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A Warming Trend for Putting Wood Waste to Work as Fuel
A plant to produce "bio-oil," under construction in Guelph, Ontario, will vaporize sawdust derived from the scrap lumber and wood chips now piled beside it.
(Photos By Doug Struck -- The Washington Post)
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"Bio-oil has its place" in the effort to use plant sources for fuel, said Michio Ikura, senior research scientist at the Canmet Energy Technology Center, a Canadian government institution that helps develop technologies. "But the economies differ from site to site. The companies don't want to talk about the economics much."
Proponents of the pyrolysis process are optimistic that profits can be found. Ensyn Technologies, a company with Canadian and U.S. divisions, has been using the process since 1989 at a plant in Wisconsin to produce Liquid Smoke, a meat-flavoring chemical contained in the oil. The rest of the bio-oil produced is reused in the plant for heating.
Ensyn is building another plant near Ottawa to skim off other chemicals from the bio-oil. David Boulard, executive vice president of Ensyn, contends that using it for both heating and to produce other salable chemicals is a winning combination.
"The pyrolysis produces a soup of chemicals," Boulard said from Ottawa. But the "fuel will always be a key, either primary or secondary," to profitability.
Dynamotive's plan is to make relatively small, modular pyrolysis plants located near the source of fuel supplies -- its West Lorne plant is next to a flooring manufacturer that generates scrap wood, and the Guelph plant will be operated by a recycling company that handles demolition waste.
This will cut the costs of hauling wood supplies to the plant, a key factor in whether the process will be profitable.
Peter Fransham, a researcher who has been working on pyrolysis for 19 years, heads an Ottawa-based company trying to make a mobile pyrolysis plant. Machines developed by his Advanced BioRefinery Inc. will be transportable on trucks from one supply of wood waste, such as the discarded "slash" from a lumbering operation, to another.
Fransham said previous attempts to produce oil from plant waste -- Germany did it during World War II and South Africa did it under economic sanctions -- have always stumbled over profitability.
"In the past, when we had short rises in oil prices -- the 1970s and '80s -- we all jumped into the renewable energy business, and then it cratered" when oil prices dropped, he said. "What is new, now, is the concern for climate change. That has given us a second driver that we never had before.
"As an industry, we haven't really delivered very well what we touted that we can do," Fransham acknowledged. "We are about the same state the oil industry was in the 1900s. Once we get into the point where we can start production and demonstrate large-scale production of bio-oil, then you will see it move to the next tier."
