EUGENE, Ore. (KMTR) -- Celebration for… and protest against a new biomass plant in
Eugene, generating megawatts of power for
Lane County.
Thursday, May 5th, 2011, Seneca Sawmill dedicated its new biomass facility in Eugene, along Highway 99, near Airport Road. The company began generating electricity from the plant in February 2011.
The plant takes wood chips, bark and slash material generated in the logging process and burns it to make electricity. Per Federal logging regulations, logging companies are required to dispose of slash virtually immediately after it’s created through the logging process.
For Seneca, the project is a first of its kind, also a chance to extend its business on another front beyond logging. The company is now taking the slash it generates and other timber companies slash for the biomass plant, which operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.
The plant can generate power for 13-thousand homes in Lane County, around 19 megawatts of power. All of the energy Seneca is generating with the new biomass plant is being sold to EWEB.
“We're fully utilizing the entire tree on one site, so we bring the entire tree to Seneca, either in the form of logs for one of our tree saw mills, and now the slash that's leftover, we're bringing that in and creating not just a renewable energy source in electricity for our local community, but also steam to go to our existing dry kilns which allowed us to eliminate the use of natural gas,” said Todd Payne, project manager for Seneca Sawmills’ biomass plant.
On the other side of the coin, protestors from the Cascadia Forest Defenders group protested Thursday’s event. 3 protestors were arrested for disorderly conduct.
A representative of the group, Jason Gonzalez caught the protests on camera. One protestor locked himself to the underside of a car, parked in the driveways to the sawmill’s property.
Cascadia Forest Defenders argues that Seneca Sawmill is still in the process of trying to harvest old growth forests, also that the biomass plant is still creating pollution by burning slash.
This very toxic air will be released into their neighborhood, that's already being just completely covered in chip boarding making facilities and other facilities, the area is surrounded by smoke stacks, and this is just another smokestack. And the simple matter is, no matter how Seneca wants to paint it, clean energy doesn't come out of a smoke stack,” said Gonzalez.
Seneca says the plant has a lifespan of about 40 years. The company’s current contract with EWEB lasts through February 2026.
In terms of investment in the project, Seneca spent about 50 million dollars on the biomass plant. Of that, 12.5 million dollars was spent on air emissions control equipment. Seneca opted to use a “4 field ESP” filtering system for the project. According to Seneca, comparable facilities in size typically use a “2 or 3 field ESP” filtering system.
