College unsure of biofuel's origins

Since the successful opening of the College’s biomass gasification plant last January, community members raised questions about the plant’s impact on Vermont forests as well as the overall environmental integrity of the biomass initiative.

The plant currently receives three truckloads of woodchips daily from loggers and mills within a 75-mile radius. However, because a private contractor — Cousineau Forest Products — mediates the process, the specific sources of the woodchips are unknown.  Though the chips may well be procured using sustainable forestry methods, it is equally likely that they are not.

Furthermore, if the biomass plant continues to be successful and inspires the construction of other plants in the area, environmental concerns exist about the capacity of local forests to support increased harvesting.

Stafford Professor of Public Policy, Political Science and Environmental Studies Chris Klyza and his environmental studies senior seminar have been investigating the biofuel’s sources and developing a set of standards for the procurement of this fuel.

The problem of potentially exhausting local resources has been addressed by the willow project, an experiment wherein nine acres of willow trees were planted — in a plot on Route 125, just west of campus — through a joint effort with the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry (SUNY-ESF) as a potential source for steadier and more sustainable fuel.

“We’re still in a learning mode as to how to make [the plant] work as best as it possibly can,” said Jack Byrne, director of sustainability integration.  “There’s a whole bunch of practical questions to be answered.”

Plant relies on woodchips from unknown suppliers

Perhaps the most important of these unanswered questions involves the source of the chips currently incinerated daily at the plant.  Early in the original planning process, before the decision was made in 2006 to construct the plant, members involved had intended to fuel it using a single supplier, ideally certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), a sustainable forestry non-profit organization.  However, they quickly learned that no such supplier exists; in fact, virtually no FSC-certified chips can be found anywhere near the College.

“That’s how we ended up making the decision to go with the broker because, if you’re going to build a system like this and you don’t have chips, it’s silly,” said Byrne.  Cousineau, the broker, works with loggers and millers within a 75-mile radius of the campus to ensure the College’s biomass plant receives the amount of fuel necessary to perform successfully. Loggers and millers produce chips as a secondary activity, behind the other forestry activities they might be engaged in: thinning trees to help the forest grow more or logging commercially, for example.

Cousineau’s structure, however, makes it difficult to track down which specific companies produce which quantity of chips.  As Klyza explained, the broker “uses sub-brokers.”  They receive chips, for example, “from Jack the chipper, and Jack the chipper’s located here, but Jack the chipper might be getting it from 10 different places, and Cousineau doesn’t know that.”

“Because there are many middlemen in the supply chain, finding the location of the cuts is difficult,” concurred Patrick Johnson ’10, a member of Klyza’s senior seminar.

Cousineau offered to tackle the extensive legwork and paperwork necessary to determine the chips’ sources, but for a fee.  The College has not engaged Cousineau specifically on this issue.

This lack of transparency due to the complicated structure of the supplier-broker relationship has rendered impossible any efforts to trace the chips’ sources and thereby determine the integrity of suppliers’ forestry practices.

“At this point, we’re trusting that the people that are supplying us with chips are practicing sustainable forestry,” said Byrne.  “But we also want to move toward being able to verify who our suppliers are and what practices they are following, because certainly if somebody is doing a terrible job, we don’t want to buy chips from them.”

Klyza remains uncertain of the chips’ sources.  “We don’t know, it could be that our suppliers are already doing great,” he said.  “One of the great unknowns is that we could be at 50 percent, 70 percent, in terms of these standards for sustainability for forest harvesting.  We just don’t know.  If it’s higher, then that’s great news, and that means everything’s working well … If not, we’re going to set forth recommendations and try to work up to those standards.”

The members of the environmental studies seminar have not yet unraveled the various chip suppliers involved in powering the biomass plant; the process remains in continual development.  The students are currently developing recommendations in relation to the fuel-sourcing issue, which are scheduled for presentation at the Dec. 3 environmental studies colloquium.
“The goal is not to be punitive,” Klyza continued.  “We’re starting down the path of trying to get a better handle on carbon outputs involved with this.”

“Middlebury has a responsibility to know where its biomass is coming from, to set high standards for its sustainability, and to monitor the sites where its biomass is being harvested,” said Sierra Murdoch ’09.5, another student in Klyza’s class.  “Doing so, in the end, would deepen the college’s environmental reputation.”

