Sunday, December 29, 2013

GAINESVILLE RENEWAL ENERGY CENTER, a Major Biomass User


One of the early renewable energy plants wanted by the EPA is in the            Gainesville, FL Energy Center.  It will use 500,000 tons of tree products per annum, some of which is now burned in the field, as described in the following article from Florida Forestry Assn.  In contrast, the nearby Georgia Pacific mill in Palatka typically uses 1,864,000 tons, 1,482,000 pine and 382,000 hardwood, of higher grade product. 

When you need help with timberland, please call Henry Rogers of Coldwell Banker Commercial Benchmark at 904-421-8537.

Biomass plant has extensive wood network

The Gainesville SunDecember 22, 2013 
 — Along a rural stretch of State Road 100 in Putnam County, heavy machinery rumbles across swaths of land, downing scrawny trees and dragging them by the bunch to a chipper.
Seconds later, that machine spits out a stream of wood chips into the back of a semi-trailer.
It is early November, and a work crew with Perry-based M.A. Rigoni Inc. has spent weeks on the sprawling Roberts Ranch Game Preserve near Florahome, taking out sand pine, turkey oak and other trees and cleaning up the scraps left after a recent timber harvest. Leaving small branches, leaves, pine needles and stumps behind, the crew will truck about 380 tons of wood removed from the site to the Gainesville Renewable Energy Center as fuel for the biomass plant.
As concerns swirl about the potential negative economic impact from a power plant that has forced an increase in electric rates that are already among the highest in the state, forest industry members who supply the plant see a potential boon through a new marketplace for previously unsellable wood.
"It's created a new viable market for a product instead of leaving it in piles to rot or be burned in an open field," said Richard Schwab, manager of procurement and new-business development at M.A. Rigoni. "It is the lowest common denominator. It is the bottom rung of the wood fiber industry."
Schwab said his company added a crew earlier in the year to focus on fuel for the biomass plant and, for the first time in five years, brought a positive outlook for the business' future.
Of the 1 million to 1.2 million tons of wood the biomass plant will need in a year, 40 percent is expected to come out of the woods from post-timber harvesting removals, thinning for forest or habitat restoration, or clear-cutting properties.
Another 10-15 percent will be mill residue. The balance will be urban wood waste, such as yard waste left at the curb or trees cut on lots being cleared, delivered by the Gainesville firm Wood Resource Recovery.
GREC has hired the Gainesville-based BioResource Management to secure contracts for the wood supply. Those contracts are between private firms, but redacted versions of them were provided to Gainesville Regional Utilities when the city was mulling an offer to purchase the plant.
Blacked out of those contracts was the amount GREC pays the suppliers for wood waste. Brian Condon, with BioResource Management, said that was done so one supplier does not know how much another is paid.
While the contracts made public don't specify the source of the wood, a records request of GRU showed some detail on where the wood has come from — 44 notices of intent to deliver wood to the plant from locations in 15 Florida counties. The supply area stretched from the Georgia state line south to Hernando and Sumter counties and from Dixie and Levy counties east to Volusia. A handful of the locations are outside the 75-mile radius that is deemed by GREC to be the supply area or wood basket for the plant.
The records provided by GRU included six locations in Alachua and Gilchrist counties. Columbia and Suwannee counties had five locations. Four were in Marion County.
The notices include the location, the acreage, the primary species of trees removed, the projected total tonnage and whether the landowner is eligible for a forest stewardship incentive payment.
The sites include large public lands that were going through thinning or habitat restoration. A projected 2,168 tons, primarily laurel oak and sweet gum, were harvested from the state's Lafayette Forest Wildlife and Environmental Area.
In Volusia County, more than 100 miles away from the power plant, more than 2,600 tons, including live oak, water oak and sand pine, were removed from Blue Springs State Park to make way for the restoration of habitat for the protected Florida scrub jay. In Hamilton County, 2,500 tons were removed during a thinning at Big Shoals State Park.
In Marion County, about 5,000 tons of sand pine and laurel and turkey oaks were removed during a habitat restoration at the St. Johns River Water Management District's Ocklawaha Prairie.
