During the summer of the current year, the tests on the usage of a new kind of the wood-free pellets will be carried out, as the spokesman of Colambia Water and Power Authority, Connie Kacprowicz, said. The tests will begin after the Missouri Department of natural resources will give the temporal license.
This type of pellets are produced by the Mexican company Enginuity Worldwide, and are intended for co-firing with coal at common thermal power plants. The raw materials for their production are such materials as corn stalks and cobs, the manufacturer said.
This experiment will be the second attempt of Colambia Water and Power Authority to use fuel pellets with coal. The previous attempt, conducted in 2012 in partnership with MFA Oil, was not considered successful, whereas the proposed pellets, produced from miscanthus, tended to too flash firing.
At the end of 2013, the municipal council set up a contract for the delivery of the testing lot of the Mexican pellets at the cost of $350 000. The supplier was selected after the consideration of many proposals, the representatives of the town said. Some companies offered to supply wood pellets, but their proposals were rejected, because the Columbia municipal power plant had been firing wood waste in the amount of 6 to 11 thousand tons annually, Mr Kacprowicz explained.
This power plant provides about 6 percent of the energy, consumed by the town, and about 12 percent of this amount of energy is produced by firing of wood biomass. Thus, the firing of wood waste yields about half a percent of the total energy consumption.
The president of the company Enginuity Worldwide, Nancy Heimann , said, that her company was ready to produce also wood pellets but that time it is focused on the usage of rural refuse, such as corn stalks and cobs. Furthermore, this will give new arguments in the question of wood biomass consumption in Europe. One of the objectives of this experiment is to determine the possibility of using pellets on power plants, which have not wood in its composition, Mrs. Heimann explained. If successful, it will help the European market of fuel pellets to avoid possible future shortages of the pellets.
