Utilizing Biomass
Utilizing Biomass. I’m Greg Martin as Line On Agriculture presents the Harvest Clean Energy Report.
When it comes to finding alternate energy sources, sometimes the answer can be staring us in the face. All we need to do is utilize it. The Montana Correctional system is taking advantage of some unique fuel sources.
OLCOTT: What we are looking at is constructing a biomass burner and by biomass I mean wood chips that are salvaged from our logging operation and our furniture construction business that we have here at the prison.
That is Andrew Olcott, Business Manager with Montana Correctional Enterprises.
OLCOTT: We’ve got about 3900 acres of forest land here that the State of Montana owns that is dedicated to the corrections prison and we have a 10-year forestry management program that we’re conducting right now where were cleaning up old timber and we’re actually having some commercial logging done on it and from that we have some slash and non-commercial timber that we’re getting out of there. And we’re going to use that as the fuel for the biomass burner.
Olcott says that the burner will then be used to provide a much needed commodity.
OLCOTT: This biomass burner is going to heat hot water and steam and we’re going to run that over to a 200 inmate housing dorm. We’ll heat the building and have domestic hot water there and also pipe the hot water over to the dairy and the dairy processing plant and we use a lot of hot water and steam there for cleaning the stainless steel tubing in the dairy and processing milk that we have here from our dairy.
They are currently looking at about a 20 year payback on the project at the present but that is a worst case scenario. Olcott says they are funding the project through a couple of state programs.
OLCOTT: About 25% of the funding is coming from a program called “Fuels for Schools.” It’s a forest service and Montana Department of Natural Resources funding. It is designed to get projects like this started for municipal and state buildings. The rest should be coming from the
For additional information on clean energy, visit harvestcleanenergy.org. That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.
www.harvestcleanenergy.org
