two distinct fibre sources, allowing the Currans to offer its clients Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified pellets. “Whether it helps us time will tell, but I believe it will. Unlike lumber that gets covered up, people will be accessing their pellets for heating daily or weekly, and they’ll see that label. We’re getting enquiries already, so I think it will be a factor for us down the road.” Pellets are bagged on an automated line from US supplier Hamer Inc., including a robotic pal- letizer and a plastic wrap turntable. “We have some work to do on the latter to make the pack- ages more windproof. We want the pellets to be completely protected before they get to the consumer, and the system isn’t doing the job we want as of yet. We’re adding a cover ourselves for now.” The line was also designed on rails so that it can be slid back several feet to allow the plant to bag mulch as well. Mulch is brought in via an outside infeed, bagged, and then follows the line just as pellets would. “We figure we can bag all our pellets on a 24/7 operation in just eight hours on this line, so we’ll have time to bag the mulch too. We’ve been in the coloured mulch market for years, but this allows us to bag the product and sell into different markets. It will also allow us to back an inventory ahead of winter, so that when the garden centres start looking for bags in the early spring we’re not struggling with piles of frozen mulch.” Changeover takes less than an hour, but in future they are hoping to add extra pellet stor- age silo capacity so they can run pellets for a full week before switching. “So far the line runs well. We’ve done 20 bags per minute with mulch and we know with pellets it will go easier.” Pellet inventory will be stored inside the rest of the 30,000 square foot building ahead of shipping. The company has also added four new Manac flatbeds to handle some of its own distribution. In the end, Curran feels that be- coming a reliable, consistent heating supplier will be crucial to growing the wood pellet busi- ness in general. “There is already interest and demand for wood pellets for heating in this part of the coun- try, but regardless of what anyone thinks, we need a surplus to make this market work; not a glut, but a surplus. And for us that means every- thing from the fibre to delivery. Our focus starts on the fibre, and we believe that access to fibre will be a big factor going forward. Customers will be relying on me, and just like our tradi- tional logging operations, some kind of inven- tory will be important to handle the surprises.” And from what he’s seen of pellet manu- facturing, surprises will not be unheard of. The mill originally hoped to start running in January, but a series of delays eventually pushed things back to late June. Curran says it’s not like they’ve been trying to make pel- lets since then, just fine tuning the design and dealing with unexpected delays. “We’ve been working the kinks out of the flow, but just parts inventory has been a learn- ing curve. We know what we need on hand to keep the chipping business running after all these years, but we haven’t built up a similar must-have inventory here yet. We had a faulty 500-hp motor go down on one of the hammer mills that cost us two days, and then no sooner did we fix that than a 1-hp motor failure cost us another two. As soon as cash-flow allows, we’ll be stocking critical items like that.” Yet already the Currans have done what many logging operations in Canada have only been talking about – turned a lost customer base and excess fibre into a new biomass busi- ness opportunity. • 20 CanadianBIOMASS AUGUST 2009
Canadian Biomass August 2009: Page 20
