"NH turns to it's trees for heat"

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You guys do the quick math on these figures? Even the lower 1600T/day total listed above is 66 tons PER HOUR! That's nutty!
 
What else would you expect an 'environmental science' teacher to say?

Oil causes global warming.
Coal is too dirty.
Nuclear is too dangerous.
Wood causes deforestation.
Wind turbines are dangerous to raptors...

These nut jobs would have us all huddled together shivering around a single smouldering cow pie to stay warm if they had their way.


I'm surprised his teacher didn't also add that if everyone switched to solar power the sun would burn out in five years. There's just no pleasing some people.
 
Keep in mind that's green tons right out of the woods. A lot different than dry pellet tons.
 
The Berlin biopower plant has a 20 year deal with the local utility to supply renewable power. The cost per KW is not competitive with fossil fuel but far less expensive then the alternatives like solar and wind. It is also "dispatchable" IE they can generate power 365 days per year 24 hours per day when its needed unlike the alternatives.

They plan to be pulling in 1600 green tons per day of wood chips. The major benefit to the region is it creates a market for low grade wood which is one component of the revenue that landowners consider when they decide to cut or maintain their woodlands. Biomass chips don't sell for much at the stump but it is revenue. Landowners may start doing timberstand improvement (intermediate thinning cuts)that they may not have done without the low grade market. The local sawmill in Milan is doubling their production capability. Pellets are best made with sawdust from sawmills so even though a lot of low grade wood goes to Berlin there still may be more overall pellet production.

I'm still trying to wrap my head around doing anything with wood at 1600 Tons a day.
 
The pulp mill it replaced used 1600 tons per day of pulpwood. Prime firewood and it was all stacked in rows. About 10 miles south there is a chipping operation that supplies 1/3 of the wood for a pulp mill about 60 miles away. I am not sure of the volume but I would guess 500 tons per day. The truckers deliver and it gets stacked then chipped before its trucked over.
 
I'm still trying to wrap my head around doing anything with wood at 1600 Tons a day.
if you're ever near to Berlin, stop by the Moffett House Museum...they have an excellent collection of material about the hayday of the Brown and Brown company that ran the mill there for....well since the dawn of time. They have some photos of mountains of logs...seriously, mountains. The river choked with logs. In its time I'm sure it was amazing. At that time they were measuring in millions of tons per year. Unfathomable. Birthplace of the retractable tape measure!
 
What else would you expect an 'environmental science' teacher to say?

Oil causes global warming.
Coal is too dirty.
Nuclear is too dangerous.
Wood causes deforestation.
Wind turbines are dangerous to raptors...

These nut jobs would have us all huddled together shivering around a single smouldering cow pie to stay warm if they had their way.

Actually this environmental science class is based on actual science, not propaganda. You need to realize and parts of the world in extreme poverty that wood is their only fuel source . Because of this; these parts of the country have been stripped of trees just for heating and cooking. Imagine all of New Hampshire using wood for heating and cooking; it would it would look like Haiti. [Hearth.com] "NH turns to it's trees for heat"
 
I'm surprised his teacher didn't also add that if everyone switched to solar power the sun would burn out in five years. There's just no pleasing some people.
I'm surprised his teacher didn't also add that if everyone switched to solar power the sun would burn out in five years. There's just no pleasing some people.
Again its actual science not propaganda, it actually addresses sustainability issues based on science. I mean if you consider biodiversity assessments outside of school and soil testing full of BS then what are you standing on? Here is food for thought, all of our modern farming techniques depend on fossil fuels: transportation, planting, harvesting , fertilizers, tilling, and picking it up at the store it. As oil gets more expensive what you think is going to happen to your food ?
 
Pretty pictures but I still don't see backup for the assertion.
 
Keep in mind that's green tons right out of the woods. A lot different than dry pellet tons.

well.....1600 tons per day...still has to be transported.
Tractor Trail with 53 ft trailer get 22 tons...48ft gets 20 tons. per truck.

if they were one ton pallats (I'd Imagine not) :
with 53 ft trailers it would be 73 loads a day
wth 48ft trailers it would be 80 loads a day.

if a large dump at best maybe 33000 lbs to
maybe up to forty to fourty five tons at best.
Even if 50 tons per truck it would be 32 trucks a day.


thats alot of green wood a day.
 
Pretty pictures but I still don't see backup for the assertion.

One country has regulated forestry practices, the other country is not therefore it's deforested. By the way the middle of the page is a border between the two . If you look on Google maps you can see the difference in the two countries same island but two different countries .
 
Haiti population density in 2010: 362.60 people per sq. km.; New Hampshire: 56.8 per sq. km. Just sayin' . . .
 
Most plants and logging operations run at most 10 hours per day and 6 days per week. The actual daily deliveries during the week are much higher to a biomass plant. I used to have design for pulp chip deliveries as the truckers tended to travel in packs and plan their deliveries around coffee breaks and lunch time. I needed to leave room for 10 to 12 trucks to line up and generally our goal was that a trucker shouldnt have to wait for more thna 15 minutes to unload. Most of the day we could meet it but around breaks it took longer.
 
One country has regulated forestry practices, the other country is not therefore it's deforested. By the way the middle of the page is a border between the two . If you look on Google maps you can see the difference in the two countries same island but two different countries .

One country has food one was does not theres a lot more going on in Haiti then bad forestry practices. Picture is quite eye opening.
 
One country has food one was does not theres a lot more going on in Haiti then bad forestry practices. Picture is quite eye opening.
True but as NH is part of a Developed country we consume more energy then those who are underdeveloped. In one year as a single fuel source we can clear cut NH just for comparison on how much energy the state needs.
 
just like NH though, the the DR has other sources and choices for fuel, Haiti has been robbed blind and mismangaged by crooks since forever, with all the foriegn aid the country has recieved they should be one of the richest in the area, corruption and theft leave them the poorest.
Even if NH turned to wood for most of the fuel needed, private owners would figure out how to manage and rotate their "crop", rather than clear cut the state. (actually would be even better for the state economy) extreem poverty leaves no room to plan for the future.
 
Looks like we are getting into the "tragedy of the commons".

Most of New England was cleared into fields around the civil war (except far northern NH and about 1/3 of Maine. Small agriculture paid the bills so the landowners put in farms. Farming in the region declined substantially post civil war and much of the land has gone back to forest.

From a wood management point of view, natural regeneration and no ongoing management leads to not very productive forest. By managing forests properly the volume and quality of wood produced per acre sustainably can go up 5 to 10 fold. One factor in the maintenance are thinning cuts where about 2/3rd of the small trees are removed early on in forest succession to allow the remaining third to grow larger by not having to battle for nutrients and sunlight. These thinning cuts usually cost more then the wood they generate and there are few if any saw logs produced so any value for the low grade biomass for power or pellet production is better than none. Thinning cuts can look pretty sloppy right after the cut (and many are poorly done) so many landowners just skip it and hope they can do a high grade cut at some point and sell the land. There are many large plots of liquidation cuts done by short term speculators that end on the market that sometimes are best clear cut and started over.
 
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