| OCR Text |
Show The economic advantages to the state, the community, and the individual landowners through the use of forest biomass for energy is significant. For example, if a 12,000 pounds per hour boiler burning at 15,000,000 BTU's per hour is fired with wood at the existing price of whole-tree green chips costing $9.50 per ton, the cost per million BTU's would be about $1.58. To fire the same boiler with oil at 52C per gallon (a cost which is projected to double in 12 months) would cost $3.85 per million BTU's. If this boiler burns 2-1/2 tons of wood per hour and runs 24 hours per day, it would use 60 tons of wood at a delivered cost of $570. The equivalent cost of oil is $1,387. The actual difference in the cost of wood versus oil on a BTU basis is $817 per day, or approximately $298,205 per year. Refined biomass (forest products) is now a patented process that appears to have a great potential as an alternate energy source. This material is environmentally acceptable as a fuel, being non-polluting to the environment in both the manufacturing and burning process, producing heat needed for any fuel requirement. In addition to the non-polluting aspects of refined biomass, it is important to understand that vegetation, through nature's processes, decomposes to carbon dioxide. In the burning of biomass, the same volume of carbon dioxide is produced and emitted to the atmosphere without disturbing nature's balance just as if the vegetation had decomposed in the normal way. The natural balance of carbon dioxide is maintained either way. When fossil fuels are burned, new additional carbon dioxide is emitted to the atmosphere, disturbing the natural balance and adding to the "greenhouse" effect in the atmosphere, an unacceptable change in all life forms on our planeh. The manufacturing process for the biomass product poses no hazards to personnel, such as associated with silicosis 26-4 |
