The new EPA regulation is to control emissions from ALL solid-fuel boilers regardless of their size, application and location. The regulation applies to this almost ready to start plant as it does to the huge coal fired power plants all across the country. The domino effect of this plant not starting up would be large. Not only would jobs at the plant be lost but also the jobs in transportation and the logging/timber jobs lost. This biomass plant has been designed to burn the debris left over from logging, thinning, slash piling of the timber industry. Timber and wood that would normally be burned in slash piles can now be burned to produce very, very clean energy to power this plant, which produces Wood pellets and bricks.
So to all you environazi's out there who have never worked an honest day in your collective lives it is time to climb out of that tree you have been sitting in and celebrate another stupid moment in environmental history. There is much to party about here! The lost jobs, the lost reduction of woody fuels that can and does contribute to forest fires, the loss of tax revenues to John day and the surrounding area, the loss of more homes and people forced out of their homes, the waste of tax payers money to build this plant, the loss of fuel to help heat schools, hospitals, colleges, and yes, even homes. This may be such a cause to celebrate that all you earth muffins, tree huggers and prairie fairies may even want to shave you legs, armpits and take a bath in the closest stream or river and come party with the locals at the Employment office in John day. I will even buy you bums the disposable razors and soap. More dependence of the nanny state and letting the government decide what is best for all of us, not!
This is the stupidity of the environmental movement. This is just one small event, place that will cause a much larger harm than you green idiots realize. Multiply this by one hundred places, plants, etc and this is what cap and trade type legislation will do for our country, NOTHING but cause the above. There is a chance that the EPA will modify the regulation but will they do it for just this one biomass plant or retool the regulation for the benefit of the entire country? Time will tell and if there is an update I will post it here. From the Bend Bulletin.
Federal money helped build John Day plant to turn biomass into wood pellets.
By Ed Merriman / The Bulletin
JOHN DAY —A $6 million biomass processing plant built with the help of a $4.8 million federal stimulus grant may be put out of business before the switch is turned on due to a new environmental regulation.
During a tour Wednesday of the biomass plant being built by Malheur Lumber Co. in John Day, company officials expressed concern that a new Environmental Protection Agency standard imposing dramatically stricter limits on emissions from solid-fuel boilers could kill the market for wood pellets and wood bricks produced by the plant.
“I agree with the concept of trying to reduce air pollution, but virtually no commercial boiler currently operating in the country would meet the new EPA rule as currently written,” said John Shelk, managing director of Ochoco Lumber in Prineville, parent company of Malheur Lumber.
“Here we are doing something that is very positive. We are taking wood biomass from forest health thinning projects and we’re using it to manufacture a renewable energy product that replaces fossil fuels, and the EPA rule could kill it before it gets off the ground,” Shelk said.
As published in the Federal Register on June 4, the EPA’s new boiler emission standards appear to run counter to President Barack Obama’s stated goal to reduce dependence on fossil fuels, he said.
The EPA rules are currently scheduled to take effect in January.
Under the Clean Air Act, the EPA is charged with setting emission standards for hazardous pollutants based on the best performing, lowest-emitting technology available and in use. But Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., has submitted three letters to the EPA over the past six months, urging the agency to use its flexibly to adopt different standards for different types of boilers, rather than using a one-size fits all approach.
“If the EPA does not utilize its flexibility in this area, I am concerned about the potential impact such regulations could have on boilers utilized by thousands of small and mid-size businesses already hit hard by the recession,” Wyden wrote. “I am especially concerned with the impact on the wood products industry, which has been dramatically affected by the downturn in the housing and construction markets.”
Mike Billman, timber manager at Malheur Lumber, told media and others invited to tour the plant Wednesday that its construction has kept 15 to 30 workers employed since last spring.
The construction jobs pay prevailing union scale wages, which range from around $22 per hour to nearly $30 per hour, under the Davis Bacon Act, said Rick Minster, business development officer with the Oregon Business Development Department, which submitted the grant request for funding under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
Helping forests, heating buildings
Doug Gochnour, supervisor of the Malheur National Forest, said there’s such a backlog of thinning needed to reduce fuel loading and thin overstocked forests at high risk of massive fires that he originally supported two stimulus grant applications, but there wasn’t enough stimulus funds awarded to fund the second plant planned for Burns in Harney County.
“We have a 10-year strategy for thinning projects to improve forest health and reduce fuel loading,” Gochnour said. “We are currently planning several projects ranging from 15,000 acres to 40,000 acres each where some pretty large-scale thinning and prescribed burning is needed.”
