Author: admin

Forests are more powerful than you think – here’s why

21 March 2017

Sustainable bioenergy

Almost one third of the earth’s land mass is covered by forests. That’s an area of around 4 billion hectares, or roughly four times the size of the US.

In addition to being a prominent feature across the global landscape, forests also play a significant role in how we live. They make the air cleaner in cities and absorb carbon from the atmosphere. They provide bio-diversity and habits for wildlife. They also provide essential forest products such as paper, building materials and wood pellets for energy.

To celebrate the UN’s International Day of Forests, we’re looking at some of the reasons why forests and wood fuel are more powerful than you might think.

They’re a major source of renewable energy

Nearly half of the world’s renewable energy comes from forests in the form of wood fuel. Roughly 2.4 billion people around the world use it for things like cooking, heating and generating electricity. In fact, about 50% of the total global wood production is currently used for these purposes.

However, it is critical that this resource is managed sustainably and responsibly. One of the key aims of the International Day of Forests is to encourage people to utilise their local forest resources sustainably to ensure it endures for future generations.

They can revitalise economies

Because wood fuel is such a widely used energy source, it also supports a healthy, vibrant industry. Roughly 900 million people work in the wood energy sector globally.

More than that, rural economies built on wood energy can be revitalised by modernisation, which can then stimulate local business. Investment can help finance better forest management, which in turn leads to forest growth, improvements in sustainability standards and in some cases, increased employment.

They can help mitigate climate change

The world’s forests have an energy content about 10 times that of the global annual primary energy consumption, which makes it a hugely useful resource in helping meet energy demand in a sustainable and renewable way.

When wood is used as fuel it releases carbon dioxide (CO₂). However, if this fuel is drawn from a responsibly managed forest or sustainable system of growing forests this carbon is offset by new tree plantings. The only emissions produced therefore are the ones involved in transporting the wood itself. The US Food and Agriculture Organization predict that by 2030 forestry mitigation with the help of carbon pricing could contribute to reductions of 0.2 to 13.8 Gigatonnes (Gt) CO₂ a year.

Building a 21st century port

16 November 2016

Sustainable bioenergy

In its long history, the Port of Liverpool has dealt with a number of industries. It’s a port characterised by its ability to adapt to the needs of the time. In 1715 it emerged as one of the world’s first ever wet docks. In the 18^th century it was used as a hub for the slave trade.

When slavery was abolished in the early 19th century, Liverpool switched to bringing in the goods of the thriving Empire, such as cotton. When goods like cotton dried up, it switched to the fuel of the Industrial Revolution: coal.

Now as the world (and the UK government) moves away from fuels like coal and towards lower-carbon and renewable resources, the Port of Liverpool needed to adapt once again.

Gary Hodgson, Chief Operating Officer at Peel Ports, explains: “About three years ago everyone was asking, ‘What happens after coal?’”

What happens after coal?

Peel Ports is one of the biggest operators of Liverpool’s shipping infrastructure, including Liverpool Port. Seeing that the future of coal was finite, it recognised there was a need for a port that could bring in alternative, renewable fuels.

At the same time Drax was looking for a logistics partner to facilitate the importing of compressed wood pellets. Since 2009 Drax Power Station had begun a process of upgrading its coal-fired boilers to run on sustainable biomass, sourced from huge, well-established working forests. More than this, it had plans to set up its own pellet manufacturing plants in the US South and needed to import large quantities of wood pellets.

The relationship with Peel Ports and Liverpool was obvious. This began a £100 million investment that helped transform the region’s port-station transport infrastructure.

“It’s about working in partnerships with companies,” says Hodgson. “Working this way helps develop solutions that really work.”

The central element of the partnership between Drax and Peel Ports was a radical redesigning of the technical infrastructure. Not only do compressed wood pellets have fundamentally different physical properties to other fuels like coal, they are more combustible and need to be handled safely.

For the three-million-tonne-capacity facility that Peel Ports and Drax wanted to build, innovative supply chain solutions had to be developed.

