The Fuels for Schools project in Montana relies on a chip-gathering system. Photo © Michael Tenner
Tiny towns like Walden, Colorado, are not unusual across rural areas in the West. It’s not far from Steamboat Springs—a popular tourist destination—but it doesn’t receive many visitors. It’s surrounded by federal forests, where past management practices have led to a deterioration of forest health. And, it has a struggling remnant of a timber products industry that must be fleet–footed and creative in order to survive.
Like most United States citizens, the residents of Walden flip a switch in their homes and the lights come on. And like most of the country, they rely on coal—and the miners, engineers and power plant operators that harness its compressed energy—for that convenience.
The local utility that serves the area, the Mountain Parks Electric Cooperative, has a long–term contract with a large coal–burning power producer that limits its ability to choose the source of the power it delivers, or to generate its own electricity. But the contract allows for some wiggle room. The small utility can generate a portion—about 5 percent—of its total load in any way it sees fit.
The managers of the utility see rural Walden as an opportunity. They are working to install a small biomass energy plant using cutting–edge technology at a local, family–owned mill. A 4–megawatt plant would supply the mill with heat for its kilns and electrical power for its machines—lowering its monthly energy bill and keeping the expense in the local economy. The surplus electricity, about equal to the amount consumed in the area, would be fed into the grid. The excess heat generated would be captured and distributed to local businesses, perhaps a complex of greenhouses, drastically increasing the project’s energy efficiency.
If the plan is successful, it will be a small step, but not an insignificant one, toward a vision of employing woody biomass—mill wastes and non–merchantable wood from the forest—to help revolutionize how some locales generate and use energy.
The Walden project fits with Brett KenCairn’s idea of the direction that energy infrastructure needs to head—especially in forested rural and tribal areas. KenCairn is the founder of Community Energy Systems, an enterprise devoted to helping stimulate sustainable energy and forestry projects in rural communities, and he’s been working on the project in Walden from the beginning. He sees many advantages to the project: it would be locally owned and operated, make efficient use of an ecologically and economically secure fuel supply and be a part of a broader economic development plan based on the community’s strengths and needs. He sees the project as setting a precedent that could be replicated in other small towns.
“If we can get the Walden plant online,” says KenCairn, “we can be the first community to be completely supported by green energy.”
SIGNIFICANT POTENTIAL
The potential of capturing the energy from forests has caught the attention of a number of players. Rural schools have switched to wood–chip boilers in order to save on fuel costs and, at the same time, support local wood products industries. Pellet stoves, fueled by compressed bits of dried wood wastes, are growing in popularity as a substitute for natural gas furnaces. States and utilities are promoting biomass–fueled electricity as a way to diversify their energy portfolios. It’s also come to the attention of large multinational corporations that sense the time is right to expend capital on fuels that can make a dent in petroleum imports.
Biomass operations are part of what many see as the future of sustainable energy: smaller–scale energy facilities that are locally owned, use renewable fuels and are distributed across the landscape. And, particularly in the largely federally managed forests of the West, proponents say a network of small–scale heat and power generators using woody biomass could also act as a tool to help restore forest health and resilience.
But some folks have reservations about using forests as fuel energy, seeing the plan as yet another pressure on ecosystems that have already been damaged for short–term economic gain.
“The interest and demand for forests to provide sustained energy is potentially the worst nightmare for forestry,” says KenCairn.
Every limb, twig and needle would become something of potential economic value—not just the timber. This could provide forest managers with greater flexibility to do important, but costly, thinning and restoration work. In a world of insatiable energy appetites, KenCairn stresses the importance of establishing robust ecological standards to guide development. Without such constraints, it doesn’t take much imagination to see the potential for abuse.
One thing is certain: energy from woody biomass has the potential to impact how we manage forests, generate energy and—in the not–too–distant future—even fuel our vehicles.
FUELS FOR SCHOOLS
During the 2000 fire season in western Montana’s Bitterroot Valley, more than 350,000 acres were burned. Soon after those fires, Congress passed the National Fire Plan, which included aggressive goals for fuels reduction.
“The fires were a wake–up call,” says Dave Atkins, the program manager for Fuels for Schools, a U.S. Forest Service project that encourages rural schools to replace heating systems that burn fossil fuels with those that consume wood chips.
“Some folks wanted to build a biomass power plant—but the amount of supply you need, delivered every day, year after year, to make that happen is substantial.”
Atkins said that one of the biomass proponents in the Bitterroot came across examples of biomass use in Vermont, where many schools are heated by wood chips. The Vermont model made sense to Atkins—it was small enough that it didn’t require great amounts of capital and it could be replicated up and down the valley.
