gypsum
http://www.energyjustice.net/tags/gypsum
enBiomass Energy Growing Pains
http://www.energyjustice.net/content/biomass-energy-growing-pains
<span>Biomass Energy Growing Pains</span>
<div class="field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field--item"><p> </p>
<p>[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"516","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","height":"360","style":"width: 333px; height: 250px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;","width":"480"}}]]<span style="font-family: 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 16px;">Several biomass power facilities have come online over the last few years in Colorado, Texas, Wisconsin, Florida, and Hawaii, but not without difficulties, including fires, inefficient equipment, lawsuits, and competing with the low price of natural gas.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;"><em>Gypsum, Colorado</em></span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">Eagle Valley Clean Energy, an 11.5-megawatt biomass power facility in Gypsum, Colorado started operating in December 2013, only to have its conveyor belt catch <a href="http://www.postindependent.com/news/15600919-113/gypsum-biomass-power-plant-still-off-line-after-december-fire">fire</a> in December 2014. Spokespersons said the facility would be back online shortly, yet as of October, it’s still offline. There have been no further media reports investigating why the facility still isn’t operating, and multiple calls and emails to the facility<em> </em>were not returned. </span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">Another thorn in Eagle Valley’s claw is a <a href="https://dockets.justia.com/docket/colorado/codce/1:2015cv01252/156554">lawsuit</a> filed against the company in U.S. District Court in June 2015 by Wellons, Inc., an Oregon-based corporation that designed and built the biomass facility.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">Wellons is suing Eagle Valley Clean Energy for $11,799,864 for breach of contract, accusing the company of “fraudulent transfers” and “civil conspiracy,” involving the transferring of $18.5 million of federal subsidies to “insider” parties in an alleged effort to hide the money. The money was issued to the facility from the federal government under Section of 1603 of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), also known as the Stimulus, involving payments to reimburse companies building renewable energy facilities.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">Wellons claims that, on top of the nearly twelve million dollars Eagle Valley must pay them, they are owed past due interest of $1,185,433.56, with debt accruing at $3254.90 per day.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">Another bump in the road for Eagle Valley involves the Chapter 11 <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/Research/stocks/private/snapshot.asp?privcapId=290825398">bankcruptcy</a> of the logging contractor that provides them the trees to fuel the facility, West Range Reclamation. West Range has provided nearly all of the wood to the facility since it opened, mostly from beetle-killed lodgepole pine from the White River National Forest.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;"><em>Nacogdoches, Texas</em></span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">Southern Power’s Nacogdoches Generating Facility, a 100-megawatt biomass power facility in Nacogdoches, Texas, opened in 2012 only to sit idle much of the time due to an inability to compete with the low price of natural gas, according to <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/12/06/utilities-southern-biomass-idUSL1E8N5CAD20121206">Reuters</a>.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;"><em>Rothschild, Wisconsin</em></span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">In November 2013, WE Energies and Domtar Corp’s 50-megawatt biomass power facility opened in Rothschild, Wisconsin. However, it was offline from December 2014 through May 2015 for repairs, and was operational only 16% of the time during its first full year, in part due to an inability to compete with the low price of natural gas, according to the <a href="http://www.jsonline.com/business/we-energies-biomass-plant-didnt-run-for-6-months-b99517998z1-307511731.html">Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel</a>.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;"><em>Gainesville, Florida</em></span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">The Gainesville Renewable Energy Center (GREC), a 100-megawatt biomass power facility, came online in Gainesville, Florida in 2013, and soon ran into controversy with <a href="http://www.energyjustice.net/content/biomass-incinerator-noise-nightmare-neighbors-biomass-monitor">noise complaints</a> from neighbors.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">In October 2014, the Gainesville City Commission approved an audit to look into <a href="mailto:http://www.gainesville.com/article/20141014/articles/141019815%20">financial transactions</a> between Gainesville Regional Utilities (GRU) and GREC, which increased costs for the utility and its customers.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">In April 2015, Wood Resource Recovery, one of the main fuel suppliers for GREC, sued the facility for <a href="http://www.gainesville.com/article/20150401/ARTICLES/150409922?p=1&tc=pg">breach of contract</a> for $5 million in damages. Part of the complaint has to do with GREC’s refusal to take yard waste and materials from agriculturally zoned properties.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">In August, the facility shut down temporarily, and when it became operational again, Gainesville Regional Utilities decided <a href="http://www.gainesville.com/article/20150812/ARTICLES/150819941">not to bring</a> it back online, with no “projected return to service at this current time,” according to Margaret Crawford, GRU Communications Director. Instead, GRU is relying on power that is “more economic than GREC’s facility.”</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">In September, the <a href="http://www.gainesville.com/article/20150917/articles/150919701">city audit report</a> uncovered that Gainesville Regional Utilities was paying $56,826 more per month than it was supposed to, totaling $900,000 in over-payments. </span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;"><em>Koloa, Hawaii</em></span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">Green Energy Team’s 7.5-megawatt biomass power facility in Koloa, Hawaii, was scheduled to start up in April 2015, but the official opening has been pushed back to November because the efficiency level from burning wood chips was lower than it should be, according to <a href="http://thegardenisland.com/news/local/biomass-plant-nears-final-testing/article_b8653861-168e-5844-ad6b-de507aa69cd5.html">The Garden Island</a>. The turbine was dismantled and reassembled, and is currently undergoing more testing. </span></span></p>
