Hot News

3.04.2008

By SEAN CLOUGHERTY
Associate Editor

ST. MARY’S, Pa. — A group of Maryland adminsitrators and agency reprsentatives gathered on Feb. 19 by a forester set off on a mission to see and scrutinize real-world examples of wood being used to heat large buildings.
The destination? An area in northern Pennsylvainia that is home to a company that makes wood-fired boilers and three places where they have been installed: A school, a hospital and a greenhouse complex.
“Everyone that went on that trip was chosen, hand-selected for a specific reason,” said Dan Rider, associate director of forest products utilization and marketing at the Maryland Department of Natural Resources’ Forest Service. Rider said he sought out people from organizations that “need to be up to speed on wood energy.”
Among the group were energy managers, engineers and officials from two of the state’s public school districts, the University of Maryland, Maryland Enviromental Service, Maryland Department of Environment and the Maryland Energy Administration.
Rider added that wood-powered systems like what they saw on the trip have been used in other parts of the country, New England and the Southwest for example, but in the Mid-Atlantic area, they are scarce, if nonexistent.
“It’s a totally foreign concept here in Maryland,” he said.
By showing the group systems already in place, Rider said he hoped to disprove two widely held beliefs around the state that wood power systems won’t meet Maryland’s emmission standards and that there isn’t enough local supply of wood to make such systems in Maryland feasible.
If employed in Maryland, Rider said it could create a new market for waste wood in the tree care industry in urban and suburban parts of the state and possibly a market for logging slash if loggers deemed it feasible to collect it and grind it.
That, Rider said, could offer more value to forest landowners as well.
Witnessing wood power
The first stop on the tour was at Dillon Floral Corporation in Bloomsburg, Pa.
In 2006, the company began to look at replacing one of its two oil burning steam boilers with a 6 million BTU wood-burning boiler, still heating with steam.
By March of last year, the system was operational.
Along with the wood furnace and boiler, a condenser also was installed to recapture water not needed in the warmer months or when the sun is shining on the greenhouse. One of the existing boilers was kept online to back up the new system and uses natural gas.
The system also included wood-handling equipment — a front-end loader, a grinder for non-prepared waste wood and a screener to filter out wood too large to go into the furnace and send it back through the grinder — and a storage structure for the wood fuel. Total cost of the wood-burning system was $1 million.
Rob Dillon, company president, said the previous heating system used No. 6 oil and at current prices, it would cost about $252,000 annually to heat the 90,000 square feet of greenhouses with the oil. Dillon said the estimated payback on the system for his operation is five years.
Dillon said the estimate for wood fuel use is about 2,500 tons annually. He buys wood already ground to the necessary size for between $22 and $32 per ton, and gets other waste wood that must be reground for free from local right-of-way tree clearing companies. He said his annual fuel costs are estimated at about $70,000 with the new system.
In St. Mary’s, the group visited Advanced Recycling Equipment Inc., a company that makes biomass combustion units and installed systems in the three places the group visited. Jim Babcock, company vice president, said they have installed systems in several states and will soon put one in at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Boulder, Colo. The systems, he said, are scaleable, custom made to fit each situation and can handle a variety of fuels. Babcock said they have tested several fuels on their own system, from switchgrass to poultry manure, and have been able to burn them and stay under necessary emissions requirements.
“The broiler litter went through fine; that went great.”
He said they’ve even tested elephant manure for an installation at a breeding facility owned by the Pittsburgh Zoo.
“The fact that we can burn switchgrass is huge,” Babcock said. “If they’re in an area where wood is not an option, they can burn switchgrass.”
At Elk Regional Medical Center in St. Mary’s, the group looked at a 15 million BTU system. The $2.3 million system has been operational for about a month, according to Gwen Auman, a grant writer for the hospital, and is estimated to use about 50,000 tons of wood per year. The system uses wood chips as well as pulverized pallets that has a much finer consistency but can burn in the furnace along with the chips at any mixture.
Auman said the hospital saves about $300,000 per year in heating costs, and after its elder care facility is connected to the system, she estimates the savings to rise to $500,000 versus using natural gas. The hospital still has a oil/natural gas system as a backup to the wood-burning system. Auman added the hospital is looking into burning shredded paper including outdated hospital records and other privileged information, which they currently pay to be destroyed.