Two Bitterroot Valley schools were chosen in the beginning—one in Darby, because it used very high–cost fuel oil, and another in Victor because that school needed to replace a natural gas furnace, so the switch wouldn’t be too much more of an economic shock. Today the program has eleven projects up and running in four states, including a much larger project at the University of Montana–Western campus in Dillon. Another six are in the design or construction phase, and include projects at a correctional center in Nevada—which will be the first project to generate electricity as well as heat—and a hospital in Montana.
“Early on in my education and career I wasn’t really interested in the use side of it—I was more interested in the ecosystem and management side of things,” says Atkins, who previously served as a regional forest health monitor. “But as I’ve progressed through my career, I’ve learned that all these things are really interlinked. You’ve got the social, the economic and ecologic to consider, and to make things work you’ve really got to find the sweet spot where those things overlap.”
To make a biomass operation viable, says Atkins, you must have enough demand to support a supplier to go out and get the chips and deliver them to the school. One way to support such an infrastructure is to develop a number of small operations within a limited geographical area.
Western Montana was a good choice for a pilot program, says Atkins, because there is already an existing infrastructure for delivering chips in the region. Smurfit–Stone, a Missoula–based producer of cardboard, produces 15 megawatts of electricity from woody biomass in the form of chips, supplying its operation as well as feeding the grid, and also generates heat for its industrial operations. According to Atkins, that operation burns through some 360,000 tons of chips a year, compared to about 750 tons in a year at Darby School.
In other places where Atkins has been working to get Fuels for Schools off the ground, such as Utah and Wyoming, the chippers and trucks aren’t already in operation.
“It became a chicken–and–egg thing, and it still is,” says Atkins. “How do you get the first one going and have all the pieces in place?”
So far, the Fuels for Schools projects have focused on replacing fossil fuels by generating heat from an alternative source. Atkins says that it’s possible to make electricity too, but at smaller scales it’s hard to get the economics to work out.
And small is where he sees the biomass future. Transportation costs to bring wood chips to the burners are one of the most limiting factors, but if plants can source wood from a small enough area, they have less of a chance to outgrow their fuel supply.
LARGE–SCALE PRODUCTION
In New Mexico, a company called Western Water and Power Production is proposing to give a tremendous boost to the region’s biomass utilization by building an $80 million, 35–megawatt biomass plant. The first commercial–scale biomass plant in New Mexico, and one of few significantly scaled operations built in years in the United States, this plant will require about as much fuel every day as the Darby school burns in a year. The plant operators predict that about 10,000 acres of land a year will need to be “treated” annually to feed the boiler. Others say it could be 20,000 acres or more. Some 7.7 million tons of biomass will be required over the thirty–year life of the plant.
The manager of the plant, Jack Maddox, says that there is no shortage of fuels in the region. He’s especially confident about the huge volume of piñon pines and juniper in the area. Altered fire regimes have allowed the trees to increase in density, and the plant will rely on removing some of the trees from state lands.
“In effect,” says Maddox, “we’d be getting the materials that nobody else wants.”
Besides relying to a large degree on clearing overgrown trees in piñon– juniper woodlands as part of restoration projects on private and public lands, plant proponents hope to utilize thinning debris from projects on Forest Service land to fuel the generators.
A potential problem, according to Mike DeBonis, a forester working with the Forest Guild and a member of the New Mexico Biomass Evaluation Task Force, is that there is not yet a good understanding of how to manage forests dominated by piñon–juniper.
“For piñon–juniper we’re in the process of working out the key reference condition for restoration,” says DeBonis. In other words, what sort of densities and conditions are they going to “restore” the primarily piñon–juniper landscape to?
The eighteen–member task force, whose membership includes representatives from federal and state land management agencies, conservation groups and industry, has come up with an initial set of principles to guide the project. The recommendations include a call for collaborative planning, using ecological principles that focus on restoration, resumption of normal fire regimes and development of site–specific plans.
“This is a huge opportunity for the environmental community,” says KenCairn. They have a chance, he says, to guide how the emerging industry can contribute to responsible forest management. He’s in favor of keeping development small, locally owned and distributed across the landscape.
DeBonis says that his group doesn’t necessarily favor large or small projects, preferring to look at each project case by case.
“For this project to succeed,” says DeBonis, “fuel is going to have to come from several ownerships.” The details for the supply have yet to be worked out. “I’m not sure if [the New Mexico project] is the right scale.”
