World's Largest Wood-Pellet Factory To Be Built in GA

[Fledermaus]

RWE Innogy announced plans to build a factory to produce biomass pellets in the southern part of the US state of Georgia. The plant will have an annual production capacity of 750,000 tons, making it the biggest and most modern of its type in the world.

Forests in Georgia provide enough wood to sustainably produce the pellets, the company said. Around 1.5 million metric tons of fresh wood are needed each year to produce 750,000 tonnes of pellets. Unlike Europe, the US have a huge growth surplus of wood that is not used. This is particularly true in the Georgia region, from which numerous paper and pulp companies have withdrawn over the past decade, thus further reducing the demand for wood. Wood growth is currently ahead of consumption in Georgia.

Dr. Hans Bünting, Member of the Board of Directors of RWE Innogy stated: “Through this new plant, RWE will be able to secure a supply of biomass at stable and competitive prices. Due to the large surplus available, wood is much cheaper in the US than in Europe with its restricted wood land availability. Furthermore, Georgia is a region where forest management is being carried out in a sustainable manner--this fully meets our strict criteria for the production of biomas

http://www.sustainablebusiness.com/index.cfm/go/news.display/id/19614

[madokie]

1. been using wood pellets to keep my ass warm for 17 years now

except the ones we buy are made from otherwise waste sawdust from cabinet shops, furniture makers and such.

[AlecBGreen]

2. nothing heats like wood

Ive lived in houses heated by every form of heat - gas, oil, electric & wood. NOTHING comes close to warming up a house like a good wood fire. I have a heat pump now (:() but we're looking into the cost of putting in a wood stove & chimney. Our electric bill for one month was close to $300.

[madokie]

3. We just purchased the Harman Advance pellet stove

www.harmanstoves.com/

When I say 'just' I mean about two months ago. This is the third pellet stove we've bought over the years and this is the cream of the crop. Harman makes excellent wood stoves and inserts also. Check 'em out when you get a chance, I think you'll like what you see.

Our choices for heat is wood, propane or electric, plus wood pellets. We have been averaging about 2 tons of pellets a winter for the last 17 years for a savings of 7 maybe 8 hundred bucks a winter. Pays for a new pellet stove in a hurry. Even though we've bought three stoves throughout the years we are still ahead money wise. We pass the old ones down to the kids. The first one we bought in the winter of '91 '92 is still just as good as it ever was. I plan to sell it as soon as I clean it up and re black it.


Pellets are costing us 220 a ton this winter. for the first several winters we used pellets we were buying them for 150 bucks a ton.

[AlecBGreen]

11. i like the cast-iron stoves best

the one in our farm is maybe 1.5 by 2 by 4 and it can heat the whole half of the house to unbearably high temps! in terms of a whole-house, furnace style stove, my folks have a taylor outdoor furnace. they can load it with logs as big as you can lift and it will heat the house and hot water all day. the only downside is spending a day per week cutting wood if its really cold out. even so, with all the pros and cons considered, ill take wood over my stinkin heat pump any day.

to use your pellet stove, the house needs hot water/radiator pipes right? what i mean is, its not forced air, correct?

[madokie]

12. You like cast iron then the Harman Accentra is the stove for you

just kidding bout that but it is a good Harman cast iron pellet stove, I about forgot the Harman XXV, its cast iron also. All the pellet stoves have blowers on them that distributes the heat throughout the house. Myself what I done to keep the farther reaches of the house warm is I put an insulated 8 inch duct coming from the furtherest room from the stove and have a small fan that is pulling the air off the floor where it's the coldest and warm air has to go back there to make up the difference. Our bedroom, which is where the duct terminates is a good 40 feet from the pellet stove and when it was down to zero a couple weeks ago and the wind a blowing we were about 3 degrees cooler than the room where the stove is located.
Go to the link I gave when you get a chance and check out the Harman stoves. They have quite a few both that burn pellets and wood. Their wood stoves uses a secondary combustion chamber design where the otherwise smoke is burned and gives up its heat.

When you see that wood stove thats putting out a lot of smoke, all that smoke is burnable, it just needs oxygen, and a bunch of it is collecting in the flue and if its not cleaned often, pretty much yearly at the least, the flue will plug up and if it ever catches on fire you're in for a house burning. I've seen a chimney fire once and it looked and sounded like a jet engine was in that chimney, luckily the folks where this happened were able to choke the Oxygen off and get it stopped before it caught their house on fire but they were lucky, I mean lucky.

Harman pellet stoves have a sensor rather than using a thermostat and you can place this sensor up to 25 ft from the stove and it keeps the fire at just the right size to keep the house at whatever temp you set it at. When I went to bed last night it was 72 degrees in here and when I got up this morning it was still 72 degrees in here even though it got colder and the wind picked up quite a bit.

My wife and I are getting up there in years, 61 for me, so we're trying to make sure we've got our ducks in a row when she retires so we'll have relatively new appliances and all that so we won't be having to worry with those when we're reduced to SS only. I'm disabled and have been for 6 years now and not much chance of that changing anytime.

