The town of Eagar, Arizona, sits nearly in the middle of a straight line connecting Phoenix and Albuquerque. Situated at in the foothills of the White Mountains, Eagar is sandwiched between the massive Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest to the west, and to the south, the vast Colorado Plateau, which stretches north all the way to Utah. While only a small handful of actual roads service the vast expanse of forest and high desert that surround the town, this summer may find Eagar the convergence of a broad array of renewable energy, forest restoration, technology development and international business stories.

Eagar is the site identified by Concord Blue Energy USA Inc. to be the first North American deployment of a unique conversion technology initially developed and proven at pilot scale in Germany in 2002. The patented technology, which the company calls the Concord Blue Reformer, uses steam thermolysis to convert nearly any carbonaceous material into syngas and a char byproduct. The syngas from the Concord Blue Reformer is unique because of its high percentage of hydrogen, typically around 50 percent. While this syngas stream is of a high-enough quality that it can be reformulated into high-value biofuels and biochemicals, in Eagar it will be converted via internal combustion into around 1 MW of electric power.

“We came across Concord Blue in 2008 quite serendipitously at a conference and began to build a relationship with them,” says Gregory Bilson, now Concord Blue’s chief development officer. At that time, Bilson and his father, both serial entrepreneurs, were working to enter the renewable energy space under the project development banner Western Energy Solutions.  “My father had built some solid relationships with a couple locals in Eagar, Arizona, one of them being the former town manager Bill Greenwood,” Bilson says.
Greenwood, like town managers all across the country, was constantly working to make the most of the resources at his disposal to generate stable economic activity and jobs within his community.

“Eagar’s an area where they have quite a lot of wood waste, milling activity and stewardship activity,” Bilson says. “Bill was looking to bring in a project that would provide a place for this wood waste to go and help stabilize the job market they have there.”

Focus On Forest Management
Greenwood and the community of Eagar’s interest in forest management cannot be overstated. The vast stands of Ponderosa pines that border the community are federally managed national forests that have engaged in fire suppression for nearly a century. As a result, the forests have evolved into stands densely packed with fuel resulting in a very dangerous situation. In fact, in 2011, an unattended campfire resulted in the largest wildfire in the state’s history, the Wallow Fire, which burned nearly 850 square miles of forest, four commercial buildings and 32 residences. The town of Eagar and seven other nearby communities had to be evacuated. Recognizing that forest thinning had to be completed, the federal government worked to build a plan that would thin hundreds of thousands of acres, at the time the largest forest management and restoration project ever undertaken. The challenge was, and remains, figuring out a way to fund the much-needed thinning.

Ideally, the restoration efforts can be partially funded by adding value to the wood harvested during the thinning operation. The forest products industry in the area is optimized to convert these smaller-diameter trees into dimensional lumber and other high-value products, but residuals from their operations and forest slash remain. Some of those materials are currently incinerated in nearby Snowflake, while others were simply burned in open pits.

“One of the promises we made to the town when we came in was that we would take in all these slash materials so long as they were not contaminated with trash,” Bilson says. “We would divert them from the pit and convert them in a way that they were not combusted, which would reduce a lot of particulate matter they were used to getting.”

Driving Towards Economic Viability
While a new home for these forest and sawmill residuals will be welcomed in Eagar, for the project to offer a long-term benefit for the community it must offer a return for Concord Blue. The opportunity first attracted the attention of Bilson and his father nearly eight years ago, but making the economics pencil out has proven challenging.

“In terms of the Eagar project,” Bilson says, “the reason it dragged out for such a long period of time is that when we were originally brought in, we were under the impression that we’d be able to get a power purchase agreement from the local cooperative there.”

For various reasons, this power purchase agreement was slow to materialize. Early in 2013, things began to change and Navopache Electric Co-Op Inc. issued a request for proposal that was eventually awarded to Concord Blue, negotiated and signed.

“Once that happened,” Bilson says, “the project basically came back to life and we were able to go back to actively developing the project.”

The full value of the Concord Blue Reformer technology is not fully realized through power sales alone, however. A byproduct of the unique, oxygen-free conversion environment is a carbon-rich material known as biochar. The production of biochar is very similar to the production of charcoal. The differences, largely, can be found in their eventual use. Charcoal’s ability to produce intense heat has led to uses ranging from cooking to more industrial uses including smelting. While proponents of biochar believe the material holds incredible promise, the markets are very much nascent.

“The main application for bioachar at this stage is as a soil amendment,” Bilson says. “There is also application in the industrial world and we’re working with one of the most established brokers in the U.S. to market char for this project.”

While Bilson refrains from identifying the broker by name, the importance of finding buyers for this byproduct remains clear and Bilson and his team aren’t satisfied to rely on the slow-to-come soil amendment market.

“We’re actually looking into creating new markets for a renewable char where it hasn’t been used before,” Bilson offers.

Specifically, Bilson identifies all of the markets that are currently served by the activated carbon typically produced from coal streams.

“There are certain niches in the market where a biobased activated carbon would be quite attractive,” Bilson says.

Eyeing Groundbreaking
The Eagar project is small by design. Concord Blue’s technology brings with it  incredible scalability, so facilities that dwarf the 1 MW Eagar installation are well inside of the Concord Blue Reformer’s operational parameters. 

“We figured the first couple of projects in North America would be mostly paid out of the cash drawer,” Bilson says. “So we targeted something that would be economically palatable at a smaller scale.”

All that remains for Bilson and his team is the awarding of an air permit. Upon issuance of the air permit, dirt will begin to move.

Because of the modular nature of the technology, Bilson expects that as long as permits are awarded this spring or even early summer, the construction can be completed in 2015 and commissioning can follow shortly thereafter or at the very beginning of 2016, thereby bringing to a conclusion a development story eight years in the making.

Author: Tim Portz
Executive Editor, Biomass Magazine
tportz@biomassmagazine.com
701-738-4969