SHRED & SCREEN Komptech is an Austrian company that makes a wide range of Crambo slow shred- ders and elaborate wood waste star-type screening systems that now has an office in Canada. It will offer these proven biomass processing products to our own growing industry. Shown is one of the supplierʼs Crambo 6000 slow shredders. Komptech also makes both mobile (diesel powered for the woods) and stationary (electrical hook up for mill or sort yard) gear. www.komptech.com. WILLOW GRASS FOR POWER Salix certainly grows like grass, with the ash-sewage fertilized fi elds we saw being ready for harvest in a few years. A willow-like crop with a three- to fi ve-year rotation, it is commonplace along the roads of southern and western Sweden. To help mechanize and reduce the cost for landowners wanting to get in the salix growing business, a Danish entrepreneur has developed the Egedal Energy Planer. Shown for the fi rst time at World Bioenergy 2008, the machine can handle both salix (willow) and poplar, according to Egedal Maskinfabrik managing director Niels Fogh. Niels told Elmiaʼs own press corps how the machine works. “We use cuttings that are about 2.3 metres long, which is a standard size. At that length, they are a year old. We use a drum cutting system, which gives a bigger capacity. The operator sits on the machine and feeds the long cuttings into the cutter by hand. The cutter automatically cuts them into either 17 or 20 cm long sticks. They are then planted vertically in the plant furrow by a hydraulic device. The stick grows in the moist ground without any other help. After three years you can take a fi rst harvest, and then re-harvest the same plants every second year, for at least 20 years.” The company has sold machines in Denmark, other European countries, and the US. The machine comes in two-row and four-row versions, with the latter planting up to 2.5 ha per hour. It is available in Canada through Timm Enterprises. www.timmenterprises.com. Rutting like this may be more common than before for a simple reason –With oil above $130/barrel and the public demanding renewable energy, whoʼs going to ride over slash? A system of trade-offs It’s hard for some of us to grasp, but there’s no free lunch when it comes to society’s energy needs. Using renewable fuels to re- place some of our fossil fuel addiction is a great idea (common sense really), but there will be a price to pay both in extra forest intervention and in changing perceptions. To me, rutting is a perfect example. It was unheard of and al- most unseen during my first few trips to Scandinavia. The idea of riding on top of a bed of harvest slash, and thus sparing the soil, has always been a big seller of cut-to-length (CTL) harvesting on this side of the Atlantic after all. You won’t sell too many CTL systems this way visiting Sweden or Finland anymore. Simply put, harvest slash has too much energy value to drive over these days, so harvester operators carefully lay it to the side, and drive on the soil and rock. The result is more rutting. So what’s more pressing – global warming and replacing fossil fuels, or a few ruts here and there? I’m not saying it’s an easy choice, but 30 CanadianBIOMASS you’d be naive thinking it’s a choice we can ignore. I think we’ll work around this issue through planning, longer booms, and harvest scheduling. Other issues will prove more thorny, and the price too high, at least for now. For starters, I’ll bet anyone a large draft that wewon’t see too many stump pullers in our woods over the next decade. It baffles the Swedes and Finns I talk to, but there’s just no way we’re going to fret the way we do over site disturbance and nutrient loss, and then start ripping up stumps and shaking them to loosen the dirt. Anyway, there are far too many lower hanging fruits out there to pick first. And that’s the main thing to keep in mind when discussing such trade-offs. With a typical 100-year-plus Canadian rotation and slash recovery systems that will still leave a lot of tops and branches behind, we can expand our biomass recovery operations dramatically before we need to lose sleep over site productivity. We need to monitor it, discuss it, choose sites carefully, and keep an eye in the rear view mirror. But we need to move on. Or use more oil. Take your pick. AUGUST 2008
Canadian Biomass August 08: Page 30
