Agriculture takes hard look at biomass opportunities

Monday, January 2, 2012

Nanticoke station must quit coal by 2014, leaving a gap farm organizations would love to fill

by SUSAN MANN

When Ontario's government closed the door on the Nanticoke Generating Station's use of coal it may have opened a window of opportunity for farmers.
And farmers along with their organizations have dived head first into efforts to figure out if biomass would work as a fuel source for the Nanticoke station, the largest coal-fired power plant in North America. It delivers up to 2,760 megawatts of power to the southern Ontario power grid.

Located on the north shore of Lake Erie in Haldimand County, the Nanticoke station must, according to an Environmental Protection Act regulation, stop using coal by 2014.

The Ontario Power Generation's long-term energy plan calls for it to explore the possibility of converting the station to natural gas and/or biomass. They're in the process of doing that exploration but "there's really no timeline for that," says Ted Gruetzner, media relations manager for Ontario Power Generation (OPG), an Ontario-based company that generates and sells electricity.

No decision has been made on what fuel source the Nanticoke station will actually use. There also isn't a decision yet on what preferred crops would be used, Gruetzner says.  OPG would propose what fuel source works best for the station. "It would be a business decision by OPG."

The customer and farmers started off working together to try to figure out how to make this happen. "Everybody sharing their information and being candid with each other is incredibly healthy," says Gord Surgeoner, president of Ontario Agri-Food Technologies.

Don McCabe, Ontario Federation of Agriculture vice-president, says OPG's Integrated Power Supply Plan is under review. But current proposals call for 10 per cent of the province's power to come from renewable resources, which would include biomass along with wind, solar, biogas and dams to generate electricity.

At the federation's convention in November, Kaji Kado, president of PPD Technologies, a management consulting firm, suggested Nanticoke couldn't work with biomass because there isn't enough acreage within 100 miles to supply it and trucking beyond that distance was impractical because of the costs.

McCabe says Kado highlighted some logistical matters that are being studied including packing the biomass tighter to move it farther. "You have to maximize the load you can put on a truck to make it worth your while," he says, adding transportation, converting biomass to gas and how much processing can be done on farms are all being studied.

As for natural gas, McCabe says the discovery of shale gas has decoupled natural gas from the price of oil. That means natural gas is very cheap and will continue to be for some time.

The efforts to determine if biomass would work as a fuel source for Nanticoke are part of a bigger picture. The Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs with support from the Ontario Ministry of Energy and Infrastructure, is coordinating the analysis to determine the feasibility of a commercial biomass industry to produce combustion energy in the province.

McCabe says the federation received $2.4 million from the Agricultural Adaptation Council to look at what biomass crops could be grown in the province and the logistics of getting the crop pelletized and transported to power plants for use. The federation has assigned the largest part of the project to the Ontario Soil and Crop Improvement Association for field-scale agricultural biomass research.

One of the expected outcomes of their work is the commercialization of agricultural biomass "enabling a diversification of producers' crop options and associated income leading to a new crop with potential farm-gate values over $100 million in five years," it says on the association's web site. The association is working to determine if biomass (crops such as miscanthus, a perennial grass, and switchgrass, a perennial warm season bunchgrass) is an economically sustainable and environmentally preferred alternative to coal and other non-renewable fuels.

John Kelly, vice-president of Erie Innovation and Commercialization, says 900 acres of biomass crops are being grown across Ontario to study how they'll perform in a variety of circumstances and soil and environmental conditions. He chairs a business working group looking at using biomass for Nanticoke.

McCabe says "we thought we were just going to grow this stuff and take it to Nanticoke and it would get burnt." But in working through the project they've discovered there are other valuable components of biomass, such as starch, oil and fibre, which can be extracted before it's used as a fuel source. "We need to find out if there are technologies readily available right now that will allow us to maximize the value of this material first."

The federation is also determining if there's an export market for biomass. Ultimately the idea is to develop a good, comprehensive strategy for Ontario farmers, he notes.

Surgeoner says they're trying to find as many business opportunities for biomass as they can in addition to Nanticoke. "We're looking at using biomass in composite plastics, composite products that used to be wood and to make into pellets for greenhouse growers."

McCabe says work on the project so far has also revealed there's more that can be done to ensure they're making the best use of the crop and returning the most value to the farm gate.

Another part of the project is to study how biomass works in Nanticoke's equipment. "We have to ensure that this is going to work and we have to ensure we don't slag up the system and screw up everything royally," he says. BF