bioenergy

- by Dylan J. Darling, March 17, 2015, Bend Bulletin

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"423","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","style":"width: 333px; height: 171px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;","title":"Photo: Biomass Magazine"}}]]A wood-burning power plant remains a possibility for La Pine, with the city now taking the lead on the project from Deschutes County and the company behind it waiting for a change in the energy market.

“It’s just been on hold due to market conditions,” said Rob Broberg, president of Biogreen Sustainable Energy Co., based in Vancouver, Washington. “And we plan on holding out until we are able to market and sell power.”

The company must find an energy buyer to make the planned plant economically viable, said Rick Allen, La Pine city manager.

“They need to find a power company that wants to buy their power,” he said. “…That’s really the issue.”

The $75 million, 25-megawatt biomass plant would produce enough electricity to power about 19,000 homes, Broberg said. The plant would burn wood — limbs and other scrap left over after logging, debris from thinning projects and urban waste — to heat water, create steam and turn a turbine. Interested power companies would likely be in California, where the state requires an increasing percentage of its power to come from “greener” sources such as biomass, wind and solar.

- by Anna Simet, March 12, 2015, Biomass Magazine

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"422","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","style":"width: 255px; height: 171px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;"}}]]While RWE Group reported it achieved its earnings targets for 2014 and EBITDA was significantly better than planned, low electricity prices and unusually mild weather negatively affected business performance, which dropped 25 percent from 2013 to 2014.

Peter Terium, CEO of RWE, said that currently, 35 to 45 percent of the utility’s conventional power stations are no longer making any money under current market conditions. “I am not talking about book values—these power stations are costing us real money,” he said. “We cannot avoid the sobering fact that conventional power generation is hardly viable any longer under current market conditions.”

He added that recent modernizations of RWE’s portfolio of power stations haven’t paid off, and that it is difficult to keep a gas or hard coal-fired power station commercially feasible. Previous Investments have made RWE the third-largest gas-fired power station operator in Europe, with capacity of around 15,000 megawatts across the continent. “Considering how quickly the electricity wholesale price fell in recent years, it would be impossible to cut a power station’s costs at the same rate to maintain margins or even make any profit at all,” he said.

- by Tim Faulkner, March 4, 2015, Eco RI News

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"410","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","style":"width: 288px; height: 237px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;"}}]]The seemingly annual debate about building a waste incinerator in Rhode Island resolved little on the issue this year, except that any such facility is too expensive and likely at least 10 years from ever being built.

The sole advocate for considering an incinerator is the operator of the Central Landfill in Johnston, the Rhode Island Resource Recovery Corporation (RIRRC). The agency simply wants to take a hard look at an incinerator as it investigates options for the state’s waste when the landfill inevitably runs out of space.

Currently, state law prohibits RIRRC from owning and operating an incinerator and from even considering it for its comprehensive plan. A pending bill would void the prohibition on studying incineration. It also would remove language in the state law that says incineration is the most expensive method of waste disposal.

“Removing this language is not consent to build,” Sarah Kite, RIRRC’s director of recycling services, said during a Feb. 26 Statehouse hearing. “This is not giving us permission to do anything other than really intensely study this issue and to bring those recommendations back to this board.”

- by Heather Clancy, March 3, 2015, Forbes 

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"409","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","height":"311","style":"width: 333px; height: 216px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;","width":"480"}}]]With companies like Apple and Google regularly stealing headlines for their solar and wind investments, it’s easy to forget “renewable” energy comes in many forms.

For consumer products giant Procter & Gamble biomass continues to be highly strategic. Indeed, it’s working on one of the biggest corporate biomass plants in the United States, a 50-megawatt installation at its Bounty and Charmin manufacturing plant in Albany, Georgia.

The $200 million project, spearheaded by Exelon subsidiary Constellation, is actually a replacement for a much smaller boiler that’s been in service for more than 30 years. The new cogeneration technology will provide 100% of the steam needed to run the production line, and approximately 60-70% of the energy for the facility, said Len Sauer, P&G’s vice president of global sustainability. The previous technology contributed about 30% of the total energy needed at the site.

- by Roger Taylor, February 26, 2015, Herald Business

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"407","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","style":"width: 444px; height: 251px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;","title":"Photo: Aaron Beswick/Truro Bureau"}}]]Hardwood trees are being allowed to go up in smoke, and with them a number of rural manufacturing jobs that are hard to replace.

It is easy to reach that conclusion after reading stories about several companies in rural Nova Scotia that have been making products from hardwood.

Just recently, the inability to access enough local hardwood was one of the reasons given by the owners of River’s Bend Wood Products Inc. for shutting down their flooring plant.

The factory in rural Antigonish County once employed 17 workers, but that number has been slowly whittled away. Now the remaining 11 employees will lose their jobs at the mill.

- by Fredric U. Dicker, March 2, 2015, New York Post

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"406","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","style":"width: 300px; height: 200px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;","title":"Photo: Gabriella Bass"}}]]With a bitter-cold winter and skyrocketing heating oil use, the GOP’s timing couldn’t be worse.

Senate Republicans, under pressure from maverick supermarket billionaire John Catsimatidis, are trying to slip a “green biofuels” mandate into Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s new budget that could add $150 million a year to heating costs in New York, business sources have told The Post.

Catsimatidis, a Republican mayoral hopeful in 2013 and a heavy campaign contributor to Senate Republicans as well as Cuomo, is well known in the city for owning the Gristedes supermarket chain.

But he’s also the owner of United Metro Energy Corp., a large company that is putting the finishing touches on a massive Brooklyn biofuel-processing plant that will be the largest in the Northeast when it opens this fall.

