Coal is just a rock, so you can abuse it, push it, squeeze it with the augers, and it’ll come out as a rock. With the biomass, the oat hull pellets had to be handled more gently. There were some changes to the stoker auger so it didn’t break up the pellets and pulverize them,” he explains. So far, Hassan Farms has not had any problems with combustion. The oat hull pellets produce more light ash that goes out of the chimney and settles into the yard, but that product is easier to handle than coal, Goossen says. The biomass also does not flow through the boiler as well as coal did. “We’ve had it bridge in the bin, which means that it doesn’t flow into the auger properly, so the boiler is shut down brief-ly,” Goossen explains. “And coal will sit and smolder in the boiler without any flame for nearly a week when shut off, whereas biomass will only do that for about 12 hours. So, if there is no heat drop for a long time, the boiler flame will go out and it needs to be re-lit. But, for us, with the chicken barns, we use enough heat even during the hot days of summer that it’s not enough of a factor.” The pellets are also a much bulkier product than coal, which means Goossen and his team have had to be more careful when ordering a new truckload of pellets because their storage bin must be nearly empty. The main farm has a storage bin that can store 65 tonnes of coal, but only 50 tonnes of pellets. But, for Goossen, the benefits of the bio-mass product far outweigh the challenges. “I like not burning coal and putting soot up in the air. It feels better that way,” he says. “Financially, it’s a business…we had to make a decision based on this be-ing the best for our farm right now and the best for our future. “With climate change, we wanted to make the switch ourselves, and the carbon tax enabled the switch,” he continues. “Be-cause as a business, you make decisions based on finance. As long as coal was go-ing to be the cheapest source of heat, we weren’t going to switch away from that. As soon as there was a viable alternative or something had pushed coal to being non-competitive, then we switched.” A GAP IN THE MARKET Despite the benefits of using oat hull pel-lets, there aren’t many farmers near Goos-sen using biomass for heating, due to a number of barriers. For one thing, natural gas is still fairly cheap, despite the carbon tax. Secondly, there isn’t a reliable source of local bio-mass in the nearby area. Thirdly, auto-mated handling of raw biomass, such as straw bales, firewood or wood chips, is difficult, Goossen explains. On top of that, more education is needed to make farmers more aware of the opportunity that biomass presents. “Very few farmers consider pellets as a feasible fuel source. They are thought to be for small residential pellet stoves, not large usage,” Goossen says. There is also a lack of a domestic market for pellets in Canada, something Goossen says is not because of a lack of demand, but a lack of supply. “Most of the manufacturers I talked to to get wood pellets had no facilities to load our trucks to sell it domestically,” he says. “It was a bit of a surprise. Your Solution for Bulk Material Handling. Pellets Woodchips Biomass TRUCK DUMPERS TRAILER TIPPERS RECEIVING HOPPERS airoflex.com [email protected] 563-506-5085 Canadian BIOMASS CB_Hoffmann_Fall21.indd 1 2021-10-12 10:22 AM 17
Canadian Biomass Fall 2021: Page 17
