DK Knight, Executive Editor: Phone/Fax: 334-834-1170, e-mail: dk@hattonbrown.com
Response to Timber Harvesting’s 2011 Logging Business Survey, sent to our logger subscribers in an e-mail blast on February 9, has been tremendous. By the middle of March 516 of you had participated. Thank you so much.
If you received the survey and haven’t acted on it, please do so. If you no longer have it, it will be coming your way a second and final time in late March. Deadline for participating is April 15.
I look forward to presenting the timely and important survey findings in the May-June edition.
Some wood energy naysayers may have gloated over the recent shutdown of Range Fuels’ big, new biofuels factory in Soperton, Ga., but as this news unfolded another new, large wood energy plant was nearing completion in the state. As of mid March, just one year after breaking ground, Georgia BioMass, LLC had begun testing machines and systems at its massive pellet plant at Waycross and was on track to begin trial production runs.
It could take a while, but the facility is expected to eventually consume 1.5 million tons of pine roundwood a year (up to 300 truckloads a day) as it hits its design capacity of 750,000 tons of pellets. That’s good news for timber growers and harvesters in southeast Georgia.
Additional good news is that the fiber consumption should be steady, given the fact the plant’s parent Germany company, RWE Innogy, represents a captive European market for much of the plant’s production. Pellets will be exported via the Port of Brunswick.
Still more good news is that RWE Innogy has strongly indicated it will build one or two more such plants in the South, possibly another in Georgia and one in South Carolina. So, while the big biofuels plant stumbled out of the gate, pellet activity is developing fast. And, from what we hear, chip exports from Atlantic ports are poised to increase in coming months.
Taking pellet development deeper, consider what another wood biomass concern has accomplished in just a few months. Enviva LP has been supplying chips and pellets to customers in the U.S. and Europe since 2007, a year ago shipping about 350,000 tons. Then Riverstone Holdings invested significantly in the company and set Enviva on a fast course.
Last August it acquired CKS Energy Inc., a small pellet plant in Armory, Miss. and announced it would increase annual production there to about 100,000 tons from 50,000. Later that month Enviva told it had reached a long-term pellet supply agreement with Electrabel, a subsidiary of GDF SUEZ Group, one of the world’s largest utilities. Under the agreement, Enviva will annually ship 530,000 tons of pellets to Electrabel plants in Belgium.
In October Enviva acquired another small Mississippi pellet entity, Piney Woods Pellets, in Wiggins, announcing it would triple production from 50,000 tons per year to 150,000.
Striding ahead, the company announced in late December that it would erect a 330,000 tons-per-year pellet facility in Ahoskie, NC, on the site of a former Georgia-Pacific sawmill. Construction was underway by February and completion is anticipated in less than a year. Taking advantage of a collapsed hardwood pulpwood market created when International Paper shut its paper mill at Franklin, Va., Enviva plans to use 100% hardwood at Ahoskie, to the tune of 740,000 tons per year.
There is more. Enviva wants to build two more pellet plants in the area, perhaps another in North Carolina and one in Virginia.
In February the company revealed it had purchased a terminal at the port in Chesapeake, Va., which it plans to upgrade by this November. The terminal can accommodate a wide range of vessels and is one of the few on the East Coast capable of handling pellets. About the terminal, Enviva CEO John Keppler said, “We can now closely monitor our product from forest to plant to port, maintaining facilities that meet our high standards for product excellence and safety.” Pellets acquired in the Gulf region and those made at Enviva’s Mississippi plants are shipped through a terminal near Mobile, Ala.
The company established a foothold in the European market in June 2009 when it acquired a pellet plant in Straubling, Bavaria (capacity 120,000 metric tons). Another plant in Belgium is capable of producing 60,000 tons of pellets annually. Enviva is planning to expand into Austria in the near future and claims that its annual capacity will reach 1.3 million tons by the end of 2012.
Enviva’s stated mission is “to become the preferred partner and supplier of sustainably sourced pellets and other processed biomass to serve power generation and industrial customers seeking to decrease their dependence on fossil fuels and reduce their carbon footprint.” It appears to be well on its way.