ahead and burn even small percentages of sawdust, they would “quickly impact” on existing users within the UK board industry and other markets.
Furthermore, according to Mr Palmer it is not always possible to sell co-products into the highest-value end markets owing to fluctuating moisture contents and other factors; and it remains to be proved beyond doubt whether co-firers can offer sawmillers the necessary continuity of co-products removal. “The hype has overtaken the reality,” he said. “Sawmillers think large-scale co-firing is already with us and the development of co-firing facilities is moving ahead but, at the moment, there is only one proven operation in the south of England consuming regular quantities of domestic biomass. Others are certainly co-firing, but to date have concentrated their efforts on imported biomass products such as olive stones and palm kernels with calorific values of up to three times that of domestic ‘wet’ wood.”
As for free-standing, biomass-fired heat and power generation, experience of this as a market for wood has been “tarnished” by the failure of the Arbre Energy Plant at Eggborough, according to Dr Wood.
He lists eight other generation projects that are currently in the planning phase and notes that AW Jenkinson has spoken to all of them with a view to supplying co-products.
Slow education process
“It will be a slow process,” agreed Mr Palmer. “We do not know of anybody in a position to take chips from January this year and to start grinding them.” Furthermore, the viability of buying, grinding and using chips has yet to be confirmed since, to date, trials have centred on sawdust rather than on chips. “It has been quite an education process to keep policy-makers feet on the ground,” he said. “People believe the availability is there when it’s not. They think it’s just a case of building generation facilities, but it’s not.”
However, one of the “most promising” among the project proposals listed by Dr Wood directly involves his own company. Full planning consent has been obtained for E.ON (formerly Powergen) to establish a fuel preparation and power generation facility at AW Jenkinson’s Steven’s Croft site near Lockerbie.
The plant would use a 40MW conventional steam-fired turbine with an annual fuel requirement of 500,000 green tonnes, comprised of sawmill co-products, small roundwood, clean recycled wood and short rotation coppice when available. If, as expected, a connection agreement is reached in the very near future, commissioning is envisaged in around two years.
“UK sawmilling capability is scheduled to grow and the co-products industry is well placed to handle it,” said Dr Wood. “I would like to think that our share will rise accordingly.” And he’s philosophical that rising energy costs are likely to persuade companies to consider their own small-scale heat and power generation facilities: “This is a threat to our own business but something that we have to take on board.”