Shifting biomass in bulk

The first challenge was getting the high-density pellets off giant ships. For this, Peel and Drax designed a solution that uses an Archimedean screw – a long tube with a spiral winding up the inside that allows liquids, or materials that can behave like a liquid (like wood pellets), to defy gravity and travel upwards.

At the top of the screw, the pellets are emptied onto a conveyor belt and carried to one of three purpose-built silos tailored to safely storing thousands of tonnes of biomass.

Here the pellets wait until another conveyor belt deposits them onto specially-design biomass trains where they are transported across the peaks of the Pennines to Drax Power Station near Selby in North Yorkshire.

Each step at the port is automated, designed with supreme efficiency in mind by a team of Drax and Peel Port engineers. End-to-end, port to power station, the whole process can take as little as 12 hours.

A new chapter for the north

In the varied history of the Port of Liverpool the new facility is another chapter, one that is helping transform the logistics infrastructure and the economic growth of the North West.

Now open and operational, the facility directly employs 50 people – around 500 additional contractors have worked on the project during its construction and development. More than that, it’s an investment in the country’s energy future. It secures a fourth port for Drax – three others are on the east coast – helping with security of supply.

“We made this investment because we recognised this as the future of the energy mix of the country,” Hodgson explain. “We can’t just rely on one form of power – there has to be an energy mix and we see biomass as a key part of that.”

How one company helped transform the biomass business

6 October 2016

Sustainable bioenergy

If asked to picture Canada, its beautiful forests often spring to mind. In fact, 38% of the country is covered by them. Little wonder that Canada has one of the world’s biggest lumber industries. But all that lumber milling means a lot of sawdust.

It was in this sawdust, and the other ‘waste’ products the milling process creates, that one fledgling Canadian company spotted an opportunity.

Making the most of waste

Started by two brothers in the 1980s, Pinnacle originally made animal feed for farmers – compressed pellets of grass and grain.

Then, in the late Eighties, after hearing about wood pellet production in Scandinavia, and taking a look at all the sawmilling residues being burned up around them, they had an idea for a new direction.

At the time the Canadian government was looking to make the sawmilling industry a lot cleaner and more sustainable. “There was a lot of fibre around that needed to find a home,” explains Vaughan Bassett, a senior executive with the company.

Canada needed a way to put to good use materials that were previously just thrown away or even burnt out in the open, releasing greenhouse gas emissions, and wood pellets seemed like a natural fit. Even better, because there was so much waste fibre around at the time, Pinnacle was able to get its raw material for free and help to avoid the unnecessary emissions. All it had to do was pick it up and take it away.

Finding a new business model

Making the transition from feed pellets to wood pellets involved a lot of trial and error.

“There was a lot of entrepreneurial spirit that went into this thing,” says Bassett. “It was untried, untested, unknown and there was no real market. It was just a couple of entrepreneurs trying stuff out.”

Initially, Pinnacle produced its wood pellets for local domestic markets – people looking to heat their homes, local businesses, and schools that used wood burners. This is a particularly convenient and efficient form of fuel for communities in off-the-grid, remote areas of Canada. But Pinnacle was keen to grow and make an even greater impact.

Rising demand for sustainability

By the early 2000s, some in the power generation industry were starting to rethink their long-term futures, looking to shift from fossil fuels like coal to cleaner alternatives in order to meet the challenges of sustainable energy production.

Central to Pinnacle’s business is a commitment to sustainability – something being based in Canada, where forest management is particularly advanced, makes possible. Being owned by the Crown, there are very tight controls over how Canadian forests are run – and how the trees are used.

“We’ve probably got the most sustainable wood fibre in the world. The numbers are just mad. Something like 95% of all the forests in Canada are ‘forest management certified’, which is unbelievable. Look at the next best country and it’s probably nearer 30%,” says Bassett, “It’s left us with an incredible asset that keeps growing every year. The industry never takes more wood than what grows.”

Indeed, carefully managed forestry is key to environmental sustainability. Fully-grown older trees don’t absorb as much CO₂, so replacing them with younger, growing trees that do, can benefit the environment. Meanwhile, the waste product of sawmilling is converted into biomass, which produces further benefits by reducing reliance on fossil fuels.

