Pellet Project Safety Profile How to stop a pellet plant explosion By Tamar Atik single ounce of oxygen. That’s all it would have taken for an explosion to have occurred at Pacific BioEnergy’s Prince George, B.C. facility in August 2017. It was Thursday, Aug. 24 when chairman and chief execu-tive officer Don Steele found out that one of the wood pellet fuel company’s silos began smouldering overnight. Steele was hosting a group of seven guests who had flown from Nagoya, Japan for a tour of the facility. “I advised them,” Steele explains. “I said we could go up and have a look. We might even go on the property and they wouldn’t see much. But, at that point in time we were evacu-ating.” Although reported as a fire in mainstream media, the inci-dent was a smouldering situation. Wood pellet consultancy company FutureMetrics’ John Swaan founded Pacific BioEnergy Corporation in 1994. His direction on-site is one of the main reasons why an explosion didn’t take place. What was the winning solution? Nitrogen injection. One In an industry where the potential for explosions is all too common, this was the first time that a North American pellet operation successfully put out a smouldering issue. “We have a number of incidents that have happened in our industry, mostly in Europe, that have not gone successfully,” Swaan says. “There were some references that I shared with Don and his key people on-site,” Swaan recalls from the day. “And then his vice-president of operations gathered his key people around and took a look at what the options might be and looked at the references. I shared the report about how best to handle these situations that was done in a research centre in Sweden.” (Find a link to the report at www.canadianbio-massmagazine.ca/pellets/how-to-stop-a-pellet-plant-explo-sion-6531) “So we did some calculations, and based on those calcu-lations, a decision was made with Don and his people to say ‘OK, let’s bring in the nitrogen,’” Swaan says. “A simple reaction would be to try and open the silo up to put out the fire, which would have been catastrophic,” Steele The silo incident at Pacific BioEnergy’s Prince George, B.C., facility was the first time that a North American pellet operation successfully put out a smouldering issue. Photos courtesy John Swaan. 14 Canadian BIOMASS NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2017
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