“It would be groundbreaking if you had power producers agreeing with the principles,” says KenCairn. “But if they start building 35–megawatt biomass power plants all over the place without an environmental framework in place,” he says, “that will open a Pandora’s box.”
A MATURE SYSTEM
The state of Minnesota has taken a lead in creating guidelines for the removal of biomass from its public and private forests. According to Don Arnosti, the forestry program director for the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, a group that promotes sustainability in Minnesota, there has been explosive growth in sourcing wood as an industrial–scale fuel.
“It had come from nowhere over a three– to five–year period,” says Arnosti, “and nobody was really watching who was using the biomass.”
In 2005, when a duo of coal–fired power plants announced plans to switch from fossil fuels to wood fuel for their burners, the state legislature mandated that guidelines for biomass removal be implemented in its state forestry handbook. The process for creating those guidelines is currently under way, and due to be completed this summer.
Arnosti calls biomass energy a “two–edged sword” that has the potential to provide economic support for good forest management work, but also to create political and market pressures that could lead to over–utilization.
“It’s important we don’t kill the golden goose,” says Arnosti.
The state and its partners are trying to take the lead in finding the limits of biomass removals, he says, before those limits have been reached.
According to Mike Demchik, a forestry professor from Universtiy of Wisconsin–Stevens Point who is currently working on a project to assess the environmental effects of biomass harvesting, much of the biomass potential in his region is already being used by existing industries.
This is not to say that there isn’t potential for more removals at a responsible rate, he says, but that the existing infrastructure is mature. In many ways, this makes adding small biomass projects much easier in Minnesota than in the rural West, where the forest product infrastructure either has dwindled or is not geared up for collecting and transporting what used to be left in the woods.
Biomass, to Arnosti, is a tool that can help guide sensible forest management, but not a silver bullet for the nation’s energy needs.
“The biggest reward and the biggest return can be a healthier forest,” he says, “not that we’ll get off Middle Eastern oil.”
Liquid Fuel
While most of the current discussion surrounding woody biomass is centered on heat and power, the future may introduce much greater demands for another form of energy from the woods.
Jim Bowyer, a recently retired professor from the University of Minnesota, has spent his career researching different aspects of product utilization from the woods. He has researched the potential of woody biomass all over the country and found a huge opportunity looming.
Bowyer recognizes the logic of using wood waste and non–merchantable forest thinnings to generate heat and power, but he sees the potential for a whole array of petroleum substitutes coming from the forests: industrial chemicals, plastics and, perhaps most importantly, transportation fuels.
The corn–based ethanol industry has boomed in the last ten years, despite uncertainty about the fuel’s ability to make a dent in oil imports or improve energy efficiency. The industry has enjoyed generous government subsidies, and powerful political boosters are calling for even more production. Yet most energy experts agree that an emerging technology called cellulosic ethanol, which can make fuel out of agricultural and forest wastes, can have a much larger and longer–lasting impact on the country’s energy future—and on the forests.
This future may not be far off. Samuel Bodman, the Secretary of Energy, recently announced that the Energy Department would like to spend $250 million to boost research into liquid fuels such as cellulosic ethanol made from forest residue and agricultural wastes. While there are currently no commercial–scale biomass plants, plans have been announced for several to come online in the next couple of years.
“We have abundant sources (of fuel) for electricity,” says Bowyer, “but only really one source for liquid fuel.”
The reason biomass has recently surpassed hydropower as the largest source of “renewable” energy is corn–based ethanol. But the phenomenal growth in that industry has done little to wean us off our dependence on foreign oil, and has had virtually no effect on energy efficiency. Many are betting on a more promising technology that can make fuels out of debris from farmers’ fields and the forest.
“If I were going to bet on how this [woody biomass] will come out in the long run, I’d bet on liquid fuel,” Bowyer says. He predicts that as soon as techniques for turning the cellulose of forest debris into liquid fuel are perfected, there will be a stampede to invest in that market. “That’s going to bring tremendous pressures to forests,” he says, “but tremendous opportunities to forest managers.”
These kinds of pressures and opportunities are exactly why KenCairn stresses the need for those in the conservation community to help create specific guidelines for woody biomass. He doesn’t think that biomass is necessarily a renewable source of energy. If the goal is to restore ecosystem functions in a forest through management action, then getting the fuel out of the woods is a one–time shot.
Building projects at smaller, more affordable scales that can amortize in short periods of time is critical, he says, in order to avoid having the quest for fuel supplies, and happy shareholders, overshadow ecological considerations.
“If you have to run it for twenty years to pay for it,” he says, “you are in the wrong business.”