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<span><span lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="" xml:lang="">Anonymous (not verified)</span></span>
<span>Mon, 10/19/2015 - 14:45</span>
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<div class="field--item"><a href="http://www.energyjustice.net/taxonomy/term/2" hreflang="en">Biomass</a></div>
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Mon, 19 Oct 2015 18:45:09 +0000Anonymous2423 at http://www.energyjustice.netGypsum, CO Biomass Incinerator Still Off-Line After December Fire
http://www.energyjustice.net/content/gypsum-co-biomass-incinerator-still-line-after-december-fire
<span>Gypsum, CO Biomass Incinerator Still Off-Line After December Fire</span>
<div class="field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field--item"><p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;"><em>- by Scott Miller, March 22, 2015, <a href="http://www.postindependent.com/news/15600919-113/gypsum-biomass-power-plant-still-off-line-after-december-fire">Post Independent</a></em></span></span></p>
<p>[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"430","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","style":"width: 333px; height: 250px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;"}}]]<span style="font-family: 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 16px;">A plant that generates electricity by burning beetle-killed wood had only been operating for a few months when a December fire badly damaged the facility’s conveyor system. The plant has been closed since, and will probably remain closed until summer.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">The plant, built by Provo, Utah-based Eagle Valley Clean Energy, used about $40 million in federal loan guarantees to finance the project. The idea was to use beetle-killed wood to generate electricity, since there’s a decades-long supply of dead trees in the forests around Gypsum. The plant was intended to generate about 11.5 megawatts of power per hour — 1.5 megawatts to power the plant and 10 megawatts to be sold to Holy Cross Energy. That’s enough for about 10,000 homes, backers say.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">Some neighbors of the plant have worried about air, water and noise pollution. But an <a href="http://echo.epa.gov/detailed-facility-report?fid=110054957409&redirect=echo">Environmental Protection Agency website</a> lists only two minor water-quality violations — one each in 2012 and 2013 — and no enforcement actions against the plant.</span></span></p>
<p><!--break--></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">In a recent phone call, neighbor Derek Bretta said he’s concerned that beetle-killed wood chips are still being moved around on the site, creating dust.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">Gypsum Town Manager Jeff Shroll said the plant’s town approvals allow wood storage, and said it has to be moved around regularly to prevent spontaneous combustion.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">Combustion of another kind led to the Dec. 13 fire on the conveyors. Eagle Valley Clean Energy spokeswoman Sarah Baker wrote in an e-mail that the fire didn’t damage the boilers or generators, but damaged the conveyors badly enough that it’s going to take another “few months” to repair.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">Shroll noted that the plant at the time of the fire was operating without a town-issued certificate of occupancy, generally a requirement before occupying a home or commercial building.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">In her e-mail, Baker replied that the plant at the time of the fire was in the “...late stage commissioning and final construction, which normally takes a year or more for an industrial power plant and usually happens before a certificate of occupancy is issued at the completion of construction. It had already passed all fire, safety and security inspections and only minor check list items with the town of Gypsum remain, such as the landscaping punch list and completion of a few easements.”</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">Until the plant starts producing power again, Baker wrote that all the employees continue to go to work every day.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">Shroll said the plant and town are negotiating terms of re-opening.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">Meanwhile, Holy Cross Energy is waiting for the plant to come on line again.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">Holy Cross Energy CEO Del Worley said that the plant running at full capacity would generate about 7 percent of the utility’s energy. With the plant under repair, Worley said Holy Cross is buying conventionally-generated power from Xcel Energy. In case any of Holy Cross’s renewable electricity sources is disabled, Xcel automatically fills any gaps in Holy Cross’s power supply.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">Those alternative sources are going to become more important as Holy Cross attempts to meet a goal of having 30 percent of its power generation from renewable sources by 2020.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">Holy Cross chief financial officer Tim Charlton said the company in 2014 met a previous goal of having 20 percent of its power from renewables by 2015.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">Those sources include solar and wind power, as well as a power plant that generates power by burning methane gas from old mine shafts near Somerset, in Gunnison County on the west side of McClure Pass along Colorado Highway 133.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">Worley said meeting the 30 percent goal is going to take a “portfolio” of energy sources, including the Eagle Valley Clean Energy plant.</span></span></p>
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<span><span lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="" xml:lang="">Anonymous (not verified)</span></span>
<span>Mon, 03/23/2015 - 10:12</span>
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Mon, 23 Mar 2015 14:12:11 +0000Anonymous2368 at http://www.energyjustice.netBeetle-Kill Fuels Bioenergy
http://www.energyjustice.net/content/beetle-kill-fuels-bioenergy
<span>Beetle-Kill Fuels Bioenergy</span>
<div class="field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field--item"><p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;"><em>- by Kelly Hatton, July 17, 2014, <a href="http://www.westernconfluence.org/?p=320">Western Confluence</a></em></span></span></p>
