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Jim Adam
Forestry Manager, Aberdeen Office
Scottish forests are now providing
environmentally friendly wood as a heating fuel.
Such schemes have already been established in
countries throughout North America and Europe.
Wood chips, pellets and forest residues are
being supplied to be burnt in boilers to produce
heat and power to homes, offices, schools and
factories.
European Union funded grant schemes are
available to help install wood burning boilers
to heat buildings and businesses. These grants
are available to help towards the costs of
installing boilers, boiler houses and hoppers
that feed woodchips and pellets into the
boilers. Help is also available towards the cost
of buying and installing equipment needed to
supply wood chips to the market such as
chippers, grading machines and drying sheds.
Wood chip supplies can be chipped from
timber/residues at source and transported to the
market place or processed on site or supplied
direct from the wood processors in the ready
chipped form. Chips are normally air dried prior
to burning to 35% moisture content, but larger
plants have the ability to use green chips. It
normally takes around eighteen months to season
chips; hence a good supply chain and
infrastructure need to be in place.
On smaller properties the boiler would be
located within the house and manually fed daily
offering direct heat and hot water/central
heating fed from a back boiler. Larger
properties and clusters are supplied with hot
water and heating from a boiler located in an
outhouse/garage and fuel is fed mechanically
from a hopper or bunker and burning regulated
automatically for optimum performance. The
running costs of such a scheme are estimated to
be 2p/Kw/h compared to oil at 3.6p/Kw/h. This
type of system is relatively maintenance free
and requires only the removal of the ash
residues on a regular basis.
Andrew Nicol runs an independent bio energy
consultancy business based at Aboyne in
Aberdeenshire and as he says wood energy is
gaining momentum in the market place:
“The new generation of wood burning boilers are
first class with automated chip or pellet
stoking systems and sophisticated controls to
optimise fuel consumption. Heating with bio
energy is cost effective and environmentally
friendly. Our contacts in Finland predict a
biomass boom all over Europe and across the UK
individuals, businesses and communities are
putting in bio energy installations.
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This may be a wood pellet stove in the living
room; a chip or pellet boiler heating a large
house, school, offices, hotel or swimming pool;
a district heating scheme with a central bio
energy plant supplying piped heat to a housing
development or steading conversion; or a
combined heat and power plant (CHP) for a
university or hospital, distillery, paper mill
or food processing factory.”
Businesses are responding to rising
demand through diversifying into installing wood
fuelled heating systems and by supplying chips
and pellets
“Businesses are responding to rising demand
through diversifying into installing wood
fuelled heating systems and by supplying chips
and pellets. I am a Director of DWP Harvesting
that we set up almost twenty years ago to
harvest and market roundwood from Members’
woodlands on a co-operative basis. Over that
time energy has risen up the agenda and DWP now
has an established supply chain delivering
conditioned wood chips to end users. Because we
are a co-operative we provide security of supply
in a way that an individual owner is not able
to. Using forest product as a renewable energy
fuel, both wood chips and pellets, is a good
opportunity for forest owners. Over the next two
to three years, the cumulative effect of
developments in the bio energy sector will have
a considerable and positive impact on the rural
economy provided we work together to build the
right business structures.”
This is all good news for woodland owners and
the wood-processing sector as this helps develop
a new and alternative market for timber and
forest/mill residues. There are also
opportunities to develop extra jobs within the
local community and the supply chain. With the
decline in the small roundwood market this will
prove to be a valuable local market for small
and large woodland owners alike.
This is also extremely beneficial to the
environment as unlike gas, oil and coal; wood is
constantly renewed as woodlands are restocked
after harvesting. A carbon neutral cycle is
created due to the fact that newly planted trees
soak up the carbon released through the burning
of the previously felled timber. The net result
is that no extra emissions of greenhouse gases
enter the atmosphere.
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