KSMU Ozarks Public Radio, Friday, 14 August 2009
CU Burns 'Torrefied" Wood Instead of Pure Coal in Test
City Utilities of Springfield invited local journalists out Thursday to witness an experiment in burning something other than coal to produce electricity. KSMU's Jennifer Moore took them up on the invitation and headed out.
CU Experiments By Burning 'Torrefied' Wood
The monitors in the control room at the James River Power Station indicate whether the test burn is working. (Photo credit: Jennifer Moore)
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Reporter: "Right now, I'm at the James River Power Station, just southeast of the city limits, near Lake Springfield. I'm surrounded by rather large hills of black coal, and looming over my shoulder are four enormous smokestacks. This coal is obviously burned to provide energy for the city. But the reason why we're here today has to do with a much smaller pile of what looks like dark sawdust. This is torrefied wood. And City Utilities is doing a test today to see whether this torrefied wood could be blended with coal to provide an alternative source of energy."
"We're gonna burn some of the torrefied wood we made in a plant in Missouri for a test," said Andrew Livingston, president of Earthcare Products Incorporated, based in Independence, Kansas. His company designs and engineers biomass energy systems, including producing torrefied wood. He arranged for this pile of wood to be here today.
Torrefication is a process of “roasting,” if you will, wood chips in a large furnace to remove the moisture and make the product more brittle. This process changes the wood chips, so that they are easier to crush for burning in generators like the ones here at CU.
"It will grind the torrefied wood as small as coal, with less horsepower, and burn in suspension burners in coal-fired boilers. It will blend, or it can be fired to 100 percent of the fuel rates. This is being tested for the first time in North America in a coal-fired boiler with this volume of torrefied wood," Livingston said.
Livingston said torrefied wood is "CO2 neutral," and that the environmental benefits to burning it as opposed to burning pure coal are plenty. As reporters look on, CU employees flip a switch and the pile of torrefied wood begins to disappear, due to a hole that is opened up under the pile. This allows the wood to fall onto an underground conveyor belt and make its way into the plant.
