Case Study: Wood Pellet Plant Helps Biomass Boiler Business Booming in UK

UK: the world largest wood pellets consumer

This wood pellet plant is located in British, one of the largest wood pellets importer in the world. The wood pellet market of UK has been developed in a very short period, started in around the late 1990’s. Now, the UK government is putting efforts on the development of renewable energy. While the biomass energy is expected to contribute up to 6 GW by 2020. To realize the goal, the UK government draws up laws and provides incentives and subsidy to encourage the development of renewable energy, which booms the development of wood pellet market in UK.

About the client

My client is called Mi Generation Living Energy, who is a supplier of biomass boiler equipment and also a provider of heating solution. They sign with their client a contact covering not only the equipments, but also wood pellets fuel. By this kind of service, they help their client reduce energy bill significantly. Instead of outsourcing wood pellets from other companies (which is very expensive at approximately £300 per ton), last year Mi Generation decided to make pellets fuel by building their own factory. Fortunately, they are able to get easy access to abundant of wooden material from local timber processing factory and gardening factory as well.

The Benefits

By building their own wood pellet plant, my client reduce their business cost and further reduce the cost at their clients’ end. Together with the biomass boiler, Mi Generation helps their clients save significant. In most cases, a return on investment of between 30%-70% is seen. Until now, they have successfully provided solutions for hotel, golf club, park, resort and corporate.

About the wood pellet plant

In this project, my client bought 2 sets of GEMCO Model 508 ring die pellet mills. Together with other necessary equipments, like hammer mill, dryer, cooling system and packing machine, engineers from GEMCO helps the client build a complete wood pellet plant with capacity of 3t/h. Check the operation video below:
 

Conclusion:

When it comes to clean energy and green business, wood pellets fuel is one of the inevitable choices for you. In other post that I write: pellet mill report, the current wood pellets market was set forth:

“The increasing demand for wood pellets in the international market booms the pellet mill markets. The EU 2020 policy which targets for renewable energy source and greenhouse gas emissions reduction drives the wood pellet market to grow dramatically. It requires that in 2020, 20% of total energy consumption shall comes from renewable energy. Looking back at the recent years, only 10 million tones pellets are produced by about 650 pellet plants in Europe in 2009. But now the current global market volume of demand for biomass pellets is about 16 million tonnes annually and is going to triple to 46 million tons annually by 2020, which means a total market value of $8 billion (€5.75 billion). Most of the near-term growth is predicted in wood fuel pellet markets worldwide.”

Wood pellet plant process procedures explanation

This wood pellet plant in UK is consisted of crusher, separator, storage bin, conveyors, wood pellet mill, screener and others to realize the goal of size reduction, drying, pelletizing, cooling and packaging.

Crushing: To crusher the materials is important for the large size materials may damage the pellet mill, reduce the serving life of the equipment and lower the pellet quality. If the materials are too larger, the die of the wood pellet mill have to work as a crusher and molding tool as same time which will waste much energy and lower the capacity and reduce die life of the wood pellet mills.
 

Drying: Dryer is always necessary for high moisture content materials. The desired moisture content is around 8- 10 percentage. When it is higher than the desired one, the dryer will be needed or the pellet quality will be badly influenced.

Pelletizing: Wood pellet mill is one of the most important equipment in the pellet plant. For large scale of pellet plant, the ring die wood pellet mills are recommended.
 

Cooling: When the pellets are extruded out of the wood pellet mills, the hot pellets are soft which needs to be cooled down and then they will become hard and solid.

Screening: Screening of the pellet is to separate the pellets from the dusts which will be recycled to lower the production cost and lower the bag or bulk fine percentage.

Packaging: The packaging of the wood pellets can be customized according to requirement. Pellets can be packed in small bags or be delivered in bulk. Well, it would be better to be packaged in bags for the bags can protect the pellets from the air moisture and help the pellet resist the pressure caused during the transportation. And the automatic packaging are recommend to save the labor cost and improve the working efficiency.