Recently, as I have prepared for various talks at conferences and other gatherings, I have made an effort to compile information on new woody biomass utilization projects in California.  It is an interesting exercise to undertake as you might think that due to the financial crisis and unreliable flow of material from public lands that there would be very little activity.  However, it appears that we have a number of exciting projects underway in the state.  They can be put into three broad categories:

1 – Power plants (electricity generation and in some cases cogeneration)
Investment in power plants is taking place as utilities try to meet California’s Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS).  Additionally energy investors are diversifying their portfolios in order to manage the risk associated with volatile fossil fuel prices and maturing carbon markets. 

2 – Densified wood fuel (wood pellets and fire logs)
Densified wood fuels represent a growing market sector throughout the US.  Demand for pellets stoves is increasing.  There also opportunities in institutional heat systems and in supplying pellets to co-fire in coal power plants (especially in Europe and Asia). 

3 – Primary processing (sawmills and other processing)
The main California opportunities for primary processing are in niche chip or shavings markets and in manufacturing post and pole from small diameter logs. 

The new projects are summarized in the table, below.

All of these projects are either currently being implemented or will be by 2011.  This is not a definitive list but it represents some of the most significant and exciting projects out there.  I have more information on most of these projects and I plan to provide more detailed project profiles here in the future – subject of course to the project developers permission.

All of the larger projects are using a variety of feedstock sources (agricultural residues, urban waste, private forest and public forest sources) in order to manage risk.  A significant component will come from public lands and of course that component could grow in time. 

It is exciting to see projects that could utilize over 1m BDT of woody biomass being implemented throughout California.  Watch this space for more information!

Power plant restarts like Blue Lake Power are becoming more common

While visiting a sawmill in northern California last week, I saw the effects of juvenile wood in stacks of lumber after they had come out of the kiln. 

Lumber from small diameter trees often contains lots of juvenile wood

Juvenile wood comprises the core through the first 5 to 20 growth rings within a tree.  Juvenile wood is different from wood derived from the outer growth rings. Its morphology means that it is prone to movement such as warp, sweep and twist.  It is also prone to cupping as dimensional change in the tangential direction is twice as great as that in the radial direction. 

With smaller trees (and therefore logs) the impact of the juvenile wood becomes more significant. 

Sweep as a result of juvenile wood

Even the best mills have problems with the effects of juvenile wood.  This and the impact of working with many smaller logs (vs fewer larger logs) mean that sawmill efficiency becomes much more important.  The message is that you can saw small diameter material but it is much harder to make the economics work especially in todays lumber market.