While public lands have produced large fuel supplies, the majority of the properties have been in private ownership.
In Levy County, about 6,000 tons of logging residuals were removed from about 412 acres owned by timber giant Plum Creek. Fuel was obtained from several properties in Alachua County as part of a final removal following a logging operation.
Suppliers and some forestry officials say the biomass plant has, for some private landowners, spurred land management and restoration efforts.
"It encourages them to clean up the land," said Jib Davidson, co-owner of Columbia Timber, which has a 10-year contract to supply the plant with fuel. "It encourages them to create a new ecosystem."
Before GREC, Davidson said a landowner looking to clear out an area in order to plant a different species of trees would have to pay a forestry company hundreds of dollars an acre. Now that the trees removed have some cash value, Davidson said companies might do the work for free or at a nominal charge.
Davidson said that's the case for a property his company is now working off County Road 232 between Jonesville and Archer. A newly created dirt road off CR 232 leads back to an area where Columbia crews have an estimated $1 million worth of machinery downing trees and loading them into a chipper. Davidson said the crew is clearing out acres of underbrush and scrub oak, while leaving large, mature live oak, to make way for the planting of slash pine.
Near the Levy County line in the Archer area, a habitat restoration project on about half of the privately owned, 200-acre Big Dog Ranch produced fuel for the biomass plant.
The property lies in the state's Brooksville Ridge area, where the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission has made a priority of attempting to bring back the longleaf pine forest that once covered 90 million acres of the Southeast and now covers only 3 million acres.
At the property near Archer, which Robert Lusnia owns with his family, crews removed hardwood trees to plant about half the property in longleaf pine.
"I feel like I got a bunch of clearing for free," Lusnia said. He said about 2,000 tons of fuel were removed.
"That's probably one of the best examples of the whole process working the way it was envisioned," Dave Conser, a senior forester with the Florida Forest Service, said of the Archer property.
Still, with the woods expected to produce nearly 500,000 tons a year for the plant, there are concerns about sustainability.
Josh Dickinson, the director of the local nonprofit environmental group Forest Management Trust, said that while biomass advocates feel the Southeast is the "Saudi Arabia of biomass," he thinks that's far from reality. Dickinson believes pulp mills and the growing demand among some biomass plants for wood pellets, which require a higher-grade wood than the Gainesville plant, will put pressure on the region's forests.
Dickinson, who served on a prior GRU ad hoc advisory committee for the biomass plant's fuel supply, said he also believes the 100-megawatt plant is too large. Its size expands the geographic area from which fuel has to be secured, he said, and leads to longer truck trips and increased carbon emissions delivering the fuel.
"I'm not against biomass, but I strongly question the scale it is being done on for both the domestic and international market," Dickinson said.
The National Wildlife Federation has conducted a series of studies on biomass harvesting in the Southeast, although not with a focus on this area of Florida. F.G. Beauregard, a spokesman for the nonprofit conservation organization, said research has shown uncertainties about whether facilities can rely on wood waste in the long term.
"Many biomass facilities claim they're sourcing from all or mostly waste, but, particularly for those with large demands, our economic modeling results gave us some skepticism about some of these facilities' ability to economically source the facility with waste only over the long term — you'd have to travel too far out from the facility, and transportation costs would be too high, considering the low economic value of harvest residual material," Beauregard said in an email.
Asked if the region's forests can provide a reliable fuel source in the long term to sustain the plant, Condon pointed to the paper mills in Perry and Palatka, which purchase millions of tons a year of higher-priced wood and have each been in operation for at least 60 years.
"We're a big consumer of wood, but we're certainly not the biggest — and the biggest have been around the longest," he said.
Information from: The Gainesville (Fla.) Sun, http://www.gainesvillesun.com

Read more here: http://www.bradenton.com/2013/12/22/4895208/biomass-plant-has-extensive-wood.html#storylink=cpy

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