<p>[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"242","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","style":"width: 333px; height: 319px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;","title":"Photo: Western Confluence"}}]]<span style="font-family: 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 16px;">On a morning in early March, I ride with Cody Neff, owner of West Range Reclamation (WRR), in his truck from Frisco, Colorado, to the company’s nearby worksite in the White River National Forest. Light is just starting to reach over the high snow-covered slopes surrounding Frisco, but Neff is awake and ready to talk. He tells me that originally it was a love of cattle, not forests, that brought him west to the University of Wyoming, where he studied rangeland ecology while raising beef on a piece of leased land outside Laramie. Now, fifteen years later, he’s running a fifty-employee company and supervising forestry projects on Colorado’s Front Range and in Wyoming’s Medicine Bow National Forest. It’s a position he didn’t necessarily imagine for himself, but one that he has taken on with enthusiasm.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 16px;">Neff and wife, Stephanie—who Neff credits for his success—started WRR in 2001. They saw a need for what Neff calls responsible and beneficial rangeland and forest management.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">From behind the steering wheel, Neff interrupts himself to point out areas on the slopes where the company has completed projects. As he steers up the rough road, he takes phone calls, fields questions, and jots notes for himself on the pad of paper nested in the truck’s console.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">When we turn off the main highway and bump slowly along the temporary dirt road that winds up the mountain, Neff points out tightly packed, small-diameter lodgepole pine as illustrative of the problems of this forest. The stands of thin trees are all the same species, the same age, and all are competing for the same resources, susceptible to the same pests. These stands are an easy target for bark beetles. Out the passenger window, I see the impact. Dead trees stand like skeletons among the green.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">At the road’s end, the forest opens into a clearing where a fleet of machinery cuts, hauls, and chips trees marked by the Forest Service for removal. Neff hands me a hardhat and a neon vest to put on before we walk over to the semi parked on the edge of the clearing.</span></span></p>
<p><!--break--></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">He directs me to the ladder on the side of the truck’s trailer and I climb up. The view from the top offers a panorama of the forest: the distant slopes show cleared patches from other recent forestry projects, while the surrounding dense forest is dotted with dead trees left in the wake of the bark beetle. On the acre of land directly below me, machinery dominates a flat lot covered with snow, stumps, and piles of logs that, a few hours ago, were a stand of lodgepole pine. Before dawn the harvester, a machine headed by a large rotating saw, cut down the trees. A skidder picked up the fallen trees and piled them next to the chipper, which is parked now on the edge of the clearing. As I watch, the skidder’s claw grabs a handful of logs and feeds them into the mouth of the chipper. In front of me, the chips pour out of a high shoot into the back of the trailer.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">In a day’s work, WRR will fill ten to fifteen semi truck trailers with woodchips—about 250 tons. Neff estimates about 70 percent of that is beetle-kill. The destination for these chips is not one of the WRR’s traditional markets: landscaping companies, dowel mills, pallet manufacturers. Rather than line playgrounds or gardens, these chips will be burned to generate electricity, enough to power thousands of Colorado homes.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">The beetle epidemic has created a new, abundant feedstock for energy production in the form of dead trees, and now Rocky Mountain forests are a becoming a testing ground for biomass energy projects. Using dead trees to make electricity and fuel requires harvesting, transporting, and processing massive amounts of wood, and questions remain about the economic, environmental, and social feasibility of bioenergy.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;"><strong>Two giant challenges: forest management and energy production</strong></span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">Aerial photos of Rocky Mountain forests show red and gray patches marking the trail of the bark beetle epidemic. When pine or spruce beetles attack and kill trees, the needles dry out, turn red, and eventually fall, leaving a grey trunk and branches. Bark beetles have affected an estimated 42 million acres of forestland in the Rocky Mountain region since the late 1990s.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">The outbreak raises questions about the future of forests, the impacts of climate change, and risks of wildfire, but the immediate question for forest managers is what to do with the acres of dead or dying stands. Leaving dead trees to eventually fall in the forest can pose risks to hikers and other outdoor recreationists and clog up roads and waterways. Tree removal, on the other hand, is costly and, given the low commercial value of beetle-killed wood, incentive to harvest stands in difficult-to-reach areas is low.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">“We haven’t seen more salvage logging because there’s just a few sawmills here and there, or pellet mills, and the cost of hauling the material hundreds of miles doesn’t pay off,” says University of Wyoming researcher and botanist, Dan Tinker.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">When a forest needs to be thinned and no market for the wood exists, foresters stack cut trees into slash piles. Visitors to the region’s national forests have likely seen these towering heaps of jackstrawed trees along roadsides. According to a US Forest Service report there were a total of 170,000 slash piles in Colorado’s Medicine Bow-Routt, Arapahoe-Roosevelt, and White River National Forests in 2010. Every year, hundreds to thousands of these piles are burned in Colorado’s forests alone.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">Capturing that energy seems obvious. But the logistics still present huge challenges.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">While turning biomass into electricity or fuel is on the rise worldwide, debate still surrounds its sustainability and economic viability. Biomass is any organic matter, including wood, agricultural crops, municipal organic wastes, and manure, used to produce energy. Bioenergy processes burn biomass to generate electricity or heat, or convert biomass into liquid or gaseous fuels, known as biofuel. As efforts to reduce carbon emissions drive the demand for bioenergy, a holistic analysis of carbon cycles and other impacts along entire energy chains requires new research, testing, and long-term monitoring.