May 4 - McClatchy-Tribune Regional News - David Brooks The Telegraph, Nashua, N.H.


When talking about the oldest of all energy technologies as it evolves for the modern world, it's OK to use terms such as "biomass" and "thermal inertia" or even "return on investment" -- but please, its proponents beg, don't say "tree-hugger."

"That image is still out there -- we need to lose that image," said Steven Walker, CEO of New England Wood Pellet in Jaffrey, the region's highest-profile biomass firm. "This is about business, generating wealth and building an economy around energy -- not just saving the world."

From the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, Christiane Egger, a government official from Austria who champions wood burning as a part of the alternative energy picture, agrees.

"This is an industry. This is not for people in strange clothes doing funny things," she told several hundred people crowded into an industry conference Tuesday in Manchester.

 The crowd, full of people in suits and business casual attire, as well as the blue-jeans-and-boots uniform of the logging industry, laughed.

Even in the midst of a recession, the biomass industry has reason to laugh, thanks largely to a decades-long move from burning cordwood to burning fuels made out of pressed, dried sawdust or other types of processed wood.

"You don't take oil or gas and throw it into a random box -- you refine it," Walker said. "We refine wood into pellets and use an appliance."

Such "biomass" fuel doesn't have to be made from wood; corncobs, grass or any type of grown matter will do. But in New Hampshire, the second most heavily forested state behind only Maine, wood is the obvious choice.

The uniform size, shape and quality pellets mean their use can be automated, with augers to feed boilers from hoppers of fuel filled by delivery trucks, echoing the way homes and businesses buy and use oil, natural gas or coal.

This has led to the convenience of pellet stoves, which have made wood heat a viable option again in homes, and large pellet-fed or wood-chip-fed boilers, which make wood a possible heating fuel for commercial and industrial plants.

That, in turn, has provided incentive to develop systems that avoid most of the pollution that older wood-burning systems emitted.

Even power production has gotten into the act: Far more electricity is produced in New Hampshire by wood-burning power plants than by hilltop wind turbines.

This doesn't mean wood is going to leap back into its 19th-century role as the leading fuel for heating homes and businesses; oil and natural gas are likely to remain dominant. But a series of technical improvements, pushed by environmental desire to wean the U.S. from fossil fuels and particularly imported oil, have given it new life.

The big issue, as is so often the case, is money. New burner and boiler technologies for efficient wood burning are expensive, partly because they're still being developed and partly because relatively few are being made and sold.

"It's cost, pure cost; that's what drives the decision" whether to switch, said Mark Froling, president of Froling Construction and Industrial Services, a Peterborough-based consultant who has been dealing with construction projects for 23 years and in renewables for a decade.

"It's incentive driven."

These incentives, mostly federal but also some state money funneled through programs such as the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, are designed to help companies and residents switch from fossil fuels.

There are other concerns, including the ability of New England's forests, which have rebounded from being mostly clear-cut, to provide fuel and remain healthy.

Wood-burning power also has a long legacy of air pollution, particularly involving soot and other small particles; officials said modern pollution controls have solved this issue, but not everybody is convinced.

The fact that incentives are required demonstrates that the transformation of biomass energy still has a way to go. But the second annual "Heating the Northeast With Renewable Biomass" conference, held at the Radisson Hotel Manchester on Tuesday and Wednesday, reflected how far it has come.

The two-day event, targeted at players within the industry rather than retail customers, was twice the size of last year's conference.

It featured not just the expected business such as stove manufacturers and New England Wood Pellet, poster child for the biomass industry in New Hampshire, but also ancillary businesses, showing that there's enough money in the industry to attract indirect players.

They include Hews Co., of Maine, a truck body firm selling a sleek forklift that could be carried around on the back of a flatbed truck, to help firms deliver bagged pellets by the ton to customers' basements.

"It used to be people would buy a few bags (of pellets) at the hardware store -- now it's delivered by the pallet load," Charles Hews said. "They're still working out the best way to deliver product to customers."

Also displaying their wares were Firefly North America, which sell fire protection systems -- wood dust is so easily ignited that it can literally explode, producing the biggest safety hazard of the forest products industry -- and Primary Packaging, which hopes pellet manufacturers will sell their product in its polyethylene bags or use its plastic wrap to encase their pallet loads.

Even wood could be found in various forms, such as Biobricks, 8-inch parallelepipeds of compressed sawdust, like pellets the size of small bricks, which can be burned in traditional wood stoves in place of cordwood, creating a longer-lasting fire with less ash.

And for those who still want to use cordwood, there was also the Garn Wood Heating System, which burns traditional logs within a gasification chamber in specialized boilers to create large-scale commercial heating systems, creating a much more efficient system if you have a good supply of logs that you want to use.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the biomass industry thinks all these options could be better used. At the end of the Manchester conference, five groups representing various aspects of the biomass industry in the Northeast issued a "A Vision for 2025."

It noted that heating and hot water used 39 percent of all energy consumed in New England and New York in 2007, and that 96 percent of this energy was provided by "non-renewable and high-carbon fossil fuels."

It urged a goal of providing 25 percent of the region's heating and hot water with "forest and farm resources transformed into heat" by 2025, replacing what it says are 1.14 billion gallons of heating oil annually with biomass. Among other things, it would involve converting 1.38 million houses to pellet boilers and other thermal biomass.

The report details the amount of "biofeedstock" available in New England forests and claims there is more than enough to do with without harming lumber mills, paper mills and other users of what is sometimes called the "wood basket."

This effort should go "hand in hand with aggressive efforts to improve building energy efficiency, thus reducing overall energy consumption," it said, and could not only reduce the amount of oil that we have to buy, but create more logging and wood-industry jobs and related jobs in servicing and installing biomass installations.

It proposes the creation of a six-state working group, involving industry, government and nonprofits, to urge state and regional support for this idea through tax incentives, loan programs, reference in climate action plans and a "public education campaign" to overcome wood's tree-hugger imagine.

It's a lot to expect, but the conference got a boost of encouragement from Egger, a director of the energy division for the state of Upper Austria, an industrial state in Austria that has, she noted happily, almost exactly the same population as New Hampshire.

More than a decade of government and industry push has led that state, which has much less forest cover than northern New England, to generate a third of its total energy use from alternative sources, half of which are wood. Among other things, she said, virtually all new homes are being heated by wood, generally pellet boilers.

"Why did this small state in a small country put such a burden on itself? ... Purely economic reasons are sufficient to justify the transition," she said. "Price fluctuation (of oil) alone is a very good reason to get out of oil dependency."

What this means, she said, is that if New Hampshire and its neighbors want to use more biomass, they eventually can.

"What you're doing is not an isolated... initiative, but is part of something bigger," she said. "You have to make a commitment and you have to stick to it."

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