Turning up the heat on biomass

September 17, 2006

The season's first cool nights called heating systems across much of Maine into service last week, and it won't be long before they fire up the corn furnance at the SAD 58 school bus garage.

Wood smoke typically fills the air in the hills of western Maine, but not around the two-bay, metal building in Salem, near Kingfield. Later this month, the district will begin burning more than 600 bushels of Maine-grown corn in a hot-air furnace made in Minnesota, where corn heat is common. The goal is to eliminate more than 2,000 gallons of fuel oil, and save the school district thousands of dollars in energy costs.

Maine isn't Minnesota, and corn won't crowd out cordwood anytime soon. But SAD 58's venture is an example of Maine's growing interest in using its farmland and forests to develop a home-grown biofuels industry.

The district's experience will be among the topics this week in Bangor, at the first Maine Biomass and Biofuels Conference. The event will feature speakers who are using biofuels to heat schools and run trucks, as well as entrepreneurs trying to build biodiesel and ethanol refineries and wood-based chemical conversion plants. Forest owners, farmers, government officials and small business owners are expected to attend the conference, which is being organized by the Maine Association of Conservation Districts.
Heavily wooded, and home to a forest products industry, Maine has been a leader in using low-value tree waste to generate electricity. It has done less, however, to exploit the energy potential of farm crops, use its vast woodlands to warm institutional buildings or unlock formulas that can substitute wood fiber for petrochemicals. In the current era of high oil and natural gas prices, these ambitions may be coming into focus.

Corn heat is a small but promising example.

SAD 58 has hooked up with Herbert "Bussie" York at Sandy River Farms in Farmington. A dairy farmer who raises corn and other crops, York has become so interested in corn energy that he recently started a side business to sell corn stoves and furnaces.

The furnace being installed in the bus garage costs around $15,000, including a storage silo, according to Quenten Clark, SAD 58's superintendent. Figuring the prices of corn and oil, and the heat output of the fuels, the investment will pay for itself in less than five years.

"We're expecting to replace $5,000 worth of oil with $1,800 of corn," he said.

Beyond corn, Clark's long-term goal is to offset the $250,000 the district spent last year on fuel oil to heat five school buildings. For that he looked to Vermont.

Twenty-five Vermont schools heat with wood chips; three new systems are being built and more than 10 are on the drawing board for next year, according to Norm Etkind, who directs the school energy management program for the Vermont Superintendents Association. In a recent survey, Etkind said, wood chips replaced more than 700,000 gallons of oil at Vermont schools.

Etkind, Clark and York are scheduled to speak at the biofuels conference.

Modern wood boilers have become so automated that a school's custodial staff can easily run them, Etkind said. But local schools need some technical advice, as well as money to help make the conversions. Through a bonding program, Vermont pays 90 percent of the cost, a contribution that will drop to 75 percent next year.
"It's all taxpayer money one way or another," Etkind said.
Quenten Clark doesn't want taxpaper money paying for imported oil. At his schools, he said, there are enough children with parents who work in the woods to supply the district with wood chips to meet all the district's heating demand.

"That would help sustain the local economy," he said. Clark said he's frustrated that Maine doesn't do more to help schools find alternatives to oil. He's aware of only one school - Leavitt High School in Turner - that heats with wood chips.

"We're going to go after the Legislature to provide some subsidies, like they do in Vermont," he said.

Along with high petroleum prices, government subsidies are clearly part of the picture for biofuels.

Created from soybean, canola and other oil-seed plants, biodiesel is mixed with petroleum diesel to improve air quality and cut dependence on imported energy.

Federal tax credits have helped put 76 commercial biodiesel plants online today, more than triple the number two years ago. Developers last week announced plans for a 60-million-gallon-a year refinery, valued at $100 million, in Illinois.

Maine obviously is far removed from the nation's corn and soybean belts, but the state has enacted a modest production tax credit and excise tax break to help spur biofuels development here. Speakers at the conference will discuss the status of biodiesel use and production in Maine. An official from Keene, N.H., also will talk about powering the city's vehicles on biofuels.

One speaker is scheduled to call for more farmers to grow canola and soybeans in Aroostook County.

John Cancelarich, who owns the Regent Associates consulting firm in Presque Isle, is working with Peter Sexton, a University of Maine extension agent, and the Houlton Band of Maliseet Indians to build a $6 million biodiesel refinery in the Houlton area.

The plant would produce 5 million gallons a year. Area potato farmers would benefit by planting canola as a rotation crop.
The pair has completed a feasibility study and business plan, which the tribe is considering. They're talking to banks about financing and visiting equipment vendors.

"We see a good market for it and could sell every drop we make," Cancelarich said.

Any efforts to develop row crops for biofuels in Maine will be dwarfed, however, by the potential of wood fiber.

That sense is reflected in a $6.9 million federal grant received earlier this year by the University of Maine to help the state's forest products industry learn to make fuel ethanol, plastics and specialty chemicals by transforming paper and lumber mills into biorefineries. Mills could create new, high-margin products - such as extracting chemicals from wood chips - while maintaining their traditional production.

UMaine's research is being complemented by other efforts around the state to advance bioproduct technologies.

One example is the work of the Fractionation Development Center, a nonprofit organization working on biomass conversion technologies in Rumford. The center is trying to establish a bioproducts industry in western Maine to make fuel, power, chemicals and other materials from low-value trees and forestland.

Speakers from the Fraction-ation Development Center and UMaine also are scheduled to talk at the conference.

Despite these and other initiatives, one of the conference organizers said Maine isn't doing enough to take advantage of the benefits of biofuels.

William Bell, executive director of the Maine Association of Conservation Districts, said some other Northeast states, such as New York, appear to be making greater public investments in biofuels. Bell said he hoped the conference would get landowners, business people and government officials thinking about the issue.

"We wanted to bring in people with experience, who are doing something that could be adopted in Maine," he said.

Staff Writer Tux Turkel can be contacted at 791-6462
tturkel@pressherald.com