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">“Biofuel is a pretty hot topic and it’s being well developed in a lot of parts of the country right now,” Tinker says. “But often it’s [made from] agricultural crops, in some cases crops that directly compete with food stock.” The most common biomass sources are agricultural crops, such as corn, sugarcane, and soybeans. (In developing nations, wood is also commonly burned for cooking or heat.)</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">Bioenergy projects in the Rocky Mountains may offer a solution for forest managers grappling with how to manage stands of beetle-kill trees. Currently, the supply is abundant. Because beetle outbreaks are cyclic, Tinker says there could be a continuous supply into the future, though predicting where and how much remains a large unknown.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">Beetle kill “might be a sustainable feedstock for biofuel <em>if</em> the technology exists to take advantage of it, and <em>if</em> [harvesting and burning it is] not environmentally insensitive and damaging, <em>if</em> local communities and stakeholders embrace the idea,” Tinker says. “There are so many ifs.”</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">Entrepreneurs like Neff, and researchers like Tinker, are now testing these “ifs.” New biomass projects are trying to overcome the challenges associated with feedstock location and management, transportation, financing, scale and technology, community receptiveness, and ecological impacts.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;"><strong>Turning trees into energy</strong></span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">The woodchips pouring into the truck bed in the White River National Forest will be hauled 70 miles to a new biomass plant in Gypsum, Colorado.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">Colorado’s Climate Action Plan calls for a 20% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 2020. To help achieve this goal, in 2011 utility company Hope Cross Energy issued a call for proposals from developers for a 10-megawatt renewable energy plant. Hope Cross Energy selected a proposal by Evergreen Clean Energy to contract a biomass plant called Eagle Valley Clean Energy, fed in part by beetle-killed trees.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">The plant started operating in December 2013 but the partnerships that make the plant possible were in place years before. Eagle Valley partnered with WRR while in the development process to supply woodchips for the plant. In 2013, the White River National Forest awarded WRR a ten-year stewardship contract, securing a reliable supply of fuel to power the biomass plant.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">Stewardship contracts differ from timber sales (where contractors bid on stands of commercial lumber) and service contracts (where the Forest Service pays contractors to complete a thinning). Stewardship contracts are, in some ways, a combination of the two. The Forest Service pays contractors for prescribed thinning, and the high-value timber removed offsets some of the cost to the Forest Service. Stewardship contracts may also be awarded for longer periods than service contracts, up to ten years. The contract in the White River National Forest guarantees WWR at least 1,000 acres of forest for thinning each year. This wood, along with waste lumber from a local landfill, powers Eagle Valley Clean Energy.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">Securing a local feedstock is the first hurdle for any biomass project. The second is getting the feedstock to the plant. For Neff’s operation, transportation is costly, and therefore, carefully considered. To remain profitable, the company trucks wood no farther than one hundred miles.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">The Eagle Valley Clean Energy plant produces electricity using boiler technology. It burns the woodchips to heat water into high-pressure steam, which spins the blades of a turbine-driven generator. Boiler technology is the most common method of converting biomass into electricity. The technology is tested and reliable, making it a low-risk investment.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">“We carefully evaluated a broad spectrum of technology for this project,” Evergreen Clean Energy chairman Dean Rostrom says. “In the end, we concluded that ‘old school’ boiler technology, with the addition of latest innovations for efficient combustion and emissions control, offered the best choice. It has been proven over many decades, is far beyond the testing and proving stage of the other emerging technologies, is more cost efficient, has a wealth of experts available for engineering and constructing, as well as ongoing repairs and improvements, and ultimately is the most financeable and reliable technology available.”</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">Partnerships, a reliable feedstock, financing and well-tested technology were the big factors that got this project off the ground, making it the first all-biomass plant in the state.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">While Eagle Valley offers one model for future bioenergy plants, it’s not the only way. Renewable energy company Cool Planet will soon begin to test a different method of bioenergy production, also using beetle-killed wood.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">Cool Planet takes a different approach to securing and transporting feedstock. Rather than setting up one centralized plant, the company uses “micro-refineries”—temporary plants that can be installed near a feedstock—to manufacture biofuels, which are trucked away and sold, like fossil fuels, to burn in vehicles or to generate heat. The company’s demo site in California looks less like an industrial plant and more like a row of parked trailers on a half-acre of land. The model cuts transportation time and costs and could make biomass projects more feasible in out-of-the-way areas.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">The technology is relatively new. The company has run small tests using corn stover and non-food energy crops, and in the next few years, they’ll scale up the model, building micro-refineries throughout the Rocky Mountain region.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">Cool Planet makes fuel using technology called “bio-fractionation.” This technology is used to produce fuels through a process known as pyrolysis in which the micro-refineries heat up woody biomass—in this case beetle-killed trees—under extreme pressure. That forces hydrocarbons to steam out of the wood. Next, a catalyst facilitates thermochemical decomposition that converts these complex hydrocarbons into simple hydrocarbons. The process results in two end products: biofuel and biochar, porous chunks of leftover plant matter.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">Farmers can plow biochar into their soil where it helps retain water and nutrients. In addition, because biochar is pure carbon, burying it in the soil keeps carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">Despite the small size of plants, the output is significant. Each micro-refinery has the potential to produce 10 million gallons of fuel per year.