“We’re not sure where it’s going,” Auman said. “We think a lot of it is ending up in a landfill.”
The final stop on the tour was at Clearfield Middle School in Clearfield, Pa., which replaced an oil-fired boiler with a 10 million BTU wood-powered system. Advanced recycling retrofitted an old coal bunker into the hopper to feed the boiler and aside from switching trailers of wood, the system is highly automated. Electronic eyes control the flow of wood from the live bottom trailers from the trailer to the hopper and into the furnace.
Bringing it back home
Many who went on the trip said their main concerns about wood energy were the two things Rider wanted to address: Supply and Emissions. Carol Kennedy Hearle and David Cosner, who both work in the facilities management department at the University of Maryland, said they came on the trip with open minds but a lot of questions.
“I was looking at different technologies that I hope we could apply to different needs at the university,” said Cosner, a utilities asset administrator. Cosner said the sheer size of the school’s campus could create issues smaller situations would not have.
“There’s a lot more cost and labor involved at our level,” he said. “We’re literally a city.”
However, Cosner added, the systems the group looked and others like them have “tremendous applicability in the county school system.”
Kennedy Hearle, a campus environmental planner, said the systems “looked like old technology applied in new ways,” and added that she was surprised by how different types of fuel could be mixed and feed the furnace simultaneously.
“I was looking to see how flexible the processes are,” she said. “I had the impression it would have to be more homogenius.”
Diane Sweeny, energy management specialist for Howard County Public Schools, said she was glad to see the level of automation in the system at the middle school.
“If we had stopped after the first day (after visiting Dillon Floral), I would have thought it wouldn’t be able to work” in a school setting, she said.
Supply and emmissions
As a rough estimate, Rider said Maryland has about 800,000 tons of underutilized and poorly utilized wood that could be used annually. If logging slash is factored in, he said the amount increases to millions of tons.
“We’ve got oodles and scads of wood that is underutilized. It’s out there for the taking and no one’s taking it,” he said.
Rider also said ideally, clearing forest floors of wood that is currently not utilized will benefit land owners by promoting growth of the larger trees.
“The foresters’ Holy Grail is to be able to go into a forest and improve it,” he said. “Our challenge has always been, ‘yeah, that’s nice but how do we get it done?’” So far, Rider said most loggers cannot justify using the resources to gather the wood left over but if a value is assigned to it through the use of wood powered heating systems, that could change.
“From a forestry point of view, I really hope it happens,” he said.
Rider said his goal is to get at least one facility in the state to install a wood-burning system, and he said the urbanized areas of the state is initially the most likely place for it to happen.
Rider referred to the urban and suburban areas as the “lowest hanging fruit” where access to wood is closest and easiest.
“The wood is already being produced, it’s already being transported and currently it represents a cost to the producer,” he said. “I don’t think supply is going to be an issue at all in the urban areas.”
Rider said one of the first things determined during a project’s development will be its fuel source.
“Any of these systems that get built hopefully will be designed around a fuel supply,” he said. “It’s a challenge, but I don’t think it’s a problem. You put these things where the production is.”
Rider said he doesn’t see emissions holding back wood-powered systems in Maryland, but added that it will take cooperation from the agencies involved and for someone to “bite the bullet and make the commitment.”
“I think what it’s going to take is we’re going to have to have somebody decide that they truly want to have one of these systems and be the first one to go through the permitting process,” Rider said.
During the development of a project, Rider said the equipment and the proposed fuel source would be tested for emmissions before a permit to construct is issued and then after the system is operational, it would continue to be monitored for a given period.
The next step
Rider said he hopes to get those who went on the trip together again for a follow-up meeting, and at the urging of some of the group, will try to bring in building and design engineers who are commonly used in large building projects.
“Now that we’ve got their attention, let’s find out what their specific needs are and let’s follow up with that and let’s keep it moving,” Rider said.