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Bioenergy no 3 May 2015

PELLETS Barry Ford, Director of Operations (left) and Clyde Stearns VP of Engineering. Selma staff behind the first lot of Zilkha black pellets (photo courtesy Zilkha). Zilkha’s Stearns is confident about where it’s headed. “Once the world can see that this is a commercially available product and it can be produced in large quantities, I believe that in the next five years most of the industry will convert to a second generation pellet that has the attributes that we’ve got here.” Bioenergy Internat ional No 79, 3-2015 25 previous operation. The Zilkha mill uses primarily in-woods fuel chips – full bark on limbs – and some chip mill clean chips to fill the gaps when it’s wet. The raw feedstock material is primarily southern yellow pine; a smaller percentage comes from a hardwood mix that will find its way into the softwood intake from mixed plots. Zilkha hired Ray Seymour as the forester on staff, having worked for RockTenn based in Stevenson, Alabama. Zilkha also maintains a corporate forester, Brian Reed. They are procuring 100 truckloads of chips per day, or approximately 2 000 US tons per day, five days a week. Zilkha expects to work with a nucleus of six suppliers, with possible expansion to nine or ten. So far the suppliers were already running chipping operations. A big reason for the refurbishment of the wood yard with additional paved spacing, an additional truck dump and two more truck scales was to minimise wait time for incoming trucks. Personnel Forester Seymour is but one of several personnel on site who came from the pulp and paper industry. Director of Operations Barry Ford worked more than 30 years in the paper industry, including for Graphic Packaging, RockTenn and Smurfit-Stone mostly in production positions. Plant Manager Charles Daw also came from Graphic Packaging and before that Georgia-Pacific and Smurfit-Stone. Process and chemical engineer Jim Truax worked for International Paper. Zilkha at Selma also brought in 10 employees with pelleting experience, including Brad Mayhew as production manager. He worked several years at the Georgia Biomass pellet plant, ending up there as plant manager before coming to Zilkha. Six former Dixie Pellets employees joined the Zilkha staff, three of them as supervisors. “They’ve been very helpful,” Ford says. “They understood a lot of the issues. One of the first things we did was sit down with them and say tell us what the problems were, what would you do different. They had some very keen insights.” Ford says at peak construction the site included more than 200 workers; the plant runs with 54. Ford compliments the city of Selma, Wallace Community College and Alabama Industrial Development Training for their assistance in the screening and applications process. Ford adds that the operation received a whopping 1 200 applications. Overseeing all of this activity is Sonny Jackson, Senior Vice President of Engineering and Operations. “We’re all very excited to wrap up commissioning and begin production,” Jackson says. “Construction of the Selma plant went smoothly. We’ll be able to take what we’ve learned here and make sure future projects are deployed even more efficiently.” Now that Zilkha is commissioning the Selma plant, planning to build a larger one on a site already selected in Arkansas, and expecting to build more plants, the issue of black pellets versus white pellets for off-shore electricity generation and heating markets assumes real-time relevance. A Welsh company Black Mountain Woodfuels has announced that it has raised sale contracts to build its first commercial-scale torrefaction reactor for Norfolk based Chase Biomass Fuels Ltd. According to a statement the contract is for three 1.5 tonne per hour torrefaction reactors of which the first is expected to be operational by November 2015 and the others by end of 2016. Chase Biomass is investing over GBP 4.5 million to be able to produce high-energy pillows and briquettes, as a drop-in replacement for coal, along with torrefied biocoal pellets for local domestic and commercial markets. – We have been working in the biomass industry for more than 15 years and have been conscious of the fact that delivering fuels with high moisture content wastes a considerable amount of money. Torrefaction not only offers us the opportunity to almost eliminate that cost, but we also gain a combustible product that offers the consumer an increase in energy per kilogram delivered of about 2 kWh. This market advantage is attractive enough to warrant the investment that we, along with our investment partners, intend to make over the next 3-5 years, said Mike Farrow, Managing Director of Chase Biomass. Black Mountain Woodfuels is the UK and European licensed manufacturer and supplier of designed torrefaction equipment for American company TSI Inc. The Seattle based company is a specialist in dryer systems, torrefaction reactors, finishing lines, and heat energy systems. In May 2013 the two companies formed a strategic partnership investing around US$1 million to design, manufacture and market a range of small-scale, static and mobile torrefaction reactors in the UK. – We are excited about the opportunity to work with Black Mountain Wood Fuels and Chase Biomass on this project. This becomes the launch platform for our technology in Europe and brings engineered fuels into a scale-appropriate application. The benefits go far beyond the value of the contract to us and we are proud to be part of this greater endeavour, said Andrew Johnson, Vice President of TSI. BI79/4832/AS Chase Biomass to set-up commercial torrefaction plant Text & photos: Rich Donnell Editor’s note: A version of this article orginally appeared in Wood Bioenergy, April 2015. BI79/4850/AS Cont. from page 23


Bioenergy no 3 May 2015
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