Wood-Chip Heating Systems - Biomass Energy Resource Center

CHAPTER TWELVE
The Future of Biomass
This concluding chapter looks at the
future of the biomass resource, its longterm
availability, its various uses, and its
possible future role in meeting local and
global energy needs. Of course, we can
only speculate on the future; but we can look at today’s
reality and make some intelligent guesses about what
we may see tomorrow.
Biomass Supply and Demand
In the last ten years, great strides have been made
in refi ning the technology for heating larger buildings
with biomass. Much of this is due to the widespread
use of automated wood energy systems in public
schools in Vermont and a few other states. There is
a growing interest from communities in the western
states to use wood residues from fi re-prone national
forests to provide energy to public buildings. There
are many successful examples of schools, hospitals,
government buildings, commercial buildings,
agricultural applications, and industries using biomass
for heat. However, at the beginning of the 21st century
these biomass-burning facilities are hardly the norm.
While some states or regions have a growing number
of institutional and commercial facilities using
biomass, others have few.
Heating applications for wood chips and other
forest residues, excluding cordwood, are a very small
part of a larger market. This market is dominated by
the use of wood residues for three purposes: making
steam for dry kilns within the forest products industry,
making paper, and generating electricity. In the
Northeast, most suppliers of biomass to schools and
other institutions sell most of their wood wastes to
paper mills and power plants.
As more schools, hospitals, and businesses install
biomass systems, the connections between biomass
fuel suppliers and users will grow stronger. In many
regions these links are now weak or nonexistent. In
the future there are likely to be more self-unloading
delivery vehicles available to serve the institutional
and commercial markets for biomass. It is also likely
that as the institutional/commercial market grows and
becomes more competitive, biomass suppliers will
adopt more of the customer service approach common
to oil dealers.
In the future the level of biomass utilization for
thermal energy will depend in part on how society
allocates the available marketed biomass among
uses for heating, electricity generation, paper
manufacturing, chemical feedstock supply, and other
applications. It will also depend on the sustainable
yield from our forests.
We can expect to see better utilization of the forest
resource in the future. Throughout the Northeast there
are very large inventories of unmanaged, poor-quality
timber stands. To improve overall forest health and
provide greater economic return to forest land owners,
there will be an increased pressure to cull, harvest,
chip and remove low-grade trees. This could result in a
much greater supply of chips to meet the needs of the
growing market for institutional biomass heating.
Trends in Biomass Burning
A number of trends already underway in biomass
combustion technology will continue to make institutional
and commercial wood burning more feasible in
the coming years. These developments are occuring in
the areas of improved combustion effi ciency, cleaner air
emissions, better operating characteristics of biomass
burners, and better-developed wood fuel markets.
The challenge of institutional biomass heating
plants in the 1980s was to develop integrated fuel
handling and combustion systems that worked
WOOD CHIP HEATING SYSTEMS
71