Harman makes good stoves. take a look see.
http://www.harmanstoves.com/products/products.asp?cat=stoves&prd=pellet-stoves

[AlecBGreen]

14. lol are you a Harman dealer by any chance?

i looked at the Accentra and that is a real nice stove! The two things stopping us are cost and cost. Im a teacher and my wife is a full time college student so money is real tight these days. Also we just bought a house so all the money we saved is gone. I will do some research this winter, save up some dough and see if we can swing it for next winter. If we could find a ventless stove that would make things a lot easier. Adding a stove pipe & chimney is going to really add to the cost of this switch to wood/wood pellet heat. Fortunately the $1500 tax credit is still good through 2010.

Here is what we have @ the farm. My dad fell in love with these Jotul stoves when he was stationed in northern Norway and he and my mom bought one when when they moved back to Virginia. Ours doesnt have a glass door and the side fresco is different but you get the idea.



This thing is worth its weight in gold!

[madokie]

15. Maybe I should be

I had forgot about the jotul stoves. I remember reading about them years ago and wanting one then.

With pellets I simple go through the wall with the 3 inch exhaust pipe and pretty close by I have a 2 and 1/2 inch pvc pipe that is bringing the combustion air in so I'm not having it come in around the doors and windows, what goes out must come in.

Have you read about the Harman brand of stoves and how they work?

The stove you're showing is a catalyst stove if I remember correctly and they simply are not suitable for our climate here, too much heat. Here we may get down in the teens during the night and up in the 50's and 60's during the day so we need something that heats up fast and cools down quickly, like a pellet stove does. We heated with wood as a kid growing up and it would be unbearably hot on some of those days where it was colder than a witches tit in a brass bra at night but nice and warm in the afternoon and here we have a stove full of hot coals that takes hours to cool down so you have to open the doors and let some of the heat out. If you live up north you don't have that problem so much like we do here in OK.

Actually I'm just trying to share some of the things I've learned about heating ones home :hi:

This pellet stove we bought this year will pay for itself in a few years over what it cost to heat with propane or electric and if our first pellet stove is any indication it should last us the rest of our lifetimes.

My figures show we have accumulated about 4500 bucks over the years from savings in fuel after the price of the 3 pellet stoves we've bought is taken out. My figures are way low ball too the actual savings is quite a bit more if I really want to get serious about the figuring. :-)

Did I mention that I simply love Teachers and feel you all should be paid a whole lot better where this kind of worry isn't needed.

We've passed our old stoves down to our kids so they won't have to worry with propane or electric for heat so we could claim some savings there too if I wanted to.

[jpak]

17. I love my Harman Accentra - it reduced my oil consumption to near zeo

(I still have to run the oil burner to heat the basement when it below zero outside)

It reduced my heating bill by more than 60%.

It made my house WARM.

The bright flame is cozy and comforting.

My heating fuel comes from my home state - not red states and overseas...

:thumbsup:

[doc03]

4. Doesn't a wood fire produce CO2? Another thing

about burning wood, I see a lot of people getting those outdoor wood burners, they make a lot of smoke. There is a house up the road from me that has one and when the wind is blowing towards the road it is like driving through a fog bank.

[TalkingDog]

5. I'm too lazy to check the footnotes but

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_fuel#Greenhouse_gases

stab 'm, beat 'm or burn 'm (they go up like a match)....

anyway...point is, if they rot they produce just as much carbon. So wood is considered carbon neutral. Unless you want to go and bury every fallen tree and never distrub the soil again......

[conscious evolution]

6. Fire is also an antidote

to TV.

[TalkingDog]

10. But is it carbon neutral?

[conscious evolution]

13. Not really sure

Worth the trade off,though,imo.

[AlecBGreen]

16. the easy answer is...

its complicated.

when you combust wood in the presence of oxygen, much of the stored carbon is converted from long-chain polymers such as lignin & cellulose to very small molecules of carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide, plus other gasses such as H2, NOx, etc. The metals are left as ash - magnesium, iron, potassium, etc. Some noncombusted fragments of carbon may be leftover in the form of charcoal.

So, is it carbon neutral? Yes. Carbon dioxide in = carbon dioxide out. Actually its a little better bc the small fraction that remains as charcoal is quite stable and degrades very slowly.

Is it greenhouse-effect neutral? I dont know. The NOx compounds are pretty powerful GHGs IIRC.

nerdy side note: wood (cellulose) doesnt actually BURN. Rather, the heat from fire causes it to breakdown into volatile gasses (H2, CO, O2, etc) and THEY burn. If you look closely at a burning log, the flame doesnt touch the wood. Thats bc the wood isnt burning! Rather it is the gasses shooting out of the hot wood that are igniting. The heat of the combustion of these gasses causes the pure carbon/charcoal "log" to burn. Look @ the pic and think what would be left if you doused it with water? A large lump of pure charcoal (= carbon). All the other compounds have already vaporized & combusted and only the carbon and some metals remain. Cool eh?

[jpak]

18. It's carbon neutral

n/t

[endless october]

7. at least it's made in the US.

we need every manufacturing job we can get.

[doc03]

8. Well what about coal? n/t

[endless october]

9. until we replace it with a massive infrastructure building initiative...

i see no way to eliminate it.

i'm 100 percent for ending all war and using that money for building non-CO2 producing plants from coast to coast. nuclear, renewables, whatever. built and run nationally if need be.

but until we do that, we're stuck with coal.

we need to make a serious decision as Americans. because conservation can only take us so far, and non-CO2 producing electricity is a serious potential for non-imported energy independence. we just have to decide to do so and then demand it.