Burning wood waste

chips are hard to burn...they smolder even in air curtain burners.

Check with EPA and local authorities about burning too.

If you can burn there are simpler ways to burn. Basically dig a huge trench in the ground in a taper, fill with wood and setup a huge fan in the wide end. That's how a lot of the post-Katrina debris was burned at the beginning of recovery.
 
We aren't looking to burn chips. I am looking into a biochar system too, which does burn (or slightly burn) chips. I'm thinking this would take the place of a chipper. Trench burning is not a possibility, we're in an area where bedrock is 12-18" down. And an open burn is limited by permitting, only allowed when snow is more than 6" deep. Plus the reclamation of a trench burn area is more time consuming and expensive than this option.
 
You need to change your focus of dealing with "wood waste" to creating a high value product.

Although we haven't officially launched yet, I'm working with the local college who has installed a biomass burner (1mw) as well as a research and testing facility. From this I've opened a separate business selling and setting up biomass boiler systems.

It is possible and not that difficult to store wood chips and turn them into a dryer, high value biomass product. You need clients for the biomass and if they're not around you have to develop a market but it's very doable now.

Never again will I dump chips for free somewhere. Every load is worth money as biomass or landscape mulch.

Vince
 
Vince, would you be willing to expand on the type of burner and the way you have to dry wood chips. This is the route I would like to take for my futur shop and/or house and this sounds super interesting. Thanks!
 
Mat, our website isn't up and running yet but when it is it will display the whole line of Froling products. They're austrian made and the best biomass boilers in the world. Only just now have they been made available to Canada and the US.

They have a few wood chip boilers ranging in size from 150kw to 1mw. For the smallest chip boiler, you'd need a decent sized building to heat. Or 8 average sized houses.

Drying the wood chips is temperamental but I'm working with the college and university here to develop the best way to drop the MC to between 20 and 30%. We actually are testing the bottom middle of our piles at below 20% which is amazing.

I've also been talking with a company that can densify chipped wood into round "logs" that would be perfect for a manual fed boiler. Conceivably, their system could move from one chip pile to another turning wood chips into densified logs for smaller scale burning.

Froling does make wood chip boilers that will heat just a house but until the north american market grows more, they aren't going to redesign them to meet our standards. A few years away hopefully.

Vince
 
Good info, thanks! What is the cost of the smallest system available here in Canada? What about a small residential unit (Froling T4 24kW)?
 
Mat the smallest wood chip boiler that Froling makes that's avaialbel in our market is the TX150. The T4 boilers are not. Froling pretty much has to redesign them (thicker steel, more welds) to meet our excessive standards so they have made that investment on only some boilers so far.

I would think that the T4 24kw would retail for around $20k. Just a guess.

Well worth the money if you can fuel it at no cost. Even better if you can get off electric or fuel oil heat.

v
 
Guys I wish there was a market for the chips here. Unfortunately such is not the case. I've worked for the last 10 years (as time allows) to find a market, so have many others in the industry here. Only BC has more pine beetle killed trees than Colorado. We're just letting them rot, becoming a carbon source instead of sink. It's really frustrating. If you check out the site this burner is on (http://www.airburners.com/index.html) they have a small powerplant they sell too. There's one running north of us in Boulder, Co. Colorado's state congress has held hearings on funding more of these powerplants. Nothing more than talk so far. I'm guessing with the drive to frack more gas around here (and the money that goes with it) it'll stay talk for the near term.
We just need to find a way to deal with our "wood waste" in the short term. My situation is trucking the chips is more than costly than disposal. Burning the limbs on site leaves only the logs to get hauled. At least firewood is a saleable commodity still. As you know these biomass buyers don't want anything but dry wood chips. So the limbs and all the leaves/needles are still a "wood waste".
 
There is a way forward but the price of Natural Gas is killing any significant progress in small scale biomass heating.

Austria heats a huge amount of buildings and homes with biomass in the form of pellets, firewood and wood chips. They have chipper systems set up where one truck arrives and chips a pile, blows it into another truck that then blows it directly into bunkers in homes and other buildings. Mind you these piles have been sitting through the entire summer so the resulting chips are already at 30% MC.

It's so simple and possible but no once is going to set these systems up when they have to compete with natural gas.

I'll give you $10/ton if you deliver to my yard here in Thunder Bay!
 
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