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Wood-to-Energy Town Hall Meetings

Wood-to-Energy Town Hall Meetings Well Attended

Wood-to-Energy Town Hall Meetings

Our first series of town hall meetings to explore community sentiment regarding wood-to-energy enterprises in the Missouri Ozarks were well attended.

Landowners, sawmill operators and community leaders were introduced to woody biomass concepts, resource availability, energy conversion platforms, as well as the potential benefits and risks to developing a woody bio-based industry in their region.

Below are the PowerPoint presentations, fact sheets and case studies from the town hall meeting.

Cuba

PowerPoint Presentations (PDF)

Fact Sheets from Forest Bioenergy (PDF)

Fact Sheets and Case Studies from University of Florida Extension (PDF)

Following the speakers' presentations, attendees broke out into smaller, facilitated discussion groups to explore their thoughts in greater depth.

The following are bulleted highlights from those discussions.

Thayer Community Seminar-Breakout Summaries, April 22, 2008

Group I

Opportunities

  • Possible use of switchgrass, sorghum and other grass and grain residue.
  • Use hydraulics to densify materials; 'Presto logs', briquettes, pellets.
  • Use wood for process energy to further process additional wood products.
  • Use sawmill waste to produce electricity or steam to operate mills and dry kilns.
  • Tree tops and limbs (28 percent of tree's cellulose left in the woods) are main resource still available for biomass processing.
  • Possibility of small-scale 'in-woods' bio-oil production.
  • Sustainable harvesting does not add to greenhouse gas problem.
  • Potential for landowners to aggregate supply.

Challenges

  • Need a net energy gain.
  • Need to consider impact of harvesting on soil and wildlife.
  • Processing grass for bioenergy could lead to reduction of cattle herds.
  • Need a long-term commitment from cellulose 'suppliers'.
  • What will it cost to buy equipment needed to process tops?
  • How can we utilize periodic episodes of widespread mortality?
  • May cause some existing wood industries to disappear.
  • Who will pay the most?
  • Sustainable management is needed.
  • Thinning needs to be affordable to buy the equipment.

Group II

Opportunities

  • Electrical generation.
  • Public heating/cooling project; courthouse, school

    Challenges

  • Impact on existing wood products industry.
  • Whole tree logging could damage the trees left in the forest.
  • Dollars from wood.
  • Poor logging practices.
  • Fossil fuel prices could create pressure on forest.
  • Clean air could become an issue near bioenergy plants.
  • Impact on water use.
  • Impact on wildlife.
  • Impact on tourism.

    • Group III

    Opportunities

  • Small schools and hospitals using wood waste.
  • Local communities looking at wood biomass as a secondary energy source.
  • Could create incentives for land owners to maintain quality forest.

    • Challenges

  • Need to develop Best Management Practices to protect environment.
  • What type of management plan for biomass is best?
  • Taking waste wood to a central location, i.e. co-op.
  • Have the schools do energy assessments for wood waste.
  • Looking at other enterprises (co-ops) using wood as an energy source.
    • Break-out groups

    Cuba Community Seminar-Breakout Summaries, March 6, 2008

    Group I

    Opportunities

    • Smaller heating and cooling systems first
    • Create a "marketing signal" to landowners in addition to the mills
    • Create a market for tops and small wood environmentally sustainable
    • Pellet business should work
    • Coordinate wood energy with fuels from recycled paper and other biomass

    Challenges

    • Sufficient and dependable supply
    • Missouri's net metering law
    • Need to maintain soil quality
    • Harvesting equipment is costly
    • Fear if new, potentially less reliable, energy systems

    Group II

    Opportunities

    • Schools heating and cooling systems
    • Electrical generation
    • Rail/interstate/infra-structure participants believed they had good infrastructure at Cuba
    • Lots of wood forest growth is 3X harvest
    • Urban waste
    • Need landowner incentives - to manage the forest
    • Recycling
    • Need education for absentee landowners/mailing

