Procter & Gamble Fires Up Massive Biomass Investment

- by Heather Clan­cy, March 3, 2015, Forbes 

With com­pa­nies like Apple and Google reg­u­lar­ly steal­ing head­lines for their solar and wind invest­ments, it’s easy to for­get “renew­able” ener­gy comes in many forms.

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

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

“This seems to be a great oppor­tu­ni­ty to take a step for­ward,” Sauer said.

Con­stel­la­tion will own and oper­ate the facil­i­ty. P&G will buy back the steam under a 20-year pow­er pur­chase agree­ment. The elec­tric­i­ty will offi­cial­ly be pur­chased by Geor­gia Pow­er. The fuel sup­ply will be local­ly sourced scrap wood such as dis­card­ed tree tops or limbs, along with crop resid­u­als such as pecan shells or peanut hulls; P&G col­lab­o­rat­ed with the World Wildlife Fund to come up with sourc­ing guidelines.“We need­ed to make sure we are sourc­ing the scrap in a sus­tain­able way. You want to make sure you’d going doing the path of using pos­i­tive prac­tices,” Sauer said.

P&G’s cur­rent cor­po­rate goal calls for it to pro­cure 30% of its total ener­gy from renew­able sources by 2020. As of Novem­ber 2014, it was at 8% of that goal. The new plant in Geor­gia will almost dou­ble that amount to approx­i­mate­ly 15%, he said.

The U.S. Depart­ment of Agri­cul­ture is encour­ag­ing bio­mass projects as one way to help reduce the threat of for­est fires on fed­er­al land. Last year, more than 200,000 tons of scraps from deceased and dead trees were removed under its assis­tance pro­gram. What’s more, in late Feb­ru­ary, the agency approved anoth­er $8.7 mil­lion for research into next-gen­er­a­tion technologies.