Pinnacle and Drax: A sustainable partnership

Pinnacle first started supplying Drax with compressed wood pellets in 2009, marking a turning-point for the company. “Since 2011, our production has doubled,” says Bassett.

Pinnacle now contracts a fleet of ships and has its own dedicated port facility. Each vessel can transport 60,000 tonnes. Given that Drax uses around 16,000 tonnes a day with two of its three biomass units at full capacity, one shipment keeps a third of the huge power station in North Yorkshire going for nearly four days.

“Pinnacle now produces in the region of 1.5m tonnes of pellets a year, about half of which goes to Drax. So they’re a very important part of what we do,” says Bassett.

Read the Burns Lake and Houston pellet plant catchment area analysis here, part of a series of catchment area analyses around the forest biomass pellet plants supplying Drax Power Station with renewable fuel. Others in the series can be found here.

5 things you never knew about forests

Sustainable bioenergy

Background. Fir tree branch with dew drops on a blurred background of sunlight

Forests and the products we derive from them are one of the most ubiquitous aspects of human civilisation. Despite the rapid pace of modern life, that isn’t changing.

Forest still covers 30% of the world’s land and in the UK more than an estimated 55 million m³ of wood was used in 2015 – either directly through furniture, books or hygiene paper, or indirectly, in infrastructure like fences, railways or through biomass electricity generation.

Behind all this lies the forest and the industry surrounding it. But how much do you really know about forests?

In some regions forests are increasing

Mention forestry, and there are plenty of people who make the jump to the activities of unscrupulous developers and deforestation. But while forest land is declining worldwide (in fact, we’ve lost 129 million hectares since 1990), the good news is the rate of decline is dropping sharply, down 50% across the same period.

A lot of this is thanks to growing environmental awareness, responsible forestry management and reforestation around the world. 10,000 hectares of new woodland was created in the UK in 2014 and in the USA, where a third of all land is forested, forestland has been consistently increasing over the last 25 years. There’s been an increase of roughly 7.6 million hectares between 1990 and 2015.

Vigorously growing forests absorb CO2 faster

It’s well known that trees are “the lungs of the earth”, but not all trees or ages are equally effective at absorbing the greenhouse gas CO₂. A growing, younger forest is a better sink for carbon dioxide than a forest that is mature and stable. This has implications for the way these resources are used – notably when it comes to the sourcing of material for compressed wood pellets.

Whereas coal releases carbon that has been trapped underground for millions of years, wood releases carbon captured within its lifetime, making it a very low carbon fuel once manufacturing and transportation are factored in. The technique is to harvest trees when they have stopped growing at a fast rate, use the wood for forest products such as timber, pulpwood or compressed wood pellets for energy and replant the area with new, high growth potential trees. The result is a forest with a steady stream of CO₂-hungry young trees and a steady stream of renewable raw material.

Forests can stop floods

A study led by the Universities of Birmingham and Southampton and funded by the Environment Agency, found that forests in Europe play an important role in mitigating the effects of heavy rain.

Thanks to the buffering abilities of the forest canopy and the enormous water absorption capacity of woods and forests, they can slow the flow of a sudden downpour of rain overfilling nearby streams or rivers. This water will eventually be released but slowing its movement mitigates flash flooding.

Different parts of the forest have different uses

The primary commercial product from forests is not a hard one to guess: wood. But there’s more to it than that. For construction timber, the lower, thicker parts of a tree’s trunk are used. Smaller parts of the trunk are used as pulpwood which can be used to make paper, panels or for energy. Residues from the wood processing industry such as sawdust can also be used for compressed wood pellets.

With the rise of the internet, smartphones and e-readers the paper market has been shrinking. Manufacture of high-density wood pellets helps replace demand for wood once used by the paper market, as pellets can be made using low-grade wood, thinnings and residues not used in construction or furniture.

Trees talk to each other

Until recently it was thought that trees perform most of their biological functions in isolation from each other. But biologists have learned in recent years that in fact they communicate and help each other.

Under the forest floor, trees’ roots are linked by bright white and yellow fungal threads, called mycelium. In a forest, these threads act as a kind of network, linking trees to one another.

