Pellet Focus Curran’s Green Power Curran Renewable Energy shipped its first pellets to a Quebec client this past July, with a twist. The pellets are made from green roundwood chips from a sister company’s pulpwood operation. By Scott Jamieson MakIng pellets from r o u n dwo o d may seem like black magic to most of Canada’s growing for- estry biomass sector, but for Pat Curran it’s all in a day’s work. It’s also a no-brainer. Driving into the yard at Curran Renewable Energy’s recently started pellet mill, the logger and forestry entre- preneur points to several piles of wood chips and summarizes his rationale for investing $10 million in one of North America’s first green- wood pellet plants. “We could see where the local pulp wood market was going, especially for the less desir- able species. Here’s a case right now where I have no market at all for the chips that are sit- ting there, except the hardwood. I also have a tremendous inventory of tree length piled in the woods waiting for us to get running here so we can chip it. We’ll let nature suck some of the moisture out a bit while we wait. We had to find an alternative for some of our volumes like this if we were going to have a future.” Curran, along with his brothers Tim and Lee, have owned and operated Seaway Tim- ber Harvesting for over two decades now. It is a large bush chipping and transport company perched on the Canadian border in Massena, New York, with established roots in the state’s private forestland market and 15,000 acres of its own. Getting fibre and harvesting it has never been a major issue for the Currans. Lately, how- ever, markets have been. A key client, Domtar’s pulp mill just over the border in Cornwall, On- tario, shut down in 2004, but even before that, currency fluctuations were wreaking havoc for a logger paid in Canadian dollars. While Domtar’s mill in Windsor, Quebec, has since become a key client for Seaway Timber Harvesting, the The automated bagging line from Hamer has been designed for a quick change-over between pellets and mulch, with the latter entering via an outside infeed system. 16 CanadianBIOMASS AUGUST 2009
Canadian Biomass August 2009: Page 16
