Biomass Burner Short on Fuel

- by Aaron Beswick, May 15, 2014, Source: Truro Bureau

Nova Sco­tia is hav­ing trou­ble keep­ing up with the require­ment for fibre at the bio­mass boil­er at Point Tup­per, says the nat­ur­al resources minister.

“There’s not enough fibre right now in the province to sup­port demands placed on that sec­tor,” Zach Churchill said Thurs­day, refer­ring to the amount of fibre avail­able on Crown land.

Churchill was respond­ing to ques­tions from reporters about whether hard­wood sawlogs are being burned in the boil­er to pro­duce elec­tric­i­ty rather than going to hard­wood sawmills where they could be processed into a high­er-val­ue product.

“We’ve been made aware of that,” said Churchill.

He added that he did not believe it to be a com­mon occurrence.

The bio­mass boil­er is expect­ed to con­sume upwards of 670,000 tonnes of bio­mass per year when run­ning at peak capac­i­ty. A trac­tor-trail­er load of wood fibre weighs about 30 tonnes.

Con­struc­tion of the facil­i­ty was start­ed by New­Page Port Hawkes­bury Corp. to gen­er­ate 20 megawatts of elec­tric­i­ty. The plan was to fire it large­ly with wood waste that couldn’t go to the company’s two paper machines.

Then Nova Sco­tia Pow­er pur­chased it for $80 mil­lion and spent $200 mil­lion on a new tur­bine to increase pow­er gen­er­a­tion at the facil­i­ty to 60 megawatts.

Mean­while, New­Page went bank­rupt. When it was reopened by new own­er Ron Stern, only one of the paper machines was put back into use, mean­ing less wood waste is being produced.

It is esti­mat­ed that the waste from the oper­at­ing paper machine will only sup­ply about 170,000 tonnes a year.

Con­tracts to sup­ply about 60 per cent of the bio­mass plant’s require­ments for chipped wood were award­ed by Nova Sco­tia Pow­er to Wag­n­er For­est Man­age­ment Ltd., an Amer­i­can com­pa­ny that man­ages about 200,000 hectares of Nova Sco­tia wood­land for its pri­vate investors, and Sheet Har­bour wood exporter Great North­ern Tim­ber, which over­sees about 170,000 hectares, pri­mar­i­ly in cen­tral Nova Scotia.

Whether those two com­pa­nies are find­ing it dif­fi­cult to meet their sup­ply require­ments couldn’t be con­firmed Thursday.

Churchill point­ed to an ini­tia­tive launched last week by the province to encour­age pri­vate wood­lot own­ers to make their wood avail­able to be cut.

The Cape Bre­ton Pri­vate­land Part­ner­ship will have a staff of two based in an office in Port Hawkes­bury and an online data­base of avail­able wood­lots and contractors.

About half the province’s wood­land is owned pri­vate­ly in small holdings.

It’s not just sawmills that are being starved by the bio­mass boil­er, warned Mike Gillis, man­ag­er of Bad­deck Val­ley Wood Pro­duc­ers. It has also been hard­er for peo­ple to get fire­wood to burn in their stoves, Gillis said Thursday.

His orga­ni­za­tion sells fire­wood off pri­vate land to about 300 cus­tomers, pri­mar­i­ly in Vic­to­ria County.

“We’re hav­ing enough trou­ble get­ting enough fire­wood,” said Gillis.

“We used to get quite a bit from Crown land, but when that plant was announced they began stock­pil­ing it and we haven’t been able to get any since.”