OT- Wood pellet woopala ......latest industrial size heating fad

[dkmc]

I heard a couple weeks ago that a local plant that
uses steam and hot water for process is converting their NG boilers to Wood Pellets.
They bought a used boiler for $1 Mil and will spend another 3-4 for install. Then it's 18 to 22 tractor trailer loads of pellets -PER DAY- required!
Supposedly will store a 6 months supply (3900+ truck loads) in a silo near the plant.

Now it todays local paper, one of the local hospitals is doing the same thing!
This will be a biomass-gas producer plant, possibly the other industrial plant is the same setup. Units sold by Chiptec Wood Energy Systems, Vermont.

Must be this is somehow less EPA involved, because it seems to me that Coal would have much more
energy density than wood pellets??
And the trucking costs must add an incredible cost to the mix.....

dk

 

[crossthread]

I think the big equalizer here is that the wood pellets are a renewable resource. Period.

 

[Mike K]

They are also clean burning and carbon neutral. They used to be a cheap fuel until they became popular. The last I heard, they cost as much as propane now. it's hard to say how expensive they will be if they get even more popular.

 

[jpete]

Wood pellets retail for about as much as coal does. $200-$250/ton.

 

[tattoomike68]

Wood pellets do burn clean. I made 5 prototype pellet stoves that all passed the EPA and UL standards.

Pellets are kind of amazing, I could heat a house with a burner the size of my hand. At the time I was the only builder making them that did not need electricity at all.

Myself I like the way people are inventing ways to make energy, my grandpa said they burned wheat in thier stoves to stay warm in the great depression, it was all they had.

 

[ohgood]

Hmm, these systems don't have train tracks right up to them ?

18-22 trailers per day sounds like a hurting on the local roads and commuters as well.

Build the tracks right up to the pellet burners ?

 

[bdx]

Popular in Ireland. Government grant available too.


Mark

 

[dkmc]

RR tracks:

No go at the hospital, right smack in a residential neighborhood. Other plant has a rail siding (they used to get coal delivered on it), but haven't heard
that the wood pellets would arrive that way. Maybe there's a missing connection in the rail system...
They also say they're 'going to get' local farmers to take the ashes and spread them on their fields.
That's OK, but what happens after it gets 2ft deep....???


dk

 

[SouthBendModel34]

Circa the 1970's, Clarkson College (now Univ.) in Potsdam NY converted their central district heating plant to burn wood chips, not processed pellets but chips, directly. I think it was saw mill waste.

On an industrial scale, would it not make sense to skip the energy-consuming pelletizing stage and just burn the woodchips from which the pellets are made?

I've seen RR cars full of woodchips passing through Essex Jct, VT on their way to a utility powerplant. As I recall, the cars were very-high-sided gondola cars rather than true hopper cars, implying an awesome car-dumper to unload them.

JRR

 

[Robert Campbell Jr.]

Re; ashes. The pellet stoves I've used produce no ash, at least not any that's visable.

Are the industrial units less efficient or are they more efficient at captuing ash? Do we little guys just get away with some small amounts of solids in the exaust?

Bob

 

[winger]

Burning 2 to 3 ton a year I get about a five gallon pail of ashes. Not sure how much goes out the exhaust. The price has almost doubled but so has propane.

 

[5thwheel]

The Pacific NW has pretty much been the main source of pellets for several years but I hear they are branching out. Real peoblem here is most is being exported elsewhere so we have had shortages. I very much would like to put in a very small pelet stove as a supliment but am afraid of the supply.

Bill

 

[gmatov]

5th,

I hate to suggest you burn corn. Corn is a food, BUT..

If you buy a corn burner, it can also burn pellets. If you buy a pellet burner, it will burn pellets, not corn.

22 pounds of corn to equal a gallon of fuel oil, depending on dryness. 46 to 56 # per.

I think today's price to the farmer is about 3 and a quarter. Don't know what it costs to buy it.

Were I to buy an emergency backup, as opposed to an alternative to save money, I think I would buy a drip type oil burner, like they use in camp cabins.

Cheers,

George

 

[Kevin Singleton]

I thought we were supposed to be saving the trees?

 

[surplusjohn]

Do the big power plants burn pellets or chips? Pellets cost a fair sum per ton to make even with free stock.
A local coal burner plant was [is?] burning papermill recycling waste, which is like cow manure in consistancy, moisture content and smell, and was mixing it with chopped up wood waste from pallets and the wood brought the average moisture down to where it was burnable. They were competing with coal so I don't think the company processing waste was getting much for the fuel but they also got disposal fees for the wood and paper muck. Coal in bulk is really cheap stuff, about the same as crushed rock.
anyways, chips or pellets?

 

[metlmunchr]

Back before most of them moved to China, the furniture mills burned all their waste and scrap, usually to provide steam for heating dry kilns. The ones I've seen had a thing the called a hog where all the scraps were ground up to easily burnable size. The stuff from the dust collectors was burned too, but I don't know for sure whether it ran thru the hog or was fed in separately. Since all the material in a furniture mill is dried, they didn't waste a bunch of energy in evaporating moisture out of the wood within the combustion chamber. There was a mill within a couple miles of home for years, and you never really noticed anything coming out of their stack that you'd call smoke. Of course today they'd probably have to put $5 million worth of scrubbers on the stack to get rid of particulates.

Are those RR cars full of chips really going to a power plant? Or are they going to a paper mill? They pass thru here all the time, but all the ones here are headed to paper mills. The mill near here phased out accepting logs over 20 years ago. They've got some offsite places around where they do take pulpwood logs and chip them, but nothing at the plant site. Other suppliers do their own chipping. Chips come in via railcar and tractor/trailer. Don't know how they dump the railcars, but the t/t rigs back onto a platform that tilts the entire rig up and dumps the chips out the back doors onto the conveyor system.

Just wondering about the chips to a powerplant thing since it seems the varying moisture content would make it difficult for them, both in operation and in determining the net heating value of the fuel. I do know on coal they've typically got onsite labs where they determine average heating values on incoming coal, and pay for the coal based on its heating value per ton instead of just paying some fixed price per ton.

 

[willbird]

Pilliod cabinet co in swanton burned particle board sawdust for heat (Sauder woodworking in Archbold ohio still does) I worked nest door to Pilliods for 9 years, they got a LOT of fine ash from their process that would cover our cars in a thin film.

I assume the wood pellets are carbon neutral because the trees use co2 and burning them creates c02 so it balances out ??

Bill

 

[rayman]

Tattoomike68,

Can you share some info on how the non-electric powered pellet stoves function - what is the feed drive mechinism? I have toyed around with the same idea of not needing any electrons. If you wish you can PM me.

Thanks,
Rayman

 

[rayman]

There is/was a wood chip fired power pland in my father's hometown in norther Maine. I visited my uncle who lived next door to it and the truck ran from 6 AM to 4 PM everyday. It was build in the '80's if I recall correctly.

 

[5 axis Fidia guy]

I have a corn burner in my basement and I love it, as said earlier it can also burn wood pellets, but corn burns waaaaayyyyy hotter and longer than the wood pellets. The only thing is that here in wisconsin they are on the ethonol kick and alot of corn is going to the plants that produce that, so you guessed it, the price of corn here is skyrocketed. The deer in my back yard are going to be a little hungry this winter.