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;"><strong>Problem solving for bioenergy projects</strong></span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">Eagle Valley Clean Energy’s energy capacity, 10 megawatts, is minimal in comparison with coal-fired power stations, which average 500 megawatts. This plant’s small size is by design. If bioenergy continues to expand in the region, developers will have to address issues of scale. Potentially, small biomass plants could be built throughout the region. Scaling plants to produce more electricity, however, would require careful planning in terms of feedstock location and relative supply.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">In an article published in <em>Science </em>in 2010, Tom Richard addresses the challenges of scaling up biomass energy projects to increase worldwide renewable energy production without detrimental environmental impacts. “The logistics of harvest, storage, processing, and transport weave a complex web of interactions that will require massive investments in research, development, demonstration and deployment to scale up biomass energy systems to meet societal goals,” Richard writes.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">Both Eagle Valley and Cool Planet have developed ways to address the technical logistics of bioenergy production, but how bioenergy projects interact with ecosystems and local communities presents a new set of questions.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">This is where Tinker comes in—he and other researchers from the University of Wyoming and four other universities have partnered with Cool Planet to assess the feasibility and the environmental and social impacts of biofuel production. The consortium, the Bioenergy Alliance Network of the Rockies (BANR), received a $10 million US Department of Agriculture grant to study biofuel production from beetle kill wood.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">Teams of researchers from regional universities are working under five categories: feedstock supply; feedstock logistics and processing; system performance and sustainability; education; and extension, outreach, health and safety. Tinker is leading the task group on ecological assessment, part of the system performance and sustainability team. His team will analyze the environmental impact of biofuel production.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">Over the five-year research period, BANR will gather the data necessary to measure the overall carbon footprint of Cool Planet’s biofuel production. Currently, BANR is assessing potential feedstock sources. The goal is to conduct trials on forests in a range of ownerships, including national, state, and private forests.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">After the first trials, Tinker and his team will assess the environmental impacts of harvesting the trees. Tinker is optimistic about the project but careful not to jump to any conclusions about its environmental sustainability.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">“Anything that has a potential environmental impact, that’s what my task group is charged with. The goal for this is to have no negative impact, hopefully zero impact or even a positive impact, so we’ll be monitoring all aspects of ecosystem structure and function—hydrology of soil nutrient recycling, biodiversity—to make sure that we’re doing it responsibly, and if it’s not [environmentally benign], then that’s what we’re going to report,” says Tinker.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">Sarah Strauss, an anthropologist at the University of Wyoming is also part of the BANR team. Like Tinker, Strauss is a co-director of the project. She is also leader of the health and safety task group and a member of the regional scale socioeconomic and policy analysis group. Her research will focus on how communities perceive biofuel production, and how they see the future of local forests. She and her team will look at historical community archives and conduct surveys and interviews.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">As a social scientist, Strauss is interested in the human dimensions of climate change. How climate change causes, impact, and need for solutions are perceived can affect how projects like bioenergy production are viewed. “It’s important for people to understand this [climate change] as a human problem,” Strauss says. The BANR project, “allows us to look at climate change in terms of impacts and drivers as well as solutions.”</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">Strauss notes that communities in the Rocky Mountain region do not have homogenous perceptions of forest values and uses. She gives the example of a Montana community with a long-standing timber-driven economy, as opposed to a Wyoming community where there has been little timber industry activity in the past. In the Montana community, residents might be more receptive to beetle-kill-fed bioenergy projects, whereas communities without a history of timbering, and the supporting infrastructure, might resist such development.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">These attitudes reflect how people view forestlands—as intrinsically valuable, as recreational land, as an economic resource, or as some combination of the three—and influence how forests are managed. Understanding how communities throughout the Rocky Mountain region think about climate change and forest management could steer location of future bioenergy projects and help the BANR team target areas for educational outreach.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">The goal is to take a big-picture approach, to analyze biofuel production not only as an economic endeavor but also to zoom out and look at interactions in the “web” <em>Science</em> contributor Richard refers to.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;"><strong>Lingering concerns</strong></span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">Our ride down the mountain is stop-and-go, not because of ruts and divots, but because, for Neff, this remote road is like a neighborhood. We stop to meet a crewmember on his way to the worksite and again to check in with an employee clearing debris from the roadside. When we come across a snowshoer, Neff puts the truck in park and hops out. “Beautiful day!” he greets the man and introduces himself.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">For Neff, spreading the word about WRR’s work and the biomass power plant is a high priority. Not everyone is in favor of burning wood to generate electricity. The strongest criticisms of bioenergy production fit into three categories: concerns about climate change, air quality, and impacts to forest ecosystems.