INDUSTRY NEWS¦
BY ANNA AUSTIN Pinnacle Pellet is building a 400,000 metric ton pellet plant near Burns Lake, British Columbia, its sixth location in the province, bringing its total capacity to 1.1 million metric tons. “We’re well into our civil work and we’ve got mechanical components showing up every day, as is typical with our build-out schedules,” said Leroy Reitsma, chief operating officer at Pinnacle Pellet. “We do a lot of preplanning and everything comes preassembled or modular, so from the time that we commence civil work to when the plant is running is usually only about 120 days.” Founded in 1989 by brothers Jim and Rob Swan, today Pinnacle has four other major shareholders, three of whom are actively involved in management of the company, including Reitsma. He and many of the other 160 people working at the company’s five strategically-located pellet mills have experience in the lumber industry, he said. Reitsma said the company expects the new plant to be up and running by the end of December. The maximum capacity for the facility will be 400,000 metric tons; actual initial production will run around 320,000 metric tons. “All of our other facilities’ production numbers total up to about 800,000 [metric] tons, with the Burns Lake facility that will increase to about 1.1 million [metric] tons, and those are real
production numbers,” Reitsma said. Pinnacle’s plants are located within close proximity to Canadian sawmills. “We’ve always tried to locate adjacent to industry-leading sawmills to form symbiotic relationships,” Reitsma said. “We support their business and provide them with a high value for their residuals, and when a plant is associated with a strong sawmill it gets a consistent, reliable supply of residuals. The two operations strengthen and balance each other, and usually mutually ensure success.” Pinnacle’s plants utilize a mix of sawmill residuals, and non-merchantable softwood timber, including pine beetle damaged wood. “That’s been key with these projects—we’ve had an overall focus of trying to become an integral part of the overall value chain, a role in which we are the default for whatever can’t be put to use as logs to make lumber or used to produce pulp, and so we’re the catch-all at the end of the equation,” Reitsma said. The woody biomass is trucked to Pinnacle’s plants, and from there the pellets are transported via rail to several British Columbia port facilities including Fibreco Terminal, the Kinder Morgan Terminal in north Vancouver and the Ridley Terminal in Prince Rupert. Pinnacle’s customer base consists of about 90 percent long-term large-scale utility overseas
PHOTO: PINNACLE PELLET
Pinnacle Pellet to build sixth plant
COMMENCING CONSTRUCTION: Reitsma (right, pictured with Ray Dawson, general manager-west region), expects the pellet plant in Burns Lake to be up and running by the end of December.
contracts, according to Reitsma. “A major focus of our marketing plan is to serve large utilities as a coal displacement,” he said. About 80 to 85 percent of Pinnacle’s pellets are shipped to the U.K. and continental Europe, 8 percent used for domestic residential heating, and the remainder shipped to Asia. Competition for woody biomass in Canada is at a reasonable level, from Reitsma’s perspective. “There’s a decent balance of supply and demand in the province right now, but that mainly depends on what is happening in the pulp and paper industry,” he said. “When the price of pulp escalates and sawmills are not running at full capacity, pellet mills tend to get choked out. Who ends up with the feedstock is a totally end-market driven.”
California bioenergy bill killed BY ANNA AUSTIN A bill (AB 222) that would have expedited the introduction of new conversion technologies to produce green power and advanced biofuels from organic waste materials in California is officially dead, due to lack of key support needed from five democrats on the Senate Environmental Quality Committee. Bioenergy Producers Association Chairman Jim Stewart said the dismissal of AB 222 was a major blow to a key element in California’s Bioenergy Action Plan, with which the bill was consistent. Overall, AB 222 would have corrected scientifically inaccurate definitions and antiquated provisions in the Integrated Waste Management Act of 1989, and enabled and expedited the in-state production of green electricity and advanced biofuels from biomass through new nonincineration technologies such as gasification, fermentation and pyrolysis. The bill would have also removed current statutory restrictions that require thermal conversion projects to have zero emissions, a standard required of no other energy generation technology or manufacturing process in the state. Finally, it would have allowed the
biogenic portion—the leftover materials when waste has been sorted for recycling—of municipal solid waste (MSW) to qualify under the state’s renewable portfolio standard (RPS). California has a recycling mandate of 50 percent, a law that was passed in 1989. “If a city or a county makes its waste available to these bioenergy companies then it doesn't count toward that requirement and it would place them at risk for being fined for not meeting the mandate,” Stewart said. Conversion technologies can recover five times as much energy from MSW as landfill gas with fewer emissions, Stewart said. “However, electricity from landfill gas receives RPS credit in California, whereas if you gasify the MSW to produce electricity before it enters the landfill, it does not.” Stewart said without AB 222, it could take five to six years to permit and construct a conversion technology facility in California—if a permit could be attained at all. NOVEMBER 2010 | BIOMASS POWER & THERMAL 19