Wood Bioenergy Conference Reveals Industry That’s Far From Reaching Potential

The message out of the ninth Wood Bioenergy Conference & Expo was that an industry that was once dominated by the discussion of industrial wood pellets has transformed into something larger, with opportunities bursting at the seams, if only the industry can see them through.

Perhaps no comment expressed the potential of the industry than that of Dru Preston, staff forester with the Georgia Forestry Commission, who said that a single data center requiring 1.2 gigawatts (1,200 megawatt) could be supplied by 12 100 MW biomass power plants using 1.2 million tons of wood chips annually.

In a state where the logging supply chains ranks has taken a super blow due to the loss of 8.3 million tons of timber market because of regional pulp mill closures (approximately 290,000 truckloads of mostly pulpwood timber), the potential biomass for data centers would be a welcome reprieve, with a single 100 MW plant requiring 75 jobs at the facility, 20 logging and trucking crews, numerous forestry and fiber supply jobs, and trickling down the supply chains to additional labor for site prep and seedlings crews—not to mention serving as a chips byproduct market for the abundance of sawmills in the region.

And if that isn’t potential enough, what about the 520 million green tons of biomass that would be required to transform the nation’s annual conventional jet fuel into sustainable aviation fuel (SAF)?

Such was the sky’s-the-limit nature of the Wood Bioenergy Conference & Expo, held April 14-15 at the Omni Atlanta Hotel at Centennial Park in downtown Atlanta. Hosted by Wood Bioenergy magazine, the event attracted nearly 200 participants, featured 22 speakers and 43 exhibitors in the Grand Ballroom North of the Omni.

Not that the conference overlooked the longstanding industrial wood pellets business. Indeed, the conference served as kind of a “coming out party” for Enviva, the world’s largest producer of industrial wood pellets, which, while maintaining its status as number one, has fought through tough times in the past two years.

But even Scott Bax, executive vice president and COO of Enviva, spoke on the bigger potential in his talk, “From Biomass to Bioenergy and Beyond.” Bax noted that Enviva and the global pellet industry created the first large-scale market for woody biomass as a renewable carbon feedstock; but it’s no longer defined by a single product, “rather a versatile renewable carbon feedstock…replacing fossil electricity with renewable power and replacing fossil carbon with renewable carbon,” with potential in biocoal, biochar, black pellets and SAF.

Bax said Enviva continues to operate 10 pellet production plants with a run-rate of 6.5 million metric tons, including Enviva’s newest plant that has started up in Epes, Ala.

Day two of the conference included a tour of the Hazlehurst Wood Pellets plant in Hazlehurst, Ga., one of the first large scale industrial wood pellet producers in the world, and of the new Telfair Forest Products torrefaction facility in Lumber City, Ga.