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Wood residuals could reap rewards for mines

Years of discarding his wood chips at a Thunder Bay sawmill and not seeing a dime in return got Vince Rutter thinking.
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Vince Rutter of Biothermic Renewable Energy Systems is a distributor for Froling, a wood pellet and chip manufacturer of biomass-fired boilers.

Years of discarding his wood chips at a Thunder Bay sawmill and not seeing a dime in return got Vince Rutter thinking.

The founder of Rutter Urban Forestry, a Thunder Bay tree care company, views his segue into a biomass energy company as a viable avenue to make better use of wood residuals.

“When you create as many wood chips we do, you start to think about fuel and how better to use it,” said Rutter, a professional forester and a certified arborist.

Through a spinoff company, Biothermic Renewable Energy Systems, he’s in the early stages of a proposal to use biomass to heat surface buildings on mine sites.

“I didn’t create this because I want somewhere to put the wood chips. I’m an entrepreneur, and when you see an opportunity you go for it.”

Biothermic is an Ontario dealer for Froling, an Austrian manufacturer of clean-burning home and commercial-scale wood chip, pellet and firewood combustion boilers. Froling also specializes in fully-automated wood boilers for large buildings and district heating plans.

“I like this because this is a business and market that has a lot of potential for very good growth and makes sense,” said Rutter.

He has a verbal agreement with a northwestern Ontario mining company to do a pilot project involving a heating retrofit to a large industrial garage of more than 20,000 square feet.

The biomass-generated heat would serve as a replacement fuel for propane.

An unexpected spike in the price of propane two years ago prompted the miner to look at more stable and secure energy alternatives that are immune to market fluctuations.

The mining company has harvesters on their expansive property, but much of the wood residuals were going up in smoke.

“When you look at the fundamentals,” said Rutter, “you have a big mine in the middle of a giant, productive industrial forest that has residual fibre that is wasted. It’s burned on the roadside and you’re trucking in propane.”

His concept would take advantage of excess fibre not being harvested and could conceivably employ First Nations to harvest for a chip-and-burn boiler operation.

“They (the mining company) were spending $200,000 a year on propane every year. With wood chips, they would spend $20,000.”

A pre-feasibility study examined the heat demand for the building and the cost comparisons with propane to other fuels.

The next step is a more detailed $30,000 feasibility study, but the money has yet to be scrapped together to do that.

Rutter said a logical extension would be to use biomass fuel to heat conveyors and go underground through the ventilation system.

For the mining company, Froling could build a 500-kilowatt commercial unit that would fit into a container the size of an average garage.

Through Biothermic, Rutter has sold 50 boiler units in two years, mostly for residential use.

“This technology has been proven in Europe and across the world time and time again. There are boilers working; it’s not like we’re inventing something new.”

The supply chain system for the mining company hasn’t been fully investigated, but it could take many forms with either chips or pellets, but chips generated in the forest would be infinitely cheaper than making pellets.

Rutter’s tree care company has a screening plant producing wood chips from their tree care process to make fuel that could be burned in these units.

“It makes sense to set up a system in the forest so you’re delivering the right quality of wood chips.”

Hecla Mining’s Casa Berardi mine in western Quebec is the first underground mine in that province to be heated by forest biomass with substantial government support of $1.1 million by Quebec’s energy ministry.

In this case, a biomass energy company provides heat to the surface buildings based on wood residuals from nearby logging operations in the region.

“No one’s going to say no to this,” said Rutter. “It’s there, it’s clean, it’s cheaper, it’s socially and environmentally responsible.”

However, he attributes the inertia in Ontario to readily adopt new green tech technologies to the general lack of knowledge of these heating systems and overall reluctance to switch based upon the failures of past projects “that have given people a sour taste.”

There have been challenges with supply issues, failure to provide a consistent quality of wood chips and pellets, and a general lack of expertise in understanding moisture content, particle size and designing fuel feed systems around that, he said.

“It’s not so simple. We need to get to the point where we have a reliable supply of wood chips and knowledgeable people, and stuff like this is easy.”