From the Missoulian
Substantial savings on fuel is just one of the benefits demonstrated by the Darby schools' new heating system.
The high cost of energy today is spurring interest in alternative fuels. As we wrote Jan. 10, ethanol distilled from grain has become the favorite (but uneconomic) fuel among some legislators. Wind energy is generating excitement as well. But anyone who's interested in a cheaper, Montana-made alternative to expensive, dirty fossil fuel scarcely need look beyond our own back doors.
A great source of energy actually grows on trees. Wood from western Montana forests is a ready, relatively inexpensive but underused source of heating fuel for schools and other larger buildings. Most people think of wood heat in terms of wood stoves and fireplaces fueled with cordwood. A lot of rural Montanans heat their homes that way. But modern technology makes it possible to heat larger structures using wood-fired boilers. The savings can be substantial.
Just ask the Darby School District.
It used to take three oil-fired boilers to heat Darby schools' 118,000 square feet of classrooms, offices, gym and other spaces. In the 2002-03 school year, the district bought 52,587 gallons of No. 2 fuel oil to fire those boilers. It also bought a large amount of propane for its domestic hot water needs.
This year, the district bought just 8,000 gallons of fuel oil. That's because this fall it switched to a biomass heating system, which is a fancy way of saying wood-fired boiler. In addition to heating the buildings, the new system heats nearly all the hot water the district needs. District officials expect to burn 600 to 700 tons of wood chips and similar forest "waste" this year at a cost of $20,000 to $22,000.
Total estimated savings this year: about $57,000. That's nearly 20 percent of the district's entire maintenance budget. It's a lot of money for a small district whose total general fund budget is $2.74 million. Money that once was quite literally going up in smoke now goes for education.
That's just the beginning of the benefits, though.
That fuel for the schools also is fuel for forest fires. Many forests in western Montana and throughout the West are overgrown with trees - unnaturally so in many areas, thanks to nearly a century of aggressive fire suppression in areas where periodic fires are a natural phenomenon. The growing consensus is that our forests need thinning in some areas, especially near communities. Thinning makes sense both to reduce fire danger and also to restore forests to more natural conditions. But a lot of what needs thinning is too small to use for conventional wood products. How are we going to pay for all that thinning, and where are we going to put all the wood that needs to be removed?
It's possible that people elsewhere once wondered what they were going to do with the black goo that came bubbling up when they were drilling for water. At least one of the things forest thinnings can be used for is fuel.
While we're saving money on institutional heating costs by burning wood, we'll also be paying local loggers and truckers money that now goes to Saudi princes. And buying this wood for fuel - even at a substantial savings over oil - could help subsidize the cost of sound forest stewardship.
All that should be enough