Trade Northern Ontario

Fort Frances Biomass boiler should be burning wood soon

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Fort Frances Biomass boiler should be burning wood soon
Thursday Jan 08, 2009
By  Fort Frances Times
While it has been tested and running on natural gas for the last few weeks, the new biomass boiler at the AbitibiBowater mill here hopefully will be burning wood and operating full steam ahead by the end of the month.

Mill manager John Harrison said yesterday from Montreal that the boiler has been running on natural gas since the Christmas break, producing steam to heat the place and run the steam turbine to create power.

 But it’s not yet quite ready to be burning slash, wood chips, and other biomass.
“We’ve got a full construction crew back finishing up the last of the electrical work that’s outstanding to get the biomass feed system up and running,” Harrison noted. “So we’ve got probably this week and two more weeks worth of work to do the electrical, and then we’ll be starting the fire on biomass.
“There will still be some ongoing work after that, but we’ll have the boiler basically online, doing what it’s supposed to do,” he added. “And there will be some clean-up work we’ll be doing for, oh, another month after that.

“But functionally, the boiler will be completely up by then.”
Harrison said the boiler first was fired up to run on natural gas on Dec. 19, then ran for a couple of days until there was a gas leak.

It was shut down for a short time until the leak was fixed, then fired up again just before Christmas.
Effluent leak

In other news, mill operations were shut down on the weekend after an effluent leak was reported on CN property on the 100 block of Fourth Street West.

Harrison said an off-duty mill employee spotted a small volume of water spilling onto the road near the old CN station on Friday.

“He was familiar with the leak that we’d had there in the past, and he could tell it was effluent by the smell, so he phoned the mill and got people mobilized,” Harrison explained.
“We had the effluent system shut down, got the sucker truck over there to suck up what was coming out of the ground—it was a very small flow,” he noted. “We sent the loader over and scooped up what had gone on the road, because it basically froze when it got to the road, and put it back in our system.

“It cost us about two days because we had to get some people in [to] put a camera up through the line, find where the leak was, and then bring in a guy that could band the leak internally,” he added. “We finally got up and running about supper time on Sunday.

“We were about two days behind where we wanted to be on start-up.”
Harrison said because it was the main line that runs effluent from the mill to the lagoon treatment system, mill operations were down for those two days.
“But it’s fixed now,” he stressed. “We had a good reaction from people, and considering we were bringing resources in from Winnipeg and Oshawa in the middle of a snowstorm, it all went off remarkably well.”

The cause of the effluent leak remains under investigation.

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