Biomass CHP technical and economic assessment applied to a sawmill plant

Abstract

Due to the risk of spreading the nematode infection to other regions or countries the Portuguese pine wood producers must perform a heat treatment to their products before exporting. This heat treatment increases the production costs and reduces the competitiveness of the industry. One possible solution to increase the income of the pine wood producers is the installation of CHP units in sawmills, fuelled by biomass (wood shavings), generating the heat needed for the treatment and simultaneously generating electricity to be sold to the grid. In the present paper it is developed and implemented a methodology to perform a technical and economic assessment of CHP units installation in sawmills. The methodology is applied to a case study and, due to the need of using biomass as fuel, only the steam turbine and organic Rankine cycle (ORC) technologies are assumed as suitable for the application. The results of the economic assessment show that none of the considered technologies are economically viable. However, the results also demonstrated that clustering a set of pine wood producers from a same region could make the investment profitable for all the members of this cluster.