Chas Vincent - Chairman of the Environmental Quality Council, Biomass Burners, Biomass Generators, Porter Bench Energy..

"Biomass energy subject of demo scandal

By JENNIFER McKEE IR State Bureau | Posted: Friday, May 7, 2010 12:00 am

Troy Morse, of Mark’s Lumber in Clancy, is barely audible as he talks about latter-day logging amid the din of his company’s enormous wood grinder.

The red grinder, on display for lawmakers in the parking lot of a state building in Helena Thursday, takes dead trees that might otherwise be burned for slash and turns them into a coarse mixture of wood chips and smaller bits that the University of Montana-Western burns to heat its buildings.

“We could sell more,” Morse said.

Morse and the grinder were part of a presentation on biomass to the Environmental Quality Council, a bipartisan group of lawmakers and some citizens who study environmental issues and consider possible new laws. The presentation was partially overshadowed by news Thursday that Rep.

Chas Vincent, R-Libby, the Chairman of the Environmental Quality Council, works for a company that ended up working as a subcontractor for another lawmaker’s controversial biomass company.

That company, Porter Bench Energy, was started by Rep. Llew Jones, R-Conrad, after he sponsored legislation to funnel federal stimulus grant money to a company precisely like the one he started.

Porter Bench Energy got the federal money to study biomass development in Montana.

The controversy didn’t come up at Thursday’s demonstration. Instead, panel members stood in windy, near-freezing temperatures watching a special bundler turn a slash pile of downed trees into tidy rectangles of wood and pine boughs.

The bundler then hoisted the enormous bundles into Morse’s grinder.

The bundler was hauled to Helena from Washington specifically for the presentation, Vincent said. There are no bundlers like that in Montana, and the expensive, enormous green tractors are rare in the United States.

That’s the forestry equipment of the future, Vincent said.

Biomass is the name given to burning chipped logs as fuel, either in large electrical generators analogous to a coal-burning power plant, or in much smaller local burners, which produces heat from the wood chips on-site.

Many lawmakers at Thursday’s demonstration talked about the devastating sweep of pine bark beetles, which is turning enormous swaths of Montana’s forests into red, dead trees. Biomass burners are a way of using that enormous amount of dead trees.

“There are so many of them,” said Morse.

Biomass generators have been floated as a way of keeping the state’s older timber mills alive. Morse said Mark’s Lumber bought its grinder in hopes of helping the old timber mill in Frenchtown near Missoulaconvert to a biomass generator.

The grinder arrived after the mill had already closed.

There is a small biomass industry in the state, Vincent said. But it is hampered by state regulations that were not written with the new industry in mind. For example, a grinder that is hauled into the woods by a separate semi tractor-trailer is permitted one way, he said, while a grinder that is built atop a semi tractor-trailer and is one unit is permitted a different way.

Both pieces of equipment are nearly identical to one another.

Bundlers will make biomass development profitable, he said, because they quickly and efficiently turn trees into fuel. They are expensive, and loggers and logging companies may not invest in one if the state doesn’t do more to encourage biomass development.

Rep. Sue Dickenson, D-Great Falls, another member of the committee, said she supports the idea of biomass and would like to see it expanded to potentially provide a market for agricultural wastes like straw, which makes up about half the yield of most cereal crops and has limited uses in modern agriculture.

Dickenson said that while she supported biomass, she also thought it should be done in an environmentally sound manner.

“It’s a very worthwhile” pursuit, she said. “We can do it in a sustainable, sensible way.”"

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Crystal L. Cox
Montana Investigative Blogger