Biomass?

ShearHeadMS · Nov 30, 2012

hey guys, got a tough question here. whats the deal with all this talk about Biomass lately? i talked to a good freind of mine across the road who runs a chipping buisness and he says he sends more of his product to plants like Masonite than he does the mill. im not sure about the biomass thing but i know for the mill you have to have decently clean chips, but i guess the stuff they take to the plant is anyting you can stick in the grinder. if anybody has anymore info on this subject please chime in.

Scooby074 · Dec 1, 2012

Biomass is popular in europe. Its basically using "unusable" biological materials to burn, to generate steam or heat. Things like straw from farms and branches/waste and tops from logging operations. Its starting to catch on more here. We have at least one plant that takes biofuel from the forests on lands where there is harvesting and uses it to generate electricity.

When I worked in a sawmill, our kilns were heated by steam that was generated by a large boiler... Its fuel was "hog fuel". Basically anything that went through the hog chipper... Bark from the debarker, off cuts, slabwood etc. etc. I guess you could say it was Biomass, just not in the modern usage where the fuel is actively gathered as biomass direct from the forest.

In europe biomass is even used in houses (also catching on here). There are special chippers (videos on youtube) where you feed in "sticks" of junk wood and it spits out briquette sized chunks of biomass fuel for your home. And there are people who burn corn and other biomass as well.

ddigger · Dec 1, 2012

Here in Nor Cal, we send as much of our green waste as possible to a bio mass plant. They pay us by the ton for the material. They will take nearly anything logs brush and stumps, as long as they are clean.

ShearHeadMS · Dec 1, 2012

ok thanks for the info guys, i wonder if there is a plant in Mississippi, and if not could you ship it by freight car?

yellowdogsvc · Dec 1, 2012

We had a biomass (pellet) manufacturer go belly up right in my neck of the woods. I think machine breakdowns and trucking costs sank them. I've seen a few plants for sell. The concept is fine but it is also competing with relatively cheap natural gas in my areas.

I would love to find a way to turn our cedar trees into cost-effective biomass for fuel but Texas already has relatively cheap energy and very few rail lines to make transport economical. I talked to some engineers from Europe who were going to invest in biomass burning powerplants but they too were looking at expensive trucking costs to get the fuel to the plants.

ShearHeadMS · Dec 1, 2012

oh yeah, cant beat cheap fossil fuels, they just opened a coal mine about 80 miles from me, and MS power is building the biggest coal plant in America or so they say right next to it, no rail cars! the dump trucks just drive up and dump it on the hopper!

tift104 · Dec 2, 2012

We have a a pellet plant not far from us. They take pulp wood and pelletize it for heating fuel. All of the pellets are then shipped to Europe. They accept mainly pine pulp wood which is good for the land owner because they take the tree up to a 2 inch top. This leaves virtually no logging debree left on the deck for the land owner to clean up. Wood that is shipped to the pellet plant pays the same as pulp wood prices currently.

deniscimafinc · Dec 5, 2012

I have been wondering about biomass as well, especially the sector of growing trees and "harvesting" them for energy generation. What I'm curious about is the efficiency of the whole process: how much energy invested (planting, "fields" maintenance, harvesting, transport, equipment and plant infrastructure maintenance) vs how much energy produced. How much does the distance from the plant impacts this efficiency? How much does intensive usage of fast-growing tree/shrub species impacts the land? How can be compared today the final cost per unit of biomass energy vs cost of alternate sources? I'm under the impression it's not that much interesting in terms of possible profit, unless a rather large number of specific conditions are met at the same time. If some of you have information on the matter, links to website, and the like, it'd be interesting...

yellowdogsvc · Dec 9, 2012

What I looked into and talked with engineers about was the feasibility of clearing things like juniper and mesquite for pellet production in Texas. One conclusion I came to was that to be efficient, the processing or power plants needed to be relatively close to where the work was going on to compete with the already "cheap" energy Texans enjoy. I love the idea of biomass but see the costs of harvesting, manufacture, maintenance, trucking, and plant costs prohibitive. Maybe I'm missing something but it seems you would need multiple plants near centers of usable trees to keep transport costs down unless your harvesting and processing was near rail lines.

I know that if you have a windmill generator or solar panels, you can sell the electricity back to the power company. I imagine small plants set up near harvesting activities could process then generate power and then tie in and sell back to the grid but it can't be cheap to set that up. I have someone in the power industry that I can get some answers from and will try and ask some of these questions. It's an interesting topic because I hate to burn things and don't like seeing brush go to waste AND in my state there is an overabundance of juniper, mesquite and other trees that can be harvested.

ShearHeadMS · Dec 9, 2012

yeah im in the wrong part of the country to be thinking about green fuel, they just opened a lignite coal mine about 100 miles from me that will last 500 years or so they say....... but anyway, i think im getting to far ahead of myself and i need to just work on getting a machine and keeping to my means, been looking at a good little Cat skid, and a kabota excavator. going to be meeting with Denis Cimaf this week and will be looking into what they have and what they can offer. thanks for all the input guys, it really means alot!