A small group of parties interested in discussing the potential environmental impacts of biomass energy in Cook County met at the 4H building in Grand Marais on October 30. Gary Atwood of the Cook County Local Energy Project (CCLEP) shared three fact sheets, developed with grant funding from the Minnesota Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund, that focus on the impacts of biomass harvesting and biomass fueled energy on forests, emissions, and the environment overall.
The supply
Numerous tree products can be used for biomass energy, but being considered for the district heating plant being considered for Grand Marais is woody debris left over from harvesting timber for the manufacture of products such as lumber or paper, woody debris gathered to decrease forest fire risk, and wood that would not be good enough for other uses. Fifty percent of the woody debris from timber operations would be left onsite.
U.S. Forest Service Gunflint District Zone Fire Management Officer Patty Johnson said that local loggers don’t necessarily have the equipment needed to process wood onsite, but other local businesses might be interested in playing that role. “The cheapest thing to do would be to chip it and then haul it,” she said. Some loggers have equipment that delimbs trees where they are cut and others have equipment that delimbs them at landings. Chipping at the landings would be much more economically feasible, she said.
Johnson said the Superior National Forest contains “tons” of untreated forest and “unmerchantable” wood that could be used for the biomass industry, and a local biomass plant would not make a dent in it. The understory in areas that are not being harvested is filling in with balsam, a highly flammable tree that presents a huge fire hazard. If left in its natural state, Cook County’s forests would burn before fallen logs would have a chance to rot. Whereas fire releases pine and spruce cones, it kills off balsam, but Johnson said, “We can’t contain every single fire every time.”
Harvesting woody debris would not deplete the forest floor of nutrients, Johnson said. Research has found that most of the nutrients in the forest floor come from leaves and branches falling and rotting rather than from tree trunks rotting, she said.
A local biomass-fueled heating plant would not necessarily create enough business to make it worthwhile for a business to purchase the equipment they would need to process woody debris and bring it to the plant, Atwood said, but Hedstrom Lumber Company already has enough byproducts to supply a local plant. Hedstrom Lumber is presently selling its wood byproducts to the biomass industry in Thunder Bay, and if the demand increases, supplying the industry north of the border with woody debris from logging sites could be profitable here.
Emissions
“Per unit of energy, forest biomass energy generates lower emissions than fossil fuels of some air pollutants and higher levels of others,” states the fact sheet entitled Emissions and biomass energy in northeast Minnesota. “Stationary sources of air pollution are regulated by Minnesota Pollution Control Agency under the federal Clean Air Act,” the fact sheet states. “Pollution control technologies are available that significantly reduce hazardous emissions.
“…When the full life cycle of energy production is considered (rather than emissions at power stations only),” the fact sheet states, “energy generated from wood results in very low GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions compared to alternatives.”
Financial feasibility
The estimated cost of the proposed district heating plant is $7.5 million. City Councilor Tim Kennedy, also on the Grand Marais Public Utilities Commission that would run the plant, said they have not gotten to the point of talking about potential financing sources yet, but bonding would be an option.
Local resident Mark Pederson has been hired to work with the large businesses in the east portion of the downtown area to determine the feasibility of hooking them into the proposed system along with the public buildings along Fifth Street. Both the county and the city have revolving loan funds that could possibly help those businesses pay for the hookup. One of the goals would be reducing the cost of heating those buildings.
The business partners engaged to study the feasibility of the project— The BioBusiness Alliance of Minnesota (BBAM) and the Swedish Bioenergy Association (Svebio)—hired a third company, FVB Energy, to review the research already completed in the last couple of years. “Overall, the opportunity for biomass district heating in Grand Marais is potentially viable and is worthy of further analysis,” BBAM, Svebio, and FVB Energy said in an August 17 proposal to the Cook County Local Energy Project (CCLEP).
More information is still needed to determine if a biomass plant would be economically feasible, but the proposal stated that the capital costs are likely to be “significantly higher” than previously projected.
The proposal concludes that a system that would include the public buildings along County Road 7 and the larger commercial buildings in the southeastern part of downtown Grand Marais would be most cost-effective.
“The Grand Marais Biomass District Heating Project is viewed by the partnership as an exceptional opportunity to develop a community-scale biomass to-energy installation to serve as a statewide model as well as a nationally recognized biomass district heating system,” the proposal states.
FVB Energy has completed projects throughout the world.
On October 9, the county board approved payment of $56,000 to the BioBusiness Alliance of Minnesota, half of the cost of the feasibility analysis that will determine whether to continue with the project. If the project goes forward, the technical design and business plan would cost another $243,000. The county board has approved funding for this work from the 1 percent infrastructure and recreation sales tax.
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