He said much of the 1.7-million acre Malheur National Forest are so overstocked that the trees can’t get enough nourishment to grow health and strong enough to resist disease.
“Our forests are too overcrowded to do prescribed burning. We need to thin them first before we can reintroduce fire to play its proper role,” Gochnour said. “If we tried to introduce prescribed burning with the current level of fuel loading, instead of creeping along the ground like in a natural healthy stand, we’d have massive spreading through the canopy and burning out of control.”
He said the type of forest health thinning projects that remove smaller trees ideal for supplying biomass is similar to the thinning that originally created most of the giant old growth forests prior to European settlement, when nomadic aboriginal tribes cut and utilized the smaller trees for firewood, building huts and teepees and other uses.
Under terms of the federal grant received for the John Day biomass plant, Billman said the plant is expected to create 10 to 12 long-term jobs, but that won’t be possible if the EPA rules kill the market for wood pellets and wood bricks.
Billman told tourgoers the plant is designed to grind up small logs from forest health and fire mitigation thinning projects and turn the sawdust into wood pellets and wood bricks for burning in wood stoves, pellet stoves and solid-fuel boilers used to heat schools, hospitals, airport terminals, prisons and government buildings.
He said the John Day airport has already installed one of the most efficient and cleanest boilers fired with wood pellets to support the biomass plant being built by Malheur Lumber, and the hospital in John Day is converting to a wood-pellet boiler as well.
“The boiler at the Burns hospital has already been converted to a pellet boiler, and we are working with the Prairie City School District to get pellet boilers in the schools,” Billman said.
About the boilers
Boyd Britton, a member of the Malheur County Board of Commissioners, said biomass projects like the plant under construction in John Day can bring back at least some of the thousands of timber sector jobs lost over the past 20 years in rural counties across the state.
“If we don’t do more things like this, we are never going to rebuild the rural economies,” Britton said.
Unfortunately, he said the EPA’s new boiler emission standards are dampening those hopes.
“We are familiar with the new EPA rule. I am just hoping it gets derailed, and most of the folks I know are hoping it gets derailed,” Britton said.
He said the government ought to support more innovative ideas like biomass plants that can help rebuild rural economies and help break the nation’s dependence on foreign oil.
Andrew Haden, vice president of A3 Energy Partners of Portland, who is a boiler expert and consultant on the Malheur Lumber biomass plant, said the German-made wood pellet-burning boilers installed at the Malheur airport and Burns hospital are the cleanest, most efficient boilers in the world.
“These boilers are 23 times cleaner than an EPA-certified wood stove,” Haden said. “These are very, very clean boilers, but the EPA standards they are proposing would mandate 50 times cleaner emissions than wood stoves.”
“These boilers burn so clean you can’t seen anything coming out of the smokestack. Compare that to the clouds of smoke that fill the sky when they burn slash piles, which is the alternative,” he added.
He said the problem with the EPA rules is that the agency has put small boilers that heat buildings like schools and hospitals under the same regulations targeting massive coal-fired power plants like the one in Boardman.
Haden said woody biomass industries are booming in other countries like Germany, Sweden, Australia and Finland because the governments are working with industry.
“(Governments) help them achieve the target together. It is not an adversarial situation like you have here, with the regulations going into effect in six months,” Haden said.
Appealing to the EPA
Earlier this month, Wyden and a number of other senators and representatives signed a letter urging the EPA to apply different standards to the smaller wood-fired boilers.
“We have heard positive signals that the EPA has gotten the message from all the senators who have spoken out on this,” Haden said.
Shelk said if the EPA rules are implemented as written, they would shut down most remaining lumber mills and disrupt the supply of kiln-dried lumber that is produced with steam heat from wood-fired boilers.
“You’d see a devastating ripple effect throughout the economy,” Shelk said. “The effect would be disproportionate in rural areas where most of the lumber mills and secondary wood products companies are that manufacture wood window frames, doors, paneling, wood cabinets, furniture and other products made with kiln-dried lumber,” Shelk said.
Original article is here.
1 Comments - Share Yours!:
This biomass technology sounds very exciting to me. How much is it a viable alternative to the older coal plants, and to oil plants (which we all know who would love)?
I'd say to pressure the government to back down from these exaggerated rules, but from the article looks like the wheels are already in motion. This line in particular sounds very promising:
"We have heard positive signals that the EPA has gotten the message from all the senators who have spoken out on this"
Maybe Democracy will work for the people in this case?
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