Experiment seeks to introduce willows as potentially greener fuel source

The willow project has been in development for the past two years.  SUNY-ESF scientists, in collaboration with the business services department under director Tom Corbin, planted the trees both in anticipation of future exhaustion of local hardwood resources if the biomass idea gains popularity, as well as in consideration of willow’s singular advantages as a fuel.
“We wanted to control the green nature of the fuel,” said Corbin.  “With willows, we can grow a very green and almost organic fuel.”

Willows are attractive as a biomass fuel source because they are relatively cheap, have a quick, three-year maturation cycle and are minimally intrusive to the ecosystems in which they grow.  After harvesting, a parcel of willows can be immediately replanted and harvested three years later.  In order for the willows to be viable as a fuel source, however, the crop would need to yield between 25 and 30 tons of biomass per acre.  If the current experiment goes well, the team behind the project plans to establish three 400-acre parcels, with one parcel harvested each year in a rotating cycle.  With this scheme, the willows could provide around 10,000 tons of biomass annually — roughly half the amount currently processed by the plant.

“If we reach our per-acre yield and can plant 400 acres a year for three years within a few miles of the College,” Corbin said, “we will have created a fuel source that requires very little carbon to maintain, harvest and transport.  At this point, I am optimistic the willows will reach the per-acre yield we need.”

According to Byrne, the willow project was developed largely as “a response to the idea that if we’re successful with our wood system and inspire others to go down that path, more wood would be coming out of the forest.”  As part of the planning process, the College hired the Biomass Energy Resource Center, a non-profit organization based in Montpelier, to perform a study of the net capacity of forest resources available for use as biofuels in Addison and Rutland counties.  The result was 160,000 tons annually — the on-campus biomass plant, therefore, constitutes a full eighth of the region’s capacity.

“That’s a comfortable margin unless more and more people turn towards the fuel,” Byrne said.  “We wanted to ease the demand on the local forests.”

The trial batch of willows located on Route 125 is scheduled for harvest next fall, when the willows have reached maturation, and will then need to go through a test burn to determine their efficiency as a fuel.

Byrne identified several unanswered questions with which the team will need to grapple.

“Are they a good fuel to burn in the biomass system?” he said.  “Would we grow them on our own land, or contract with farmers? If so, how many?  We could rent some of our land to a farmer and have him grow it for us; there might be some farmers who want to get out of dairy but still want to work the land, and this could be an option for them.  Would we be willing to contract with a farmer who wants to work only 100 acres — we probably wouldn’t agree to 50, but maybe 100?  What’s the threshold there?  And since we’re trying to grow the willows without pesticides or herbicides, what’s the best kind of green fertilizer — can we do it with manure?  What’s the best combination of willow species?”

Byrne acknowledged that the College will be farther along in the discussion process closer to the time of the preliminary willow harvest.  “There will probably be a better sense of where we’re going to go with it at the first of next year,” he said.  “We haven’t really looked at all the data thoroughly yet.”

Biomass plant stimulates the local economy

The willow project, if successfully implemented, would help contribute to one positive side effect of the biomass initiative: stimulation of the local economy.  Willow stock could be cultivated in local nurseries.  Farmers looking for an additional source of revenue could become involved in the willow harvesting process, even making use of the corn harvesters they already possess.  A simple modification to the machine’s cutting head can transform a corn harvester into an efficient willow harvester.

The biomass plant, even without the added impact of the willows, already has had a positive impact on the local economy.  The College new position as chip purchaser will likely inject around $800,000 annually into local forestry, a troubled industry.

Both Klyza’s class and the willow project seek to examine enduring questions about the sustainability of biomass and its impact on the local environment.  However, the dialogue surrounding the biomass plant is a continually evolving, dynamic conversation in which no definitive answers have yet been posed.

“There had been some conversations about these kinds of issues before we decided to build the biomass plant, and then they kind of fell by the wayside when we went to build it,” said Klyza.  “So we’re now bringing them back up again.  We don’t think we’re going to offer a solution, but rather a first step that’s going to help continue the College down the path of sustainability improvement.”