- by Thomas Content and Lee Bergquist, February 28, 2015, Journal Sentinel

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"405","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","style":"width: 300px; height: 189px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;","title":"Photo: Journal Sentinel"}}]]In an about-face from his first term, Gov. Scott Walker wants to eliminate funding for a University of Wisconsin-Madison renewable energy research center that has played a key role in helping land one of its biggest government grants ever.

In his budget, Walker is proposing to eliminate $8.1 million over two years — a total of 35 positions — from a bioenergy program.

The reductions are separate from his proposal to cut $300 million from the University of Wisconsin System over the next two years.

The research program, founded in 2009, is charged with developing technologies to convert wood chips, corn stalks and native grasses to homegrown sources of power.

- by Tim Knauss, March 2, 2015, Syracuse.com

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"404","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","style":"width: 299px; height: 201px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;","title":"Photo: Syracuse.com"}}]]The city council today voted against a 20-year extension of Syracuse's garbage disposal contract with the Onondaga County Resource Recovery Agency, citing a desire to pursue alternatives to trash incineration.

Syracuse remains obligated under its existing contract to haul waste to OCCRA's trash plant near Jamesville through June 2015, but it's not clear what will happen after that.

Councilor-at-Large Jean Kessner, who led opposition to the contract renewal, said she would like the city to negotiate a five-year deal with OCRRA and pursue alternatives over the long term, such as more extensive recycling.

- by Lisa Gale Garrigues, Indian Country Today Media Network

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"403","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","style":"width: 275px; height: 182px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;"}}]]For centuries the pinyon trees of Nevada have nourished the Shoshone, Paiute and other peoples, giving them pine nuts, ingredients for soup, milk and even a place to pray. Now it is about to become something else: a profitable source of biomass.

The Pinyon-Juniper Partnership, a consortium backed by Senator Harry Reid, D-Nevada, plans to remove pinyon trees in Nevada’s arid Great Basin in a project it hopes will be a model for the western United States. This spring, the partnership will begin using chainsaws, masticators and prescribed burns to thin pinyon and juniper on 300,000 acres in Lincoln and White Pine Counties.

In addition to the economic benefits of the project, the partnership (spearheaded by the Bureau of Land Management [BLM], the U.S. Forest Service and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and backed by groups that include Newmont Mining, the Nevada chapter of the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation and the Nature Conservancy) also argues that replacing some pinyon in eastern Nevada’s Humboldt–Toiyabe National Forest with sagebrush and other vegetation will help prevent dangerous forest fires, allow for more wildlife viewing and hunting, and develop a biomass industry in Nevada that will convert wood chips to fuel and electricity. It already has at least one potential customer: A-Power Energy Generation Systems, a Chinese firm that is planning to build a biomass-generated electrical plant in Lincoln County. (An ironic aside: Despite the abundance of pinyon in the western United States, the pine nuts on U.S. supermarket shelves come, increasingly, from China.)

The plans to reduce pinyon could eventually result in 20 million to 60 million tons of pinyon-juniper biomass. Six million tons of biomass can result from “a really light thinning” of a million acres, says Dusty Mohler, a forester and utilities manager for the partnership.

- by Al Maiorino, March 3, 2015, Environmental Leader

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"295","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","height":"319","style":"width: 333px; height: 221px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;","width":"480"}}]]In 2014, the United States Departments of the Navy, Energy and Agriculture awarded a $70 million grant to Red Rock Biofuels for the design, construction, commissioning and performance testing of a new biofuel refinery.  The biorefinery is planned for Lakeview, Oregon, close to the Fremont Nation Forest and the intersecting state lines of Oregon, Nevada, and California. This new renewable project aims to expand military fuel sources, improve reliability of the nation’s fuel supply and prevent supply disruption to reinforce the nation’s energy security.  Despite these benefits that bring additional employment and revenue benefits for the local community of Lakeview, NIMBY, or “not in my backyard,” opponents to biofuel refineries across the United States run fierce opposition campaigns that threaten project completion.  These campaigns can often result in project delays or even cancellation all together, and despite a properly zoned site.

Two Lake County Commissioners, Brad Winters and Ken Kestner, support the biofuel project and believe that when completed, the project will improve Lakeview’s air quality by creating healthier forests and preventing forest fires. Additionally, Oregon Business wrote an economic report stating that the biofuel plant would create up to “25 direct and 79 to 109 indirect and induced jobs,” resulting in an increase in labor income. However, Commissioner Winters acknowledged the myths promoted by the opposition that take hold by noting that those opposed to the creation of the biorefinery are not basing their concerns and objections on factual information.  Winters emphasized the importance of community members’ attendance at review workshops and hearings in order to become more informed as state and federal agencies evaluate the proposal as a prerequisite for completion.

Despite a successful rezone of the proposed site by the Lake County Planning Board, opponents remain focused on keeping the proposal out of their community. They fear that transporting these biofuels through the Lake County railroad from Lakeview to Alturas could possibly result in derailments with damaging effects on the community. The opposition is highly organized, holding meetings to strategize and planning petition drives to re-open the process for public comment before the County Commissioners. As is the case with some projects, the opposition group is also instigating a recall drive against Lake County Commissioners and Lakeview Town Council members, showing that all land use truly is political in nature.

Meanwhile, supporters are hoping that this project will receive the necessary approvals according to current plans so construction can begin in summer or fall of 2015 for operations to commence by 2016.  Just as the opponents have utilized grassroots tactics to add to their numbers, so too much supporters. To save time and money, companies must engage communities and stakeholders throughout the entire permitting process to ensure that community members are informed and engaged every step. By identifying and mobilizing members of what is often the silent majority, public support can be built throughout Lake County for a quick and successful project approval.