This project achieves many things. Jobs, for one, as well as green and efficiently used energy. It also makes St. Marys Paper more competitive, so in a way it provides some added job security for existing employees at the plant. One concern, however, is the fact that St. Marys has negotiated access to up to 400,000 tonnes of biomass annually from the area’s Crown forests for the life of the project. What this means, exactly, I don’t know. Does it mean St. Marys can harvest the forest slash or directly cut down trees for fuel? I would hope that whatever is harvested from these forests will go toward producing paper products first, and then whatever is left over can be used for energy production.

It would also be nice if the power authority disclosed exactly how much it’s paying for this electricity or any other incentives it may be offering. There’s a hint in this report that tens of millions of dollars may flow to the company from the province’s forestry sector prosperity funds, and this would be on top of the $17 million or so in financial aid that went to the struggling company after it was rescued from a bankrupty sale in 2007. The hope, one assumes, is that the CHP plant will lower energy costs for St. Marys and help it to eventually wean itself from corporate welfare.

The Atikokan station was built 25 years ago and has a capacity of 230 megawatts. The plant has produced annually as much as 1.5 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity. If it’s expected to generate 150 million kilowatt-hours when burning biomass — or one-tenth of peak annual output — it means the plant will be used primarily as a peaker and for other backup purposes.

I know there are concerns within the environmental community, also expressed by Ontario’s environmental commissioner, about the wisdom of using biomass for power generation. The fear is that the biomass that makes up the fuel wood pellets won’t be harvested sustainably, and there is also skepticism related to the “carbon neutrality” of biomass when used as a fuel. Also, particulate emissions are still a concern with burning biomass, so while it may serve a climate change strategy it won’t necessarily address local pollution problems. Obviously, these concerns need to be addressed so that all stakeholders are satisfied, but given the choice, I still believe that biomass is a better option than coal, particularly when it’s only used sparingly and for backup.

What do you think?

In other words, it expects it will need 90,000 tonnes annually but wants to break this down into three our four chunks so it can have several suppliers. The final stage of conversion will begin in June 2012 and commissioning of the new equipment will likely start in August. OPG expects full-on commercial operation will happen by December. “The wood fuel pellet supply being considered under this RFIP will have a local content requirement such that the source of the wood fibre and the location of the production facilities that will produce the wood pellets shall be within Ontario,” according to the company. “OPG will require that the wood-based fuel pellets be accompanied by Chain of Custody Certification ensuring that the wood pellets supplied to OPG are manufactured from wood fibre sourced from well managed forests.”

In the Great Lakes St. Lawrence forest region of Ontario it’s estimated that there is about 1.475 million oven dry metric tons of wood fibre available for sustainable harvesting each year, or about 1.25 million if we take into account that some of the biomass will be used as fuel to dry the biofibre. So what OPG is requesting in this initial round is roughly 6 per cent of what’s available — and let’s not forget that pellets made of grass crops are also a potential source of fuel. Let’s keep in mind these converted coal plants will be used as peakers when using biomass fuel. This means there is plenty of biomass available for several units being targeted for conversion at the massive Nanticoke coal plant.

What we’re witnessing here is the beginning of the creation of an entirely new industry in Ontario developed around the need to economically harvest, pelletize and transport biomass fuel pellets to support the province’s coal phaseout strategy. This will create many jobs in parts of the province where jobs are needed most, and will establish a made-in-Ontario biomass fuel supply chain that can support the move to more distributed forms of biomass energy generation. There is plenty of opportunity here for entrepreneurs looking to play a role.

I wrote about the government’s coal-to-biomass power generation strategy last fall and it appears to be gaining some momentum. It’s an ambitious project. Not just from a technical perspective, in terms of the actual plant conversion, but perhaps even more so from a logistical perspective. We’re talking huge volumes of biomass — whether in the form of wood or switchgrass or some other pelletized biosolid. It requires development of a reliable supply chain. If it can be done, the reduction in air pollution and CO2 emissions is just one benefit. Displacing imported coal with local biomass would give birth to an industry, local jobs, and leverage existing generation and transmission assets in the province. “The tricky part is ensuring that the fuel is produced sustainably,” says Keith Stewart of WWF-Canada, who supports the idea of turning several units at the Nanticoke generating station into biomass burners. “If we produce 2.5 to 3 terawatt-hours of electricity from biomass at Nanticoke it would allow Nanticoke to play the stabilizing role for the grid it does now while creating an infrastructure for a biomass sector.” Local greenhouse operations in the area, by leveraging that infrastructure, would also have a steady supply of biomass that could replace the burning of bunker oil or natural gas.