These links enable trees to share nutrients, carbon and water. Some species of tree also increase nitrogen uptake in the soil and help to improve the conditions in which other species grow. In fact, research by the University of British Columbia, indicates that certain large, older trees that rise above the forest act as ‘mother trees’ which actively help to ‘manage’ the resources for the other trees in the forest.

Based on their findings, it seems trees not only talk to each other, but help each other grow too.

How does Europe use biomass?

Sustainable bioenergy

Family on summer Senja coast (Norway, polar day)

At the heart of Norse folklore is a figure called Yggdrasil that connects its nine worlds and gods. It’s an immensely important and holy icon, but it is not a god itself – it is an ash tree.

That the central figure of mythical Scandinavian cosmology should be something as humble as a tree is no surprise, Scandinavia is a heavily forested region. Sweden, the largest country in the area, is more than 68% forest. Wood is an inherent part of life there. For thousands of years it’s been used as a resource and a fuel, and today is no different.

Throughout much of Europe the same is true. But, while historically wood was used only for cooking, heating and light, today its use as a form of energy also includes generating electricity and heat when formed into compressed wood pellets.

Europe and wood pellets

Nearly 22 million tonnes (Mt) of wood pellets were used in the European Union in 2015, making the region the leading wood pellet consumer in the world. It is also the world’s leading producer, creating roughly half of the world’s global output – largely from European trees.

A report from the Standing Forestry Committee, set up to represent the forestry industries in EU countries, found that just 4% of the woody biomass used in the EU was imported.

Of the 22Mt used across Europe, 10.5Mt was used for heating, while 11.5Mt was used for industrial uses like fueling power plants. But in the UK, the level of wood used for fuel falls some way behind EU averages. Thanks in large part to Drax and its transition from coal to renewable wood pellet-powered electricity generation, that’s changing, but the UK still has a way to go to catch the continental average.

Where is the UK falling behind and how is wood being used to power the rest of the continent? Here, we look at some of the largest consumers and producers of biomass in Europe and how it’s being used.

Sweden

Sweden is the third highest consumer of wood as a source of energy in Europe, trailing only Finland and Latvia in its use. A key use of biomass in Sweden is powering district heating systems. In a district heating system, rather than each building or home having its own boiler, whole areas of cities are heated through a single central plant distributing heat to buildings. These plants can be powered by a variety of fuels, but many run on wood pellets or distribute the waste heat captured at power plants.

Germany

In 1713, an accountant and mining administrator, Hans Carl von Carlowitz, published what is considered the first ever book to look in depth at forestry management, effectively kickstarting the modern idea of sustainable forestry. In the 300 years that have passed, Germany has embraced the cultivation of wood and has made wood and biomass a fixed part of its energy makeup.

More recently, the Renewable Energy Heating Act and Market Incentive Programme was passed in 2009, which requires new building owners to provide a percentage of their heat from renewable sources, including wood-fired boilers. The aim is to increase the country’s share of renewable heat to 14% by 2020.

Finland

Nearly three quarters of Finland is forestland, making it one of the most forested countries in the world, let alone Europe. As a result, wood plays a large part in Finnish culture. Stora Enso, one of the world’s leading paper and packaging manufacturers is Finnish and more than 20% of the country’s exports are from wood and wood products. Coupled with a strong focus generating much of its energy from renewables, energy derived from wood and products made from wood is high.

United Kingdom

In 2013, less than 10% of all energy used in the UK was generated from wood and wood products. This places it some way behind countries like Germany and Sweden, in part owing to a lack of infrastructure for providing heating derived from wood and wood biomass.

This could change if the government continues to back technologies equally in initiatives like the Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI). Available to homeowners, landlords and commercial customers, RHI provides incentives for installing generators of renewable heat such as wood pellet boilers.

To reach climate goals, the then Department of Energy and Climate Change noted that both biomass-driven electricity generation and heating should continue to increase in the UK. And with the upgrade of Drax and Lynemouth power stations from coal to compressed wood pellets, there are positive signs the UK can catch up to the European biomass average. In doing so, renewable biomass electricity generation can also help increase wind and solar power generation in the UK, and help create a more sustainable energy future.

Author: admin

Forests are more powerful than you think – here’s why