Tacoma’s biggest forest products company is entering a new business: green power.
Tacoma-based Simpson Investment Co. announced Wednesday that it’s spending $100 million to build a new co-generation plant at its Tacoma Tideflats’ paper mill. That generation facility will burn sawmill and paper mill waste products, wood building demolition waste, debris from logging sites and even bark, trimmings and sawdust mined from old lumber mill landfill sites.
The new plant will produce both steam to power paper mill machinery and enough electricity to power 44,000 urban homes.
The new power plant machinery will reduce Simpson’s paper mill carbon dioxide emissions by about 10 percent, the company said. The particulate matter, the small unburned remnants of the biomass burned to create heat, will be trapped by scrubbers in the exhaust stream. The new plant will meet the same particulate standards required for the existing boilers, said Dave McEntee, a Simpson vice president.
Simpson President Ray Tennison said the plant will provide a new income source for the company as well as provide power from renewable local sources for regional homes and industries.
“This will be a positive for the community and the environment,” said Tennison.
Construction on the new generation facility began in January at Simpson’s Tacoma Tideflats plant. The plant won’t create any new, permanent jobs. The company expects to produce the first commercially available power from the plant beginning in August 2009.
The power will be transmitted to the regional power grid via Tacoma Power transmission lines. Portland-based PPM Energy is buying the power from Simpson and will remarket it to West Coast utilities.
The region’s power utilities are under legal mandates to obtain a proportion of their power needs from renewable sources such as windmills, solar arrays and biomass generation facilities such as Simpson’s, said Peter van Alderwerelt, PPM senior vice president. Those requirements vary from state to state.
In some states such as Oregon and California, all of the power created by the new Simpson power plant will meet “green power” requirements. In Washington, only about half the power from the plant qualifies, because power generated from burning a paper mill waste product called “black liquor” doesn’t qualify. The Simpson plant will generate about half its power from burning black liquor, McEntee said.
Black liquor is a byproduct of the Kraft paper pulping process in which cellulose in wood is separated from lignin and other substances. The cellulose is used to produce paper. The “black liquor” traditionally has been burned in recovery boilers to produce steam. The new plant at Simpson will also burn other biomass products and use high-pressure steam to turn a generator to produce electricity.
Under most conditions, the Simpson plant will use no supplemental fossil fuels to power the plant. The mill now supplements its black liquor fuel with fossil fuels.
Simpson had attempted to sell the power from its new plant to Tacoma Power, but the municipal utility had neither the immediate need for power nor the desire to buy the relatively expensive power, said Bill Gaines, Tacoma Public Utilities chief executive.
The power is marketable to other regional utilities because their cost structures and legal green power needs are different, said PPM Energy’s van Alderwerelt.
Simpson will gather wood wastes from its own sawmills in Tacoma and Shelton to help power the plant, said Tennison. It may supplement that waste with scrap wood, sawdust and shavings from other companies’ mills as well as by using wood from tree trimming and thinning projects and woody debris from logging called slash that in the past was burned in open fires on the logging sites.
The company will also likely buy scrap wood from a Tideflats company that obtains wood from building demolition debris. The company has even started uncovering tons of sawmill waste it buried in a company landfill near Shelton in the past.
Simpson has already received necessary permits for the new co-generation facility from the state Department of Ecology, McEntee said.
John Gillie: 253-597-8663
blogs.thenewstribune.com/business
Simpson co-generation power project
Cost: $100 million
Capacity: Enough electricity to power 44,000 homes. Enough steam to operate Simpson Tacoma Kraft’s Tideflats pulp and paper mill
Construction start: January 2008; first commercial power produced in August 2009
Burns: Sawmill and pulp mill organic waste products, woody demolition debris, lumber mill landfill wastes
Property tax increase: The new facility will pay $2.1 million in additional property taxes annually.
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