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">Some critics argue that bioenergy production, which is heavily reliant on fossil fuels for planting, fertilizing, harvesting, transporting, and processing, contributes as much to climate change as generating electricity from fossil fuels. Using beetle-killed trees instead of agricultural crops eliminates the energy needs of planting and fertilizing, but the equipment used to harvest and transport the wood does run on diesel, and the plant itself emits carbon during operation.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">Bioenergy supporters claim that biomass is both renewable and carbon neutral, and therefore better for the environment than fossil fuel energy. All of the carbon released to the atmosphere when the biomass burns was captured out of the atmosphere during the plant’s life.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">Strauss believes that new methods need to be tested in order to find viable alternatives to fossil fuel energy and solutions for climate change. She points out that the controlled high-temperature pyrolysis process used by Cool Planet and other companies to produce energy from biomass is far better for the environment than the current National Forest policy of burning slash piles and sending that carbon directly into the atmosphere. “We need to be looking at all the alternatives,” she says.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">Some local community members and organizations are worried about how the plant’s emissions will affect human health. In a letter from Colorado’s chapter of the American Lung Association, Natalia Swalnick describes how particulate matter, carbon monoxide, and volatile organic compound emissions from bioenergy plants can rival or exceed those of coal plants if not properly controlled. “If biomass is combusted, state of the art pollution controls must be required,” Swalnick writes.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">The Eagle Valley Clean Energy plant uses scrubber technology that offers the “latest innovations for efficient combustion and emissions control,” says Rostrum.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">Proponents of bioenergy point out that burning the material in a power plant is no worse, and possibly cleaner than, burning slash piles on the forest floor without controls.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">The third critique of bioenergy is how it affects ecosystems. In 2012, the community group Stop Gypsum Biomass wrote, “Industrial-scale biomass incineration is one of the greatest threats to functioning forest ecosystems today.” Forest ecosystems provide clean air and water, erosion control, and fertile soils. The group is concerned that timber harvest could damage these systems and ruin wildlife habitat. Removing dead and downed trees, for example, could eliminate habitat for species like woodpeckers and owls that nest in snags. Over the next five years, Tinker and his colleagues at BANR will study these impacts, and hopefully, provide answers to these concerns.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">Meanwhile out on the forest, every encounter is an opportunity for Neff. He’s proud of his employees, of WRR’s reputation with the Forest Service, and of the work he’s doing, and he’s eager to talk about all of it. He knows that not everyone supports harvesting beetle-killed trees for energy production, but to Neff, the criticism is a matter of misunderstanding.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">“There’s a large population who really looks down on what we do and feel that we’re in this for the money or trying to get everything we can out of the forest,” he says. “But we’re up here because we believe we’re helping sustain and promote a natural resource that we love more than anything, for many generations to come, and that feels really good to us.”</span></span></p>
<p> </p>
</div><span><span lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="" xml:lang="">Anonymous (not verified)</span></span>
<span>Thu, 08/14/2014 - 16:33</span>
<div class="field field--name-taxonomy-vocabulary-2 field--type-entity-reference field--label-above">
<div class="field--label">Tags</div> <div class="field--items"> <div class="field--item"><a href="http://www.energyjustice.net/index.php/tags/beetles" hreflang="en">beetles</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="http://www.energyjustice.net/index.php/tags/beetle" hreflang="en">beetle</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="http://www.energyjustice.net/index.php/tags/national-forest" hreflang="en">national forest</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="http://www.energyjustice.net/index.php/tags/colorado" hreflang="en">colorado</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="http://www.energyjustice.net/index.php/tags/gypsum" hreflang="en">gypsum</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="http://www.energyjustice.net/index.php/tags/eagle-valley-clean-energy" hreflang="en">eagle valley clean energy</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="http://www.energyjustice.net/index.php/taxonomy/term/2" hreflang="en">Biomass</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="http://www.energyjustice.net/index.php/tags/bioenergy" hreflang="en">bioenergy</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="http://www.energyjustice.net/index.php/taxonomy/term/41" hreflang="en">climate change</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="http://www.energyjustice.net/index.php/tags/pollution" hreflang="en">pollution</a></div> </div> </div>Thu, 14 Aug 2014 20:33:38 +0000Anonymous2198 at http://www.energyjustice.net220,000 acres of Colorado’s White River National Forest to be Logged for Biomass Energy
http://www.energyjustice.net/content/220000-acres-colorado%E2%80%99s-white-river-national-forest-be-logged-biomass-energy
<span>220,000 acres of Colorado’s White River National Forest to be Logged for Biomass Energy</span>
<div class="field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field--item"><p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;"><strong>Demand for biomass energy in Colorado will require logging in 220,000 acres of the White River National Forest. -Ed.</strong></span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;"><em>- by Allen Best, March 6, 2014. Source: <a href="http://mountaintownnews.net/2014/03/06/problems-and-promises-of-biomass-in-colorado/">Mountain Town News</a></em></span></span></p>
<p>[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"40","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","height":"360","style":"width: 333px; height: 250px; float: left; margin-left: 10px; margin-right: 10px;","width":"480"}}]]<span style="font-family: 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 14px;">For most of the last decade, Coloradans have been talking about how to make good use of their mountain forests, dying and gray. Something is finally happening.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 14px;">In Gypsum, 140 miles west of Denver, a biomass mill began operations in December, burning wood to create 10 megawatts of round-the-clock electricity.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">In Colorado Springs, the city utility began mixing biomass with coal in January to produce 4.5 megawatts of power.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">In Pagosa Springs, a 5-megawatt biomass plant may be launched next year, producing one-sixth of the base-load demand in Archuleta County</span></span></p>
