… at present, there are not enough long-term experiences with briquettes to prove the … theoretical advantages." Pacific Briquetters Inc. in Mission, British Columbia, (a subsidiary of Vancouver-based Carbon Friendly Solutions Inc.) would like to be producing briquettes for U.S. and Eu-ropean power plants, but has put plans for that on hold for now. Carbon Friendly Solu-tions CEO Mike Young says, “We had been in discussions with energy companies in the Scandinavian region to purchase briquettes in the 125/tonne range. However, with the sudden drop in the euro, there is almost a 30% decline in profit, making it no longer profitable. Basically, our cost to produce briquettes is approximately CAD $90/tonne FOB (free on board) our mill. Shipping costs overseas are in the CAD $50 to 60/tonne range, so you can see the margins were al-ready going to be tight.” Young says they’d ideally like to sell and ship within North America, “but to the best of my knowledge, the market is not there yet.” In the mean-time, Pacific Briquetters is going forward with developing its wood waste and recy-cling facility in Mission, and Young says they can easily move into briquette production as demand increases. DOMESTIC POWER For North American utilities to effectively use briquettes, Winkler advises them to in-vestigate the best technical features of bio-fired European plants and tweak the design to suit local markets. “This could involve co-firing with biomass and natural gas, which has already been done in Sweden,” he says. “Demand for fuel briquettes is large, as there are more than 600 coal-fired plants in North America, many in the 600-MW range, which equates to approximately one million tons/year of coal per plant. If 5–10% of it is exchanged for biomass fuels, it equates to millions of tons of required biomass. Coal-fired power plants can use their own station-ary grinders to grind briquettes.” Brose says it’s a misconception that bri-quettes are too big to use in power plants. “The coal must be ground up anyway, so briquettes are fine,” he notes. Since drying is needed for briquetting however, Brose notes that combined heat and power systems that have been developed in Europe are a smart move. “Electricity is produced from the bri-quettes and the waste heat dries the biomass that goes into the briquettes, which eases costs significantly,” he notes. CanadianBIOMASS 15 Kanviromental’s BioKrush briquetter was developed using the staff’s long expertise in densifying scrap metal from the automotive industry and is designed for industrial set-tings where large throughput is required. “There are already small-throughput Euro-pean machines available, so we’ve focused on what we call ‘central briquetting,’” says Brose. “This means one of our units would briquette feedstocks like sawdust and chips, purpose-grown crops, or paper waste left-over from recycling operations at (capacities of) one, five, and eight tonnes/hour.” The company has some machines in stock but plans to produce them on a made-to-order basis. Director of sales Gary Cruickshank says the company may choose to find part-ners to jump-start electricity production from briquettes, but that the company’s focus is briquetter manufacturing. “It’s a rel-atively new industry to Canada,” he notes, “but Ontario Power Generation and others are very interested.” To supply a local co-fired coal plant as
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