For perspective, 2.5 terawatt-hours is about 10 per cent of the electricity that was generated last year in Ontario by OPG’s four existing coal plants — enough to supply 200,000 homes with electricity for a year. Generating this much electricity with biomass is an immensely ambitious effort, but if OPG can pull it off, it would set a fine example for other jurisdictions looking to reduce their dependence on coal power as talk of cap-and-trade heats up under an Obama administration.

The char, when mixed with earth, is excellent at helping soils retain nutrients. Farmers can put the char back on the land to improve crop yield (and reduce dependence on fertilizers) or the char can be used to help revive depleted lands. In this way the char both permanently sequesters the carbon and improves the ability of soils to grow more carbon-absorbing plant life.

The end result: Carbon Negativity

Scientists supporting this approach to carbon sequestration are hoping it will be recognized as part of Kyoto talks and qualify as carbon-offset projects. They argue the potential is huge, though it remains to be seen if, in practice, it could ever achieve meaningful scale. That said, interest is growing. Next week Canadian scientists, government officials and academics are meeting in Montreal for the first meeting of the Canadian Biochar Initiative, a national branch of the International Biochar Initiative.

I’ve written about this a couple of times in the past. If you want to read more click here and here.

My Clean Break column today takes a closer look at efforts by Ontario Power Generation to convert some of its coal-fired generating assets into biomass-burning power plants, including potentially several units at its Nanticoke Generating Station – North America’s largest coal plant. The provincial Liberal government has vowed to shut down the last of Ontario’s coal plants by 2014, and biomass conversion is being seriously considered as a way of partially getting there. It’s an ambitious undertaking, given the scale of such a project, but successfully making it happen would solve many problems with one solution.

Shutting down Nanticoke, while a good move for environmental reasons, will cause many headaches in the area. More jobs will be lost in a region of the province already suffering from economic decline. Mothballing Nanticoke leaves a 4,000 megawatt hole in Ontario’s grid. And the loss of that generation takes away some crucial voltage support for the entire electricity system. By converting three or four of the eight units at Nanticoke into biomass and shutting down the rest, some jobs can be kept, some voltage support and generation is kept, fewer new plants or transmission projects are needed in the area, and the large demand for biomass can create a local supply chain that could provide a significant boost to the regional economy.

OPG has tested biomass burns and blends at all four of its plants — Nanticoke, Thunder Bay, Atikokan and Lambton — but so far the most progress has been at Atikokan, a 200-megawatt plant that in July successfully burned 100 per cent wood pellets for a day. A three-day burn is scheduled for early December, and OPG officials say Atikokan will likely be the first plant converted to biomass. After that, attention will likely turn to Nanticoke, which has so far co-fired wood pellets and wheat shorts with coal as part of tests.

Blending isn’t the final objective. Blending produces ash that can’t be used by the cement industry, like coal ash, and can’t be used as fertilizer, like pure biomass ash. But getting to 100 per cent biomass burn has some technical issues, including the impact on equipment (i.e. soot buildup and the extra maintenance required to clean it) and the difficulty of establishing a secure supply chain. The latter issue is what OPG considers its biggest challenge, given the huge volumes of locally produced, non-food biomass it would require.

Despite these challenges, it’s encouraging to see the province moving in this direction. I don’t think converting coal plants to biomass is a long-term solution, but it’s a good medium-term solution that will create a stable local supply chain. As the remaining Nanticoke units are retired, the biomass can go toward supporting the emergence of more efficient combined heat and power (CHP) plants distributed throughout the area.

According to a Nexterra release, the gasification system “will replace ORNL’s existing natural gas steam plant by converting locally sourced woody biomass into clean burning syngas. The syngas will produce 60,000 lbs/hr of saturated steam to displace 75 MMBtu/hr of fossil fuel traditionally used to heat the campus.” Once the system is operational, it is expected to reduce fossil-fuel consumption on the campus by 80 per cent, removing about 20,000 tons per year of greenhouse-gas emissions — equivalent to taking 5,000 cars off the road.

I’ve heard a lot of positive feedback about the Nexterra system from a variety of people in the industry. Selling a system to an organization as high-profile and respected at Oak Ridge Lab is a major credibility booster, and represents a terrific public showcase of what the system can do in areas where wood waste is a viable alternative to fossil fuels.