New England Wood Pellet's New Plant

[Eric Johnson]

I just got back from a visit to New England Wood Pellet's new plant in Schuyler, NY. They expect to start producing in about 3 weeks. Steve Walker, the president (and inventor of most of the equipment in the plant) says it will produce about 100,000 tons of pellets annually. That's running 24/7, 365. Here's a few pictures. That's Walker in front of the chip dryer, the view from the parking lot and the three pellet presses on the plant floor. Those motors on the side of the presses are 500 hp each. I don't recall the pressure at the point of extrusion, but he did say that the average wood splitter ram puts out about enough pressure to make one pellet at a time. So it's a lot.

 

[begreen]

Awesome shots Eric. Thanks for posting them. How is he powering the plant? Does it generate it's own power? How is he fueling the driers? With the sawdust or pellets?

 

[Eric Johnson]

At the moment, power comes off the grid. He told me that represents 5% of the energy used for production. The rest is in the form of wood (dried but not pelletized) burned to dry the feedstock. That's what the stack is for in the bottom pic above. The furnace puts out 15mw of thermal energy. It exhausts through the drying drum. A series of cyclones separates dust and other particulates from the exhaust before it goes out the stack. Basically, the dried wood is combined with the exhaust gasses in the rotary dryer--until it hits the cylclone. Then the gas goes up the stack and the dried wood pieces are metered into the 4 big silos in the front of the plant. There the stuff is mixed and stored, and eventually conveyed to another hammermill to be pounded into particles ready for pressing.

I don't have a great pic of the furnace, but you can see part of the base (and the refractory cement-filled maintenance door) on the lower left of the first pic. The cyclone arrangement described above is shown in the second photograph.