Green Horizons

Dynamotive Energy Systems Corporation and its subsidiary, Dynamotive USA, Inc., announced Dec. 5 its plans to invest $24 million to build the first fully commercial industrial biofuel plant in the U.S. The facility will be located in the northern Howell County town of Willow Springs. According to the Associated Press, the plant is expected to open mid-2009 and will employ 27 people.

The company is in the final stages of completing its first commercial, second-generation biomass-to-biofuel plant in Guelph, Ontario. That facility will utilize fast pyrolysis technology to convert 200 tons per day of wood residues from nearby sawmills into 34,000 gallons per day (12.4 million gallons per year) of BioOil. The Willow Springs plant will be of similar design.

Pyrolysis is a very old process. One could rightly claim that Missouri was (and still is) the epicenter. That is because pyrolysis is simply burning wood in an air-limiting environment; a process at the very heart of making charcoal.

Charcoal production is dependent on heating wood without enough air for complete combustion. Under these conditions, water is expelled from the wood and volatile substancessuch as tars and oils are released, leaving charcoal containing up to 90 percent carbon. In most charcoal production processes, some of the wood in the kiln is burnt processes, some of the wood in the kiln is burnt to produce the necessary heat. Four tons of air-dried wood will yield one ton of charcoal. Depending upon the type of kiln used, the process of making charcoal can take from two to four weeks.

Flash forward (and I literally mean ‘flash’) where you take the same basic process, but instead of burning the wood fiber in a limited oxygen environment you burn it in a chamber where the oxygen is replaced with an inert gas, such as nitrogen. And instead of taking weeks to ‘burn’ the wood you take two seconds! The byproducts of this fast pyrolysis are 70-80 percent BioOil, 10-15 percent light gases (such as carbon monoxide), and 10-15 percent char. I have oversimplified the process by some $24 million dollars, but you get the general idea.

BioOil is said to be a price-competitive replacement for No. 2 and No. 6 heating oil, widely used in industrial boilers and furnaces. The char can be made into activated charcoal, or the char can be mixed back into the BioOil to increase BTU content.

When BioOil and BioOil Plus are combusted they reportedly produce substantially less smog-precursor nitrogen oxides emissions than conventional oil as well as little or no sulfur oxide gases, which are a prime cause of acid rain. These fuels have been awarded the coveted EcoLogo in Canada, meaning they are certified as meeting the stringent environmental criteria for industrial fuels as measured by Environment Canada’s Environmental Choice Program.

Char also can be used as a soil amendment, and the company is currently conducting field tests in Iowa. The goal there is to mimic the highly fertile "terra preta" or black soil found in the Amazon basin. These soils were created hundreds of years ago by native South Americans to grow crops in their infertile soils.

The new plant is not expected to immediately affect local forest practices because it will initially use mill residues rather than feedstock directly from forests. However, later expansions could generate a demand for forest residues.

Reaction to the announcement has been mixed. Some are excited at the prospect of using waste sawdust to compete with foreign oil. Some existing mill operators are concerned there might not be enough sawdust to meet everyone’s needs.

That’s because the days of huge piles of sawdust and chips being burned, buried or simply left lying around are gone. Most sawmills and flooring mills use a portion of their wood waste to fuel boilers that generate steam for generating electricity or heating their drying kilns. They also sell slabs to the charcoal industry, chips to the paper mills, bark mulch for landscaping, and sawdust for processing into wood pellets and charcoal briquettes.

According to John Tuttle, wood utilization specialist with the Missouri Department of Conservation (MDC), the biofuel plant’s daily appetite for 200 dry tons of sawdust per day should not tax the resources within the 40- to 50-mile radius sourcing area from which they will be purchasing their wood fiber. He said 200 dry tons works out to roughly 11 semi-truckloads of green sawdust or about eight truckloads of dry sawdust. However, if construction of additional facilities boosted demand to 400 to 600 tons per day, mill residue supply "could become an issue," Tuttle said.

Others have expressed guarded optimism that using no- and low-value small-diameter trees for renewable energy will provide an opportunity to thin the Ozark’s overcrowded forests if it can be done in a sustainable manner and not lead to a rash of forest liquidations as seen with the arrival of the chip mills in the Ozarks back in the late 1990s.

The Eastern Ozarks Forestry Council (EOFC), Van Buren, which represents landowners to promote sustainable forestry, issued this statement: "The council hopes that Dynamotive will see the value of working closely and early with local and regional stakeholders other than their feedstock suppliers to ensure that the implications of this initiative are fully understood and that environmental and economic development benefits are delivered to Ozark residents."

Top of the Ozarks’ RC&D President Richard Stricklin said, "Oil production from wood is going to come. There’s no stopping it. Our concern is that it be done in a sustainable way so it leaves us with healthy forests."

The Top of the Ozarks RC&D and the EOFC are partners with John Tuttle and the MDC in developing a set of voluntary guidelines, or "Best Management Practices" (BMPs), for the harvest of trees for woody biomass in Missouri. The guidelines will provide information on conserving soil and water quality during forest harvests, protecting wildlife habitat, and will encourage practices that will maintain long-term viable forests. Stricklin said the group hopes to complete the harvest guidelines before Dynamotive or any other such plant is up and running.

To learn more about Dynamotive or their fast pyrolysis process and see pictures of their Guelph, Ontario, biofuels plant, visit www.dynamotive.com