Fort Worth Star-Telegram
FORT WORTH -- Randy Hill lives amid the fossil fuels of America, a place where natural gas and crude oil made millionaires and the landscape is dotted with pump jacks.
But Hill, who lives outside Abilene in West Texas, is spending much of his time nowadays talking about an unusual power source: wood chips.
The owner of a firm that manufactures trailers that dry agricultural products, Hill has turned his moneymaking attention from peanuts to timber waste, believing that the same process that revolutionized the peanut industry could do the same for biomass within the alternative energy industry.
Burning biomass for electricity generation, even in places as treeless as West Texas, is possible to Hill, who can't help but notice millions of acres of Texas ranchland covered with mesquite.
A native of Garland and a graduate of Abilene Christian University, Hill, 42, is a natural entrepreneur, a fast talker who can make even the agriculture industry and drying trailers sound like the most fascinating topic in the world.
In the last year, he has traversed the country meeting with university professors, power plant managers and industry experts in an effort to understand the biomass industry, find out its weaknesses and pitch his solutions to reduce waste and increase efficiency.
At least 110 power plants in the U.S. burn biomass, a tiny fraction of the electricity generation compared with coal, natural gas or nuclear. Texas has only a handful of biomass plants -- the closest is a 3-megawatt plant in Marshall. They are far more common in logging-heavy areas of the Pacific Northwest, Upper Midwest and New England.
Hill's home area of West Texas is growing as a source of wind power, but there's room for other sources, he said. "Wind is only going to be an auxiliary source of power," he said. "It will never be a primary energy source. We will always need other sources of power."
The U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy spends millions of dollars a year researching and funding projects on using biomass for alternative fuels, such as ethanol and biodiesel. But using biomass to generate electricity has only recently attracted much attention.
Beginning in the mid-1990s, Hill's company -- APT Advanced Trailer & Equipment -- started selling specially made trailers to the peanut industry in West Texas so farmers could dry their product faster.
About two years ago, as demand for the trailers began to lessen, Hill started investigating other possibilities for his drying trailers. Biomass is where his attention landed.
"I knew it would work," Hill said. "I just didn't know how long it would take and at what temperature to achieve the maximum efficiency."
Using biomass is not always the most efficient process, although most experts say it is far more environmentally friendly and cheaper than coal or natural gas.
Tons and tons of wood scrap are needed on hand for a boiler or power plant. The transportation to move it from place to place is more expensive than the loads of scrap the trucks are carrying. In the winter, the wood is stacked in the cold and wet of Idaho or New Hampshire until it is needed, which means it absorbs a great deal of moisture. Wood with a high moisture content burns inefficiently, meaning more is needed and more carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere. That's where Hill believes his trailers work.
Texas Tech University professor Michael Farmer, an expert in environmental and land management, said using the trailers to dry a product while simultaneously delivering it to a power plant where it's ready for immediate consumption would be a significant development in making renewable energy able to meet peak electricity demand.
Developing more biomass power plants would not eliminate the need for coal-fire plants, but it might mean that "lots of little sources" using biomass might mean the coal plants wouldn't necessarily need to expand, he said.
"The long-term environmental impact of that alone is quite substantial," he said.
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