That has been the situation in the fuel pellet industry, says Chris Wiberg, chief operating officer of Twin Ports Testing Inc. There has been a dearth of information generally comparing fuel pellets made from different feedstocks. Additionally, a significant number of pellet manufacturers have never had their products analyzed or have only had single samples of their products analyzed. Other energy sources such as coal, natural gas or fuel oil are standardized products that are consistent among many suppliers. With biomass fuel pellets, the properties of the fuel can vary not only with the type of feedstock but the time of year the feedstock was harvested.
Small Beginnings
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The pellet fuel industry started in the early 1980s in response to the energy price shocks of the 1970s. The U.S. market has largely been limited to residential heating and fireplaces. The equipment for this market didn’t require strict quality specifications. The Pellet Fuels Institute, the trade association that represents pellet manufacturers, industry suppliers, appliance manufacturers and retailers, released a set of standards for the industry in 1995. “They were pretty loose,” Wiberg says.
The standards created two classes of pellets—premium and standard. The standards specified ash content, fines and diameter, and had a recommendation for sodium content. The weak points of the standards were a lack of any sort of schedule of testing and acceptable test methods. “It became kind of an optional sort of thing—if you want to use them go ahead,” Wiberg says. “The Pellet Fuels Institute put them out there as standards but there was no enforcement.”
What happened is that some manufacturers wound up testing their products only once, and assumed their products would continue to match that initial analysis. “So you had people who tested their product one time and it looked like premium [grade] so they sold their pellets as premium from thereon out,” Wiberg says.
After a discussion about standards at a Pellet Fuels Institute meeting, Wiberg was approached by a manufacturer who said he would have to start testing his product. “I asked if he had ever tested his product and he hadn’t,” he continues. “The strange thing about it was that he didn’t even know he had to. When he went out for his initial order of bags, the bag supplier printed a guaranteed analysis on the bag, even though there was never an analysis of the material. So it is definitely an industry where some people think a pellet is a pellet is a pellet.”
Selling a product as premium grade without an analysis to back it up can open up manufacturers to liability problems. “It’s truth in advertising if nothing else,” Wiberg says.
A New Standard
Other problems with regulations led the Pellet Fuels Institute to look into revamping its pellet standards. Wiberg says a stove manufacturer was spending more than a quarter of a million dollars per year on repairs under warranty because the fuel used in those stoves was supposedly meeting quality specifications. “Somebody would say come out and repair my defective stove and when they got there they realized it was a fuel problem,” Wiberg says. “It said premium on the bag but it wasn’t.”
In 2005, the institute invited Twin Ports Testing to give a presentation on testing methods. They presented a problem to Wiberg because the Pellet Fuels Institute standards didn’t require specific testing methods. “I could tell them how I tested their materials, but not because that’s what I was told to do,” he adds. “Somebody would say ‘I need moisture number and ash and Btus. Here are my pellets.’ If I asked what method they needed to test to, they would have no clue.”
While at the institute meeting, Wiberg was invited to sit in on a meeting of the group’s standards committee where he heard about the stove manufacturers problems. “I listened to that and I knew what the industry needed to hear,” he says. “They needed to understand quality control and quality assurance. I threw out my presentation and told the group they needed to understand quality from the laboratory’s point of view.”
Wiberg uses the coal industry as an example of the kind of standards the pellet industry needs. “You can’t touch coal without using an ASTM procedure,” he says. “This industry didn’t have that.” He also stresses the need for proficiency testing and the need to use traceable standards. He adds that the pellet industry doesn’t need specifications as comprehensive as the coal industry, but it does require a true quality control program.
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