Maine
A wave of companies say they’ll use Maine wood to make eco-friendly fuel and fertilizer
A handful of corporations are proposing to repurpose former Maine paper mills into refineries that create environmentally pleasant fuels and fertilizer from wooden, elevating hopes that they may generate financial exercise in areas tied to the state’s conventional forest economic system.
Ensyn Fuels Inc. utilized for a state license this week to open a biorefinery on the website of the previous Nice Northern Paper Co. mill in East Millinocket. The Ottawa agency would use thermal expertise to transform biomass, like wooden chips, into renewable heating oil.
Customary Biocarbon, a Portland agency, signed a lease with East Millinocket final 12 months to additionally open a biorefinery on the former mill website to supply a sustainable fertilizer various known as biochar. The corporate additionally introduced plans final week to supply biochar on the Nice River Lumber mill in Enfield, spokesperson Kelley Attenborough mentioned.
And Biofine Developments Northeast Inc. introduced final summer season that it had reached an settlement with the city of Lincoln to open a biofuels refinery on the location of the previous Lincoln Paper and Tissue mill. The corporate produces ethyl levulinate, a heating oil substitute.
The proposals provide some hope for communities that misplaced a whole lot of jobs when their mills closed and for loggers who misplaced clients for his or her waste wooden. However the corporations behind the initiatives and people working with them are cautious about making guarantees that these concepts will pan out and revitalize their communities, after so many previous guarantees of financial revitalization by no means got here to fruition.
Ensyn selected the East Millinocket mill due to Maine’s “regulatory-friendly setting” and its proximity to the corporate’s buyer base within the Northeast, president Lee Torrens mentioned.
Nonetheless, Torrens mentioned he was “very cautious” about making any guarantees concerning the influence Ensyn may need on the native economic system, citing earlier proposals that promised to revitalize the Katahdin space and didn’t pan out.
“Maine is simply riddled with individuals who promised the moon and didn’t ship,” he mentioned.
That applies to Lincoln, City Supervisor Rick Bronson mentioned.
BDNE and Lincoln are negotiating a joint improvement settlement, and the city is making use of for federal grants to wash up the mill website, Bronson mentioned. Financial improvement director Jay Hardy mentioned BDNE hoped to open its refinery by the tip of 2023.
Nonetheless, Bronson mentioned that he was cautious of constructing definitive statements about when the previous mill could be up and operating.
LignaTerra International, a North Carolina-based cross-laminated timber producer, introduced plans in 2019 to open a manufacturing unit there however has but to interrupt floor.
“They introduced that on a Friday,” Bronson mentioned. “The next Monday, I bought a name from a citizen [asking], the place does he go to use for a job?”
A LignaTerra spokesperson mentioned the rising value of equipment elements and provide chain challenges have “generated a rethink on a couple of items of the [company’s] total technique,” however didn’t reply to a follow-up query asking what that meant for its plans in Lincoln.
James Beaupre, the director of commercial cooperation on the College of Maine, mentioned Maine nonetheless has a “vibrant timber and lumber trade,” and that bio refineries might enable Maine to diversify its forest economic system and assure extra makes use of for waste wooden.
Refineries present alternatives to make use of every kind of waste wooden, like wooden chips and sawdust, that may’t be used for lumber, Beaupre mentioned.
Customary Biocarbon, the corporate that plans to open bio refineries in Enfield and East Millinocket, produces biochar by changing wooden chips, by means of a course of known as pyrolysis, right into a form of charcoal that traps carbon as a substitute of releasing it into the ambiance and contributing to local weather change.
Fred Horton, Customary Biocarbon’s chief govt, instructed the Bangor Each day Information final August that the corporate deliberate to make use of 12,000 tons of wooden chips sourced from close by furnishings and mulching corporations to supply 3,000 tons of biochar a 12 months. The operation would make it the largest biochar producer on the East Coast.
Every firm has its personal operations and chemical processes for producing wooden merchandise, so it’s tough to quantify what number of jobs every plant would create, Beaupre mentioned.
“Generally that may imply three jobs, typically that may want a few hundred jobs, based mostly on the dimensions of the gear and the quantity of [raw material] that you could herald,” he mentioned.
Dana Doran, the chief director of the Skilled Logging Contractors of Maine, mentioned that having extra corporations like Ensyn and Customary Biocarbon to make use of loggers’ wastewood could be helpful for forest administration.
Between 2012 and 2016, Maine misplaced six mills in Millinocket, East Millinocket, Lincoln, Bucksport, Madison and, quickly, Outdated City. All of them accepted loggers’ waste wooden, Doran mentioned.
Shedding these six mills meant that fewer timber have been harvested, resulting in forests’ deteriorating well being, he mentioned.
Refineries would offer new sources for loggers to dump their waste wooden, although their consumption could be nowhere close to what paper mills took in. He talked about Ensyn’s utility, which mentioned it could soak up 165,000 tons of wooden a 12 months if its East Millinocket operation was authorized.
“Within the grand scheme of issues, we’re not even speaking a couple of half 1,000,000 tons of wooden between the three or 4 initiatives which can be form of on the drafting board,” Doran mentioned.
“That’s lower than 10 % of the wooden we’ve misplaced during the last decade,” he mentioned. “It’s not a whole lot of wooden, but it surely’s necessary, as a result of it’s one thing, and it’s helpful to not solely the contractors for market, but it surely’s additionally helpful to the forest.”