Half the Wood for New Hampshire Biomass Incinerator from Out of State

- by Chris Jensen, May 23, 2014, New Hamp­shire Pub­lic Radio

About 51 per­cent of the wood pur­chased for the new Burgess BioPow­er bio­mass plant in Berlin dur­ing its first two months of oper­a­tion came from New Hamp­shire, accord­ing to a new “sus­tain­abil­i­ty” report filed with the state’s Site Eval­u­a­tion Committee.

Thir­ty-five per­cent came from Maine.

Five per­cent from Vermont.

Eight per­cent from Massachusetts.

And “one truck load” came from Canada.

The facil­i­ty began pro­duc­ing elec­tric­i­ty in Novem­ber and pur­chased about 80,000 tons of wood chips by the end of 2013.

When the Site Eval­u­a­tion Com­mit­tee was con­sid­er­ing the project in 2010 the devel­op­er, Laid­law Berlin Bio­mass, wouldn’t promise it would buy all its wood from the North Country.

But Laid­law offi­cials told the SEC it would make eco­nom­ic sense to buy wood close to Berlin to save on transportation.

The plant is now owned by Cate Street Cap­i­tal of Portsmouth. A spokesman for Cate Street has pre­dict­ed the com­pa­ny will put about $25 mil­lion a year into the for­est econ­o­my buy­ing 750,000 tons of wood chips.