THE BEST FEEDSTOCK FOR BLACK PELLETS
Seven Reasons Why Fire-Damaged Dead Wood is the Best Raw Material for Advanced Black Pellets
As climate pledges press harder in the late 2020s it seems most likely that coal will be replaced first in our energy mix, ahead of oil.
After white wood and torrefied pellets failed to prove themselves an ideal substitute for the fossil fuel, new steam explosion technology developed in Finland has now created coal’s first truly viable replacement.
Advanced black pellets made by steam explosion behave just like coal, in multiple ways.
They’re waterproof, with much greater mechanical strength and bulk density than earlier pellet iterations. They grind like coal, and have a comparable calorific value to coal.
However, lab tests have shown, stream-treated advanced black pellets release just six percent of coal’s deadly CO2.
To date, manufacturers used mainly ‘round wood’ timber as fresh feedstock for biofuel pellets. Its high water volume makes it energy-intensive to process. Tree resin and terpenes impact negatively on biofuel quality. The environmental impact of using fresh cut timber is clear – fewer trees means more CO2 in the atmosphere.
Instead, CoAlternative Energy Ltd converts fire-damaged forest dead wood into its best-in-class advanced biofuel pellets.
From good forest management to carbon-neutral processes and final product quality, the reasons for using fire-damaged dead wood to make advanced black pellets are numerous:
1. Ideal Physical State for Processing
When fire sweeps through a forest, it typically kills the trees in its path but leaves the structural integrity of their trunks intact. The intense heat produced during a forest blaze turns each trunk into a natural kiln, warming heart and sap wood, before wind and sun draw out its moisture content.
By the time this standing wildfire-damaged dead wood is harvested from Canada's boreal range by our forestry team it can contain 50 percent less water by mass than 'green wood'. This makes it lighter to handle and transport, and less energy-intensive to process at our production plants.
Wildfire-damaged dead wood provides more net fibre than 'green wood' and is therefore more efficient to process. It results in much lower operational expenses and a significantly smaller production carbon footprint than when processing 'fresh' feedstock with high water content.
2. Reduction of Forest Fire Risk
Climate change has doubled the likelihood of extreme wildfire weather conditions in Canada. Holdover ‘zombie’ fires can now smoulder for years underground and a much greater frequency of lightning strikes place Canada’s boreal forest carbon sink at more risk than ever before.
Every wildfire leaves standing and fallen charred dead wood in its wake, creating dangerous fuel continuity. Dried by wildfire heat and then the elements, this desiccated timber acts as extensive kindling for underground holdover ‘zombie’ fires, and the spread of future forest blazes.
Clearing this ‘tinder’ – as part of producing a green fuel – creates fuel breaks that stop the spread of future wildfires by distancing burning forest from unburned forest. These fuel breaks protect ancient old-growth trees, and their carbon stores, and allow Canada’s boreal forest range to thrive.
3. Stable Fixed Price Feedstock
Canada operates stringent policies around forestry, logging and timber practices, quite rightly, to protect the carbon sink in its precious boreal range. The price of ‘round wood’ timber prices across the world has also become increasingly volatile, with fluctuations sometimes entirely unpredictable.
CoAlternative has bought 20-year forestry rights to harvest fire-damaged dead wood and beetle-infested trees from five million hectares of woodland. This land already contains a 15-year backlog of scorched timber and ensures more than 500,000 MT of feedstock can be harvested each year.
This long-term access to low-cost raw cellulosic material provides CoAlternative Energy Ltd with feedstock for production at the same fixed price each year, for 20 years. And, in turn, it protects offtake partners and their residential and industrial customers from unstable fuel and energy prices.
4. Reduction of GHG Emissions
Leaving dead wood to rot in the forest releases methane – a potent greenhouse gas 80 times more powerful in trapping heat than carbon dioxide. Methane is thought to have caused more than 30 percent of global warming in recent years and it is the focus of new efforts to ease climate change.
Scientists and politicians now believe the most effective way to slow human-made climate change could be to reduce the amount of methane released into earth’s atmosphere. They claim that a 40 percent cut in methane could pair back temperature rises by 0.3°C in the next decade.
CoAlternative Energy Ltd removes dead, dying and decaying wood from Canada’s forest range, to convert into low-emission advanced black biofuel pellets. In doing so, it prevents vast amounts of decomposition methane from entering the atmosphere and causing global temperature rises.
5. Groundwork for Reforestation
Perhaps the most compelling argument for using fire-damaged dead wood for black pellets is the environmental restoration it facilitates. Clearing standing and fallen charred timber from large swathes of land both protects old growth woodland and creates space for planting new trees.
Restocking and expanding Canada’s forest carbon sink with indigenous tree species is at the core of CoAlternative Energy Ltd’s composite approach to addressing climate change. It launched the New Ground Foundation in 2018 to reforest and manage areas that it clears of wildfire dead wood.
Through the foundation, in cleared areas, the company plants coniferous spruce, fir, pine and larch trees alongside deciduous species including birch, aspen and poplar. All contribute to a greater carbon sink that draws down atmospheric carbon dioxide from above Canada’s boreal forest belt.
6. Unique Chemical Make-Up
Wildfires cause intense heat that typically destroys tree branches and canopies but only scorches tree trunks. The structural integrity of tree trunks often remain unchanged while their chemical makeup is slightly altered by thermal degradation of the wood’s lignocellulosic structure.
Fire-damaged dead wood has had its cellular bonds weakened by heat, so activated lignin has begun to redistribute through its fibres. It has also had volatile resins, oils, and terpenes driven off so they can’t interfere with binding during pelletisation – leaving pellets with a higher fixed carbon content.
Advanced black pellets made from fire-damaged dead wood grind into a less stringy more consistent powder, improving mill throughput for furnaces. And the resulting fuel feedstock is cleaner and concentrated in carbon-heavy components needed to produce high-calorie fuel.
7- Coal-Like End Product
Coal-powered generating stations around the world, faced with making “low capital cost” switches to burning biomass, require the most viable ‘drop in’ replacement for coal. The low-emission biofuel they adopt must behave like coal in as many ways as possible to minimise capital expenditure.
Standard wood pellets are notoriously difficult to grind, requiring five times more energy to prepare for pulverized coal boilers. They also necessitate major plant modifications to handling, storage and processing infrastructure. And torrefied pellets aren’t dissimilar to white pellets in many ways.
Advanced black pellets, made from fire-damaged dead wood and by steam explosion, have a Hardgrove Grindability Index (HGI) much closer to coal. Their coal-like, pre-brittleness means they can be processed using existing coal-handling infrastructure with minimal CapEx and modification.
