Progress Report—Aspen Power, Nacogdoches Power, Range Fuels

From the August 2010 Forest2Fuel newsletter.

• Aspen Power is making significant progress in the construction of a 50 MW biomass power plant in Lufkin, Texas. The air permitting process, which ended last fall when the company agreed to put additional controls on its boilers to further lower emissions, delayed the project in 2009. The plant will begin test firing in August 2010 and expects to begin commercial operations by November. The company will hire 200 permanent employees this fall. Feedstock for the plant will be supplied by local loggers, who will deliver 525,000 tons of forest biomass to the plant annually. The Texas Department of Agriculture recently gave the city of Lufkin a $750,000 grant to provide road, parking, engineering and administrative services for the biomass power plant. The company in currently negotiating a long-term power puchase agreement (PPA). Despite the lack of a PPA, Akeida Capital Management recently loaned Aspen Power $14.1 million, on the strength of its institutional backing from private equity firm Energy Spectrum Capital and the new grant.
• Southern Company in Sacul, Texas, is also well underway with its 100 MW plant. Purchased from American Renewables in the fall of 2009, the Nacogdoches plant will start test runs in 1Q2012 and reach full production in June. Austin Energy has signed a 20-year power purchase agreement with the facility. The company will use 1 million tons of chipped woody biomass annually; because the plant will not have chipping capability, no whole logs will be accepted at the plant. Fuel Procurement Manager for Southern Power, Stephen McInnis, said that 60 percent of the material will come from logging residues and pre-commercial thinnings from within a 75-mile radius of the plant. The rest of the material will come from municipal waste and wood manufacturing residues. Jobs created will include 300 construction jobs, 40 full-time employees to oversee daily operations and 100 logging and trucking jobs.
• At the Southeast Biomass Conference held in Tifton, Ga., Kevin Biehle, Vice President for Production at Range Fuels, announced that the company would be at 50 percent capacity sometime in the next few months; if that happens, they’ll be producing 500,000 gallons of methanol from clean whole tree chips. They expect to be at 100 percent capacity, 1 million gallons of methanol, by the end of 2010. No announcement has been about when the company will produce cellulosic ethanol. In March, the company announced that it had received a loan note guarantee from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and closed its related $80 million bond issuance.  

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