    Challenges

    • Are people ready for it?
      Kingsford uses almost all of the sawmill residue
    • Dollars to get into the business
    • Equipment (harvest) cost lots of money
    • Residue already being used
    • Need to stay small - use residue that is available to the project
    • Transportation is costly
    • Quality of wood
    • Chip mills - do not want to see the management resulting from past chip mills
    • Need incentives ($) to manage forest
    • Forest ownership fragmentation

    Fredericktown Community Seminar-Breakout Summaries, March 7, 2008

    Group I

    Opportunities

    • Utilize Mill Springs Chipmill Equipment
    • Create income for loggers
    • Ameren is seeking opportunities to generate biomass energy syngas or pyrolysis oils
    • New income source for landowners
    • Create incentives to keep young people in home communities - related job creation
    • Retrofitting sawdust boilers to chips
    • Wood pellets for Europe

    Challenges

    • Need sufficient transportation systems
    • Need dependable, sustainable feedstock supply
    • Overcome "It won't work syndrome," that says we can't accomplish something we haven't done before
    • Lack of a critical path analysis, need to determine:
      • what is most possible
      • what is easiest to accomplish
    • This is needed to prevent going down paths that over-commit resources or create a single-project that precludes future growth or development
    • Small landowners have difficulty arranging for loggers

    Group II

    Opportunities

    • Syngas plant - need to create one to produce energy
    • Small diameter products
    • Use existing heat from lime plant
    • Small diameter products this was in reference to using small diameter wood products to make furniture such as cedar benches.
    • Urban waste
    • Direct combustion-wood gas

    Challenges

    • Competing with existing sources for woody biomass
    • Private land management - what happens to good management?
    • Fuel prices could force a newly created plant to go out of business (i.e., if sawdust goes up a school could not afford to buy it).
    • Government money-existing industry – what happens when the government gives a large grant to an outside source to build a bioenergy plant in Mo.
    • Residue prices are going up
    • Net metering – need the electric companies to solve this problem.

    Group III

    Opportunities

    • Syngas as a new opportunity
    • Storage medium for wood energy systems
    • Local state institutions need to utilize biomass as a energy source
    • Need for community leadership
      • Cultural issues
      • Local issues
    • Electrical power generated from 'Green Power' sources
    • Build more small user facilities using biofuel
    • Who else is installing boilers that could use sawdust
    • Wood technology is getting better for mass production
    • Lots of large tract which would be good for growing biomass
    • Biomass can bring electrical cost down
    • More electrical power is needed
    • How can vast underground water supply be better utilized
    • Explore application for cogeneration facilities
    • Door-to-door survey and information for home owners to improve their conservation of energy

    Challenges

    • Bidding is a bad process
    • Low-grade forest product not cost effective
    • Removing trees can damage remaining trees
    • Transportation cost
    • High and low price fluctuation is good and bad
    • Animal waste sold for $100 per ton in the community (resulting from high cost for commercial fertilizer)
    • We need to manage our forest land
    • Securing tax credits for our forest
    • Securing tax credits for restoring forest-replanting
    • Problem, why does tax credits for burning biomass increase until reaching oil reaches $70/ton and then starts to decline?
    • Bottom line plant to care for our forests for the long-term
    • Balancing expectations of landowners and harvesters while planning and implementing good forestry management

    Chip Mill II?

    The Missouri Ozarks experienced a similar opportunity to utilize small-diameter, low-quality wood back in the mid-1990's when two large-capacity chip mills began operations in Mill Spring and Scott City. Due to some poorly executed harvests, Missourians called upon the Governor who assembled a Chip Mill Committee to investigate the issue.

    While this was a hotly debated topic at the time, the Committee (consisting of large and small landowners, large and small wood processors, professional foresters, environmental groups and state agencies charged with managing Missouri's natural resources) produced a thorough report that captured the essence of both the opportunities and challenges of managing the state's forestlands.

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