<p><!--break--></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">And at Xcel Energy’s headquarters in Denver, environmental officials are sorting through proposals for a 2-megawatt biomass demonstration plant. The utility wants to understand the technology, the problems and promises.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">This isn’t much electricity compared to the 1,426 megawatts generated by the <a href="http://www.xcelenergy.com/About_Us/Our_Company/Power_Generation/Comanche_Generating_Station">Comanche coal-fired complex</a> at Pueblo and the 1,139 megawatts at the <a href="http://www.craigdailypress.com/news/2013/sep/21/craig-station-ranks-number-one-carbon-polluting-po/">Craig generating station</a>.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 20.6719989776611px;">But biomass plants can and should be part of the electrical mix. In providing a market for woody material, they can make forests less vulnerable to fires like the ones that have killed nine people and destroyed 1,164 homes along the Front Range over the last two years.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">Biomass also displaces burning of fossil fuels, reducing emissions of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas. That’s worth something, maybe a lot to Glenwood Springs-based <a href="http://www.holycross.com/">Holy Cross Energy</a>. It is paying an unspecified amount for electricity produced by the Gypsum plant in an effort to reduce its carbon footprint. It expects to be at 23 percent renewables later this year, best in Colorado among co-ops.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">Environmental skepticism</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">Colorado environmental groups, however, are skeptical that biomass plants will actually lower carbon dioxide emissions. “We’re saying we want to see the analysis of greenhouse gas impacts,” says Gwen Farnsworth of <a href="http://westernresourceadvocates.org/">Western Resource Advocates</a>.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">Biomass clearly can reduce greenhouse gas emissions by displacing fossil fuels, says <a href="http://soilcrop.agsci.colostate.edu/faculty-2/keith-paustain/">Keith Paustian</a>, a professor of soil ecology at Colorado State University. “There are questions as to what degree you do that, and obviously, you want as low a carbon footprint as possible,” he says.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">Paustian hopes a more detailed accounting of carbon impacts will be a byproduct of the $10 million research project he is leading. The project, the <a href="http://banr.colostate.edu/">Bioenergy Alliance Network of the Rockies</a>, seeks to examine the potential for conversion of the 22 million acres of beetle-impacted wood in the Rocky Mountains into bioenergy.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">An even broader fear among some environmental groups is that public lands will be managed to feed the hunger of biomass plants, instead of the biomass plants being a useful tool for curbing fire risk. “We don’t want the tail wagging the dog,” says Sloan Shoemaker, director of the Carbondale-based <a href="http://www.wildernessworkshop.org/">Wilderness Workshop</a>.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">If <a href="http://evergreencleanenergy.com/eagle-valley-clean-energy">Eagle Valley Clean Energy</a>, developer of the plant at Gypsum, sticks to its projections, that won’t be a problem. When seeking local support, it said that at least 30 percent of wood will come from landfills, another 20 percent or more from private lands, and a minimum of 40 percent from state or federal lands.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">The plant is designed to operate for 30 to 40 years, long after forests now gray have become green once again.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">Using stewardship contracts</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">Stewardship contracts are one mechanism for delivering wood from federal lands to biomass plants. Authorized by Congress in 1998 as an alternative to timber sales, they allow for a more nuanced management of national forests than timber sales.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">For example, a stewardship contract across the <a href="http://www.fs.usda.gov/whiteriver">White River National Forest</a> calls for the agency to pay a contractor, Western Range Resources, $1,500 per acre for 1,000 acres per year for wood removal. Much of that wood will end up at the biomass plant in Gypsum.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">Through this program, the Forest Service hopes to also get aspen forests on the periphery of the Flat Tops Wilderness Area cut, to allow for more wildlife habitat but also to reduce wildfire threat in Summit County, near Breckenridge and also near Green Mountain Reservoir.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">“There’s a lot of doghair in Summit County,” says Jan Burke, silviculturist on the White River National Forest, referring to dense forests of small trees. “And a lot of standing and falling dead trees are rotted out at this point. They have no merchantable value as far as saw timbers.”</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">The <a href="http://www.denverwater.org/supplyplanning/watersupply/partnershipuSFS/">partnership between Denver Water and the Forest Service</a> is another model for reducing fire risk while producing wood for biomass plants. In that partnership, each agency chipped in $16.5 million to address dead and falling trees on 6,000 acres upstream of Dillon Reservoir, one of metro Denver’s primary water sources.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">Burke says fuels’ removal for biomass and other purposes altogether will probably occur on just 10 percent of the 2.2 million acres of the White River National Forest, which extends from Breckenridge to Meeker and Carbondale.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">Fire risk is not totally eliminated. The right combination of climatic conditions in the higher, subalpine forests will someday yield a fire comparable to the one that burned 1.2 million acres in and near Yellowstone National Park in 1988, says Tony Cheng, director of the Colorado Forest Restoration Institute.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">But land managers do hope to provide firefighters safe zones from which to fight major fires. Using the slash piles from thinning operations creates an added benefit, says Cheng.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">Getting buy-in at Pagosa Springs</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">At Pagosa Springs, fire was frequent prior to about 1900. Growing seasons there are longer, the climate more moist and soils rich, all of this conspiring to produce bounteous forests of ponderosa pine and now, because of fire suppression, white fir. Houses now sprinkle the private lands along and sometimes on in-holdings within the national forest, a combustible and sometimes deadly mix.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">In creating the stewardship contract on the San Juan National Forest, foresters identified forest types within a 50-mile radius of Pagosa they wanted treated, then stripped out wilderness and roadless areas. That left 140,000 acres for the stewardship contract.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">The buyer, local entrepreneur J.R. Ford, can harvest wood from 1,500 acres per year. He is required to pay the U.S. government for trees greater than 10 inches in diameter. He will mill these logs at a sawmill beginning in April, shipping the blocks of wood to a sawmill elsewhere for refined sawing. For trees of less than 10 inches in diameter, the government will pay Ford. He can leave no slash piles of trimmings behind.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">In addition, Ford will draw upon another 300 to 400 acres of private land. This will provide 50,000 tons of wood chips for the biomass plant he hopes will go online next year.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">Steve Hartvigsen, supervisory forester for the Pagosa Ranger District, says the stewardship contract will yield no permanent roads. “That may mean temporary timbering roads, but they must be rehabbed,” he says of the stewardship process.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">The <a href="http://www.sanjuancitizens.org/">San Juan Citizens Alliance</a>, a grassroots environmental group, has endorsed Ford’s biomass plans. “That scaling is what made us comfortable. It wasn’t a 20-megawatt deal,” says Jimbo Buickerood, the group’s public lands coordinator. That smaller plant results in shorter distances for trucks to haul wood. Experts say biomass must commonly draw wood from within 50 miles, to contain deal-killing truck-hauling costs.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">Whether Ford goes ahead with the biomass plant depends partly upon how much Durango-based <a href="http://www.lpea.com/">La Plata Electric</a> will pay for the electricity. Ford says he needs 15 to 20 percent more than what the La Plata and other electrical cooperatives pay wholesale provider Tri-State Generation and Transmission.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">“The coops are paying between 7 and 7.5 cents per kilowatt and are selling it for 11 or 12 cents, depending upon the area,” Ford says.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">Smaller is better</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">In Europe, biomass production is far more common than in the United States. There’s a good reason: Europe has fewer fossil fuels at its disposal. All electricity is more expensive, generally 14 to 18 cents per kilowatt.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">All biomass plants in Colorado contemplate subsidies. The Gypsum biomass plant got a $250,000 biomass utilization grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Plus, it enjoys $40 million in loan guarantees from the Rural Utilities Service, the same agency that financed many of the co-ops’ coal-fired power plants.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;"><a href="http://www.xcelenergy.com/">Xcel Energy</a> also expects electricity from biomass will cost more, and is seeking approval from the state’s Public Utilities Commission to pass along higher costs to customers. The utility is seeking plants that use gasifier technology, as is planned at Pagosa Springs, instead of the boiler technology now in place at Gypsum. It has fewer emissions and uses no water. That, says Kathryn Valdez, manager of environmental policy for Xcel, is an important consideration if plants are to be located in places that will minimize haul distances.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">Xcel specifies just a 2-megawatt plant for its 10-year demonstration plant.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">Phil Kastelic, of <a href="http://www.colofe.com/Pages/default.aspx">Colorado Forest & Energy</a>, a company proposing to build a demonstration plant in Gilpin County, says that size matters. “There just aren’t that many places where you can put five-megawatt of generation and have local feedstock to support it.”</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">In other words, biomass plants aren’t the answer to everything that ails us. They won’t immediately turn our forests green, nor will they alone replace the fossil-fuel plants that are fouling the atmosphere with greenhouse gases.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">But biomass has another attribute. Think of it as the energy equivalent of community agriculture. The 20th century was all about bigger and more centralized production of everything. This creates huge supply lines, mile-long coal trains going to plants, and high-voltage power lines leaving them.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family:times new roman,times,serif;">It’s easy to think of water originating in the tap, electricity in the outlet, without broader consequences. Smaller sources of power generation, close to their locations of use, keep us in touch with the spider’s web of energy, allowing us to understand the implications of our use.</span></span></p>
</div><span><span lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="" xml:lang="">Anonymous (not verified)</span></span>
<span>Wed, 03/12/2014 - 14:35</span>
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<div class="field--label">Tags</div> <div class="field--items"> <div class="field--item"><a href="http://www.energyjustice.net/index.php/taxonomy/term/2" hreflang="en">Biomass</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="http://www.energyjustice.net/index.php/tags/forests" hreflang="en">forests</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="http://www.energyjustice.net/index.php/tags/colorado" hreflang="en">colorado</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="http://www.energyjustice.net/index.php/tags/beetles" hreflang="en">beetles</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="http://www.energyjustice.net/index.php/tags/rockies" hreflang="en">rockies</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="http://www.energyjustice.net/index.php/tags/gypsum" hreflang="en">gypsum</a></div> </div> </div>Wed, 12 Mar 2014 18:35:47 +0000Anonymous2072 at http://www.energyjustice.net Deprecated: Directive 'allow_url_include' is deprecated in Unknown on line 0