Roasted Wood: An Alternative To Coal Energy?

RENEE MONTAGNE, host:

The goal of many people concerned about climate change is to find alternative sources of fuel to generate electricity. That's because scientists say more than one-third of the world's carbon dioxide emissions come from burning coal. One possible alternative fuel is also one of the oldest - wood.

From member station KSMU in Springfield, Missouri, Jennifer Moore reports on a process aimed at more easily converting wood into fuel for coal-burning plants.

JENNIFER MOORE: Right now I'm at the James River Power Station, and looming over my shoulder are four enormous smoke stacks. I'm surrounded by rather large hills of black coal. Now this coal is obviously burned to provide energy for the city. But the reason why we're here today has to do with a much smaller pile of what looks like dark sawdust. This is torrefied wood.

Mr. ANDREW LIVINGSTON (President, Earth Care Products): We're going to burn some of the torrefied wood we made in a plant in Missouri for a test. It will blend before it's fired to 100 percent of the fuel rate.

MOORE: That's Andrew Livingston, president of the Kansas-based Earth Care Products. His company engineers biomass energy products like torrefied wood.

Torrefaction, also known as biochar, is a process of roasting wood chips in a large furnace to remove the moisture and make the product more brittle. Coal and wood both give off carbon dioxide when they're burned, but the trees originally got their carbon from the atmosphere as they grew, so burning wood doesn't put new carbon dioxide into the air.

Livingston is here in Springfield, Missouri, with his team to test whether local provider, City Utilities, can mix a 10 percent blend of the wood with 90 percent coal and get good results.

Employees here flip a switch and a pile of torrefied wood begins to disappear through an unseen trapdoor under the pile, making its way into the plant on a conveyer belt. Inside the plant, control room operators are keeping an eye on the monitors to make sure the test is running smoothly.

Steve Myers is the director of the James River Power Station.

Mr. STEVE MYERS (Director, James River Power Station): We have a lot of hardwoods. We have a lot of trees that are - that need to be cleaned up. We have a lot of wood chips out there that need to be cleaned up initially.

MOORE: While many environmentalists see some benefit to burning wood instead of coal, they also have reservations about where that wood might come from.

Terrence Bensel is a professor of environmental science at Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania.

Professor TERRENCE BENSEL (Environmental Science, Allegheny College): Anytime you have a situation where you have trees being cut on a significant scale directly for power plant use, for combustion in a power plant, you do run the risk of some ecological impacts in that forest.

MOORE: But he probably won't have to worry about that happening any time soon. Chris Hopkins is a researcher at North Carolina State University who produces torrefied wood on a small scale. He says large coal-burning facilities are still reluctant to sign on to the idea without seeing solid results from much larger test burns.

Mr. CHRIS HOPKINS (Researcher, North Carolina State University): It's just unknown as to whether you can produce machinery at that scale for a reasonable amount. You know, you don't know what the technical hurdles may be as you scale up.

MOORE: So that's what today's test is all about. And utility officials here say the data is still being analyzed, but they like the idea of burning larger quantities of torrefied wood as well as other biomass products like switchgrass to fuel the power station. And in doing so, they hope to take a small step toward weaning the hundreds of coal-burning power plants in America off of the one fuel they currently rely on.

For NPR News, I'm Jennifer Moore in Springfield, Missouri. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright National Public Radio.