Turning Scraps Into Energy

Until last October, there wasn’t much Sterling Tipton could do with the piles of scrap wood that didn’t make it into the finished chairs, tables and cabinets that left his factory floor.

Now, Tipton, manager of Zuni Furniture Enterprise, uses the scraps to help power half his operation from a white corrugated metal building that looks out onto the sandstone mesas surrounding the rural pueblo.

He’s doing it with the BioMax 15, an experimental “bio-powered” contraption that can transform a variety of dry organic matter, from wood chips to coconut shells, into useful heat and electricity.

Tipton’s company is one of eight sites around the United States helping the system’s creators work out the bugs before it hits the market.

Community Power Corp., the Colorado-based company that designed the BioMax to offer small businesses, schools and homeowners a cheaper and environmentally friendlier source of energy, has partnered with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Products Laboratory and the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory to market the system.

Above the din of the BioMax 15 bouncing off the insides of a garage-sized shed housing the unit, Tipton recently talked Zuni Pueblo Gov. Arlen Quetawki and other curious guests through the system’s basic operation. Community Power President Robb Walt stood by to fill in the details and answer questions.

“I’m a pretty common-sense country boy, so if I can operate it just about anybody can,” said Tipton, who consulted for oil companies around the world before returning to his native Zuni two years ago.

The BioMax 15 has three main units: one to receive the organic material, another to turn that material into gas, and the last to turn the gas into useful energy. Wood chips are fed into a trough that funnels the chips onto a conveyor belt. The belt carries the chips over the second unit, where they are dropped into a gasifier that heats them to 800 degrees Celsius.

The hydrogen- and carbon monoxide-rich gas released from the wood is then fed to the third unit, a standard internal combustion engine that converts it to mechanical, electrical and thermal power.

Walt said the system captured 80% of the energy stored in the wood, two-thirds of that as heat, the rest as electricity.

“The real opportunity is to be able to use both the heat and the electricity,” he said.

But just how much power does it produce?

According to Walt, a BioMax 5, a smaller version of the BioMax 15 intended for residential use, can convert 3 pounds of wood into one kilowatt-hour of electricity. At that rate, he estimates, an average house could make it through the day on 30 pounds of wood. And as a fully automated, self-regulating system with an emergency shut-off function, he said, it would take up little time.

Byproducts include char, ash and other gases, though Walt said the system met all current emission standards.

In Zuni, the BioMax 15 hasn’t taken the furniture company off the grid entirely, Tipton said, but it is providing half his operation’s electricity and 75% of the heating.

Come winter, Zuni Furniture Enterprise gets hit with a 40% cut in productivity in part because of the longer time adhesives need to do their job in lower temperatures. Tipton is hoping the money the BioMax 15 saves him will let him up his output in the winter especially, when he’s building up his inventory for the coming months.

“It’s a perfect site,” Walt said of the furniture company, “because it involves an enterprise that makes things from wood, so it’s very appropriate that wood can provide the heat and electricity.”

But the company’s own scrap wood accounts for no more than 20% of the Zuni BioMax’s fuel, Tipton said. The bulk of the wood fuel comes from local forest thinnings.

The Forest Service’s Jean Livingston said it spent as much as $1,000 per acre to thin the 70 million acres of federal forest across the United States, “so anything we can do to use the thinning materials can help us recoup the costs.”

“The Forest Service is coming up with different uses for forest thinning materials, and burning is one of the uses,” Livingston said.

With BioMax systems of its own, she said, the Forest Service could help power its own operations or sell the electricity to power companies.

In return for the free BioMax from the Department of Energy and a grant to cover the man-hours spent operating the system, Tipton will be feeding it different types and amounts of wood and reporting back the results.

Quetawki is excited about helping lead the way for other rural communities.

“If we succeed in this, just imagine what can be done elsewhere,” he said.