British thermal units, while releasing the least amount of carbon dioxide.
Randy Hill, president of APT Advanced Trailer and Equipment LP and the University of Idaho are betting they can solve this issue by using Advanced Trailer’s agricultural drying trailers. Although prior testing has proven Hill’s trailers can do the job, he wants to be able to show biomass processors the benefits of using his trailers. To do this, he is providing a grant and the use of a trailer to the university so it can be tested in a real-world situation.
After talking with the people at UI, Hill saw their interest as a perfect opportunity to develop the specifications he needed to get into the biomass industry. “We know it works, we know it removes moisture from product,” Hill says. “The question has been, is it feasible cost-wise for energy production to remove that moisture? We started these discussions last summer with the University of Idaho and initially the university was interested in just purchasing the equipment and putting it into use. But I saw that there would be value in using the equipment and having some research from professors who say here’s how you do it, here’s how long you do it and here’s what the benefits are.”
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UI took him up on his offer and has already developed plans to use the trailers. “The short-term goal is to look at how the technology of the trailer works,” said Darin Saul, sustainability coordinator for UI. “The long-term goal is to integrate the trailer into a larger system that uses the waste heat from the steam plant to pre-dry the chips before they are burned.” Initial testing will use natural gas to dry the chips, but the university believes that greater benefits will be realized when they are able to use their own waste heat. “My involvement in this is looking at how more affectively we can use biomass so we can further reduce our natural gas use on campus,” Saul says. “We do that by better utilizing our biomass boiler.”
Mike Lyngholm, steam plant manager at UI, says they are still trying to get the process established by working with the utility company and the natural gas supplier, but he hoped to be using the trailers by the first week in May. The university has a wood-fired boiler that they use to heat 80 percent of the buildings on campus, he says. The problem is that Lyngholm has to have a huge stockpile of chips to keep up with the demand for heat in the dead of winter. The outside of that pile gets wet and freezes. “Right now I have a big wind-row of wet half-frozen fuel from the pile that we threw off to one side as we dug in,” he says. “I’ve looked at dryers to install at the plant to dry everything but the energy needed to dry all the fuel would be rather expensive and the equipment is quite expensive.” Lyngholm thinks he may be able to solve his dilemma by using one or two of the Advanced Trailers agricultural drying trailers to haul and dry the wood chips in the winter and then park the trailers in the summer when they aren’t needed. Ultimately, Lyngholm wants to improve the efficiency of the boiler. “I’ve got some of the researchers here from the College of Natural Resources who are going to help me out and through the next 12 months run some test loads, put some probes in the loads and tweak the trailers for dying wood,” he said. Those tests will determine how long the wood chips need to dry, what kind of temperatures are needed and if the process is efficient.
From Peanuts to Wood Chips
The idea to use his trailers to transport biomass wasn’t just a shot in the dark. Hill has been in the trailer business since the mid-90s, first working for GE’s Dallas Trailer Fleet Services (formerly Transport International Pool) and then forming Advanced Trailer, a semi-trailer storage rental and sales business. When he was working for GE, people would call asking for storage trailers, “but GE wasn’t in that business and wasn’t interested in that market,” Hill says.
Storage trailers are outdated and retired 18-wheelers, which Hill buys and hauls to Texas where they are cleaned, painted and decaled. “I was the first guy in Dallas who really aggressively approached that market,” he says. “I saw opportunity not only to build my own rental fleet but to sell to other companies in the rental business.”
Shortly after he started his business, there was a change in the west Texas landscape that had a profound affect on his company. Peanut growers from central Texas started to see the area as a perfect place to grow their crop in a rotation with cotton. “The climate and the soil were perfect for growing peanuts and there was a good supply of water,” Hill says. “West Texas became a new frontier for the peanut industry.” There was only one hitch. The fields in central Texas were 65 to 300 acres, and in west Texas they were 1,000 to 2,000 acres. “The problem was that when they harvested those big fields they didn’t have a piece of equipment that could handle it,” Hill said.
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