AL - Company to start producing wood pellets

The plant will have about 25 employees and the total venture costs Lee about $7.5 million

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Company to start producing wood pellets

By Jonathan Stinson
The Reporter

Published October 10, 2009

CROSSVILLE The concrete was still being poured and the roof was not quite finished Tuesday at the new Lee Energy Solutions wood pellet plant on Alabama 68 in Crossville, but by the end of the month it will start producing between 65 to 70 tons of wood pellets an hour, according to Davis Lee, the owner of the company.

The plant is part of Lee Energy Solutions who also manufactures furnaces used to heat poultry houses and Lee needed a plant to produce the fuel for those furnaces.

Really what were doing, were making wood pellets, but its replacing oil, Lee said. So, its just like having an oil well here in Crossville, Alabama.

The plant will have about 25 employees and the total venture costs Lee about $7.5 million.

According to Lee the plant was designed with the environment in mind and has a neutral carbon footprint because of the process used when producing the pellets and the way the plant will collect the raw materials used to make the product.

The wood that will be turned into pellets comes from slash, which is the parts of trees that cannot be used for lumber like the treetops, and smaller limbs which are turned into wood chips and delivered to the plant.

The plant then takes those chips and runs them through a furnace to dry them out.

Wood is 40 to 45 percent moisture, Lee said. The reason you make pellets rather than burning chips is because of what I just said, you cant burn water.

After the chips are dried out the wood is then compressed into a pellet and the dust particles that are created during the process will go back into the mill and used to fuel the furnace.

We use very little natural gas, Lee said. This is an all green plant,

Lee is also working with state legislators to help farmers get grants to purchase the furnaces because he says the furnaces are cleaner than using natural gas to heat the poultry houses.

Each poultry house uses the equivalent of 100 plus barrels of oil a year its a lot of money we wont have to send to foreign oil producers. Lee said.

Lee said there were about 125,000 poultry houses in the U.S. and after running some numbers he said it would be just short of $1 billion in oil the U.S. would not have to buy if each of the poultry houses would use the wood pellets for heat.

He said it would also have an impact on the air quality too.

Each poultry house by using propane or petroleum based heat emits 2025 tons of carbon a year into the atmosphere. With the wood pellet burning furnace there is zero emission, Lee said.

For more information people can visit www.leeenergysolutions.com

Additional Information

Web Site: http://www.sandmountainreporter.com

Category: Forestry>Wood Pellets

Region: Alabama

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