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of Minneapolis for several years, and it’s close to the locations where the tree material is being removed. It’s also inside of the EAB quarantine area, Cook points out, reiterating that no whole tree material can leave the quarantine area without further processing. The fact that the processing and storage facility, which is located at the 20-acre SMSC organics recycling facility, is only 7 miles away from the power plant keeps processed fuel transportation costs low. Both facilities are key components in ensuring that the product delivered to the energy facility meets certain specifications for size and moisture content for the proprietary fuel blend used at the energy plant.
Meeting Specifications For the woody biomass component of Koda’s fuel blend, chippers and grinders are used to reach the specifications of three-fourths of an inch for size, and an MEC wood dryer is used to achieve less than 14 percent moisture content by weight. “We use several other types of fuel too, hulls from various grains, aged seed corn, undersized whole grain products, sunflower seed material, corn screenings, other grain dusts, and many other dry agricultural byproducts,” Cook says. “These grain-derived fuels are typically less than 10 percent moisture and the size of a kernel of wheat, and usually arrive meeting our specifications.” Koda also contracts with several pallet manufacturing companies to receive recycled pallet board material, most of which, Cook says, use horizontal wood grinders for size reduction and can meet the moisture specification without further processing. When fuel arrives at the CHP plant, it’s segregated by material type and combustion characteristics, including ash content, Btu value and alkali per million Btu. “The separate fuel types are then blended in a specific ratio so that the combined fuel recipe has favorable characteristics for our combustion process,” Cook explains. Drag conveyors move fuel from individual silos to four Bliss hammermills, which are commonly found in flour production facilities,