for shipping wood pellets. “We are now building an 18,000 tonne fibre shed so we will be able to store 45,000 tonnes of pel-lets on site in total,” Watkins says. “It’s not really a shed,” says Watkins of the new facility, which was completed in sum-mer 2011. “It’s a very large 50,000-square-foot building.” The structure is a tension fabric facility constructed by ClearSpan Fabric Structures out of the United States, which provides fabric structures for mul-tiple purposes, including riding arenas and salt storage sheds. The new facility will allow Fibreco to store up to a full vessel load on site between ship loadings. Continued global demand for fossil fuel alternatives and cleaner fuels is ex-pected to drive demand for wood pellets even higher and affect Fibreco’s storage re-quirements in the next five years. Fibreco is currently only using 50% of its handling capacity of 3.5 million tonnes of com-bined fibre products (pellets, bioenergy wood chips, and pulp chips). “After that, we will have to look at redevelopment to go higher,” Watkins says. further expaNsioN Watkins is anticipating that Fibreco will require another expansion in 2012, with a possible doubling of the current shed, hiking storage capacity to 60,000 tonnes. That’s because the next wave of pellet production in British Columbia, with new mills coming on-stream or new lines ramping up, is expected to hit in 2012. This could affect Fibreco next year with as much as 1.5 million tonnes (up from 1 million tonnes) of product arriving at its doorstep to go to markets, explains Watkins. He adds that as the industry be-comes more established, an additional 1 million tonnes of pellets “could” come to the terminal facility again in the next three to five years. Fibreco has aggressively gone after the burgeoning pellet market, says Watkins, who came to Fibreco from MGI Interna-tional, where he served as president, and also spent 14 years with British Columbia timber major International Forest Products as general manager. The pellet business neatly dovetails with Fibreco’s traditional chip export market and provides a buffer to the cyclical pulp market. Watkins esti-mates that of the total volume of fibre that arrives at the North Vancouver terminal this year, approximately 75% will be pellets (with 5% of that being wood chips destined for the bioenergy sector in Japan to replace coal), while only 25% will be wood chips directed towards traditional pulp markets. That’s not to say that the pulp side has dropped, but it has remained flat while the bioenergy sector has soared. “In most cases,” notes Watkins, speak-ing of European market buyers, “the product is going to replace coal.” There is a growing worldwide awareness of the benefits of using wood pellets, which have almost a zero net value in carbon release when burned. large-scale pellet haNdliNg Fibreco’s modified ship loader gives it the ability to either store the pellets brought in by rail car or “hot load” directly onto a ves-sel. Pellets arrive via grain rail cars, which are enclosed to protect the pellets. Fibreco has a rotary dumper on site for wood chip rail cars but uses a bottom feeding convey-ing system to unload pellets. As part of the learning curve in pel-let handling over the past five years, the company has been an active participant in a number of studies. In 2010, the Uni-versity of British Columbia’s Biomass and presents SPC Sweden Power Chippers AB Turn waste into profit! From dry shavings, sawdust or similar material – Silvana specializes in providing turn-key, small-scale pellet press solutions from SPC Sweden to fit your specific needs. Talk to us and start making more profit now! 4269 Sainte-Catherine Street West, #304 Montreal, QC H3Z 1P7 Tel: 514 939-3523 Fax: 514 939-3863 www.silvanatrading.com www.pelletpress.com Silvana Import Trading Inc. 20 Canadian BIOMASS SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2011
Canadian Biomass September/October 2011: Page 20
