Biomass moving in

It appears the planned biomass switch at a pair of Northwestern Ontario coal-fired generating stations is moving full steam ahead.

On Friday an Ontario Power Generation official outlined progress to date on the proposed changes in Thunder Bay and Atikokan, made necessary when the provincial government mandated the end to coal use by 2014.

Chris Young, OPG’s vice-president of fossil projects, said the switch to wood pellets has its challenges and will cost decidedly more in its initial stages to produce power, but in the long run it’s the best solution.

"We’re looking at biomass as a fuel because biomass is renewable, biomass is carbon neutral and it represents an opportunity to continue using these generating stations to provide electricity for the people of Ontario," Young said.

Saving the two facilities would maintain about 240 jobs.

OPG at present is studying ways to make the conversion, which Young said won’t be an easy task, but makes more sense than starting from scratch.

"It is difficult to do it and it requires very significantly fuel handling and storage. We store coal out of doors. You can’t store biomass fuels out of doors. They need covered storage. So there’s a lot of consideration to change of the fuel handling, and there’s some changes that we need to make around the boiler," Young said.

The biggest problem could fuel procurement. There is no local source for the pellets, which the province has dictated, must come from plant or wood matter; in other words, waste products like garbage are not welcome.

The supply problem could soon change, Young said.

"We’ve been approached by a number of companies throughout the province of Ontario – and a lot of them in the Northwest – who’ve expressed an interest in producing this fuel," he said.

Atikokan Mayor Dennis Brown, who desperately wants to keep the 90 jobs at stake in his community, said he’s encouraged at what he heard on Friday at the 27^th annual Northwestern Ontario Regional Conference.

Brown said a full test last year proved biomass works and now it’s just a matter of working out the engineering and hopefully moving forward with a request for proposal to potential suppliers.

The result could be even better than expected, he said.

"It would also mean jobs in the forestry, something that we don’t have now with the coal. We simply buy the coal from Saskatchewan and all the jobs are created out there. When we go to wood pellets, we’re going to create jobs in the woods industry to harvest those pellets," Brown said.

Derrick Brooks, the plant manager for Northwest Fossil, oversees both the Atikokan and Thunder Bay Facilities, says the Thunder Bay conversion, if approved, would occur about a year after Atikokan, but he sees no real complications at either site, over and above what was expected.

"These are all really straightforward technical issues that can be managed," Brooks said, adding that Thunder Bay is about a year behind Atikokan in the move to wood pellets, but should be ready by 2013 if all goes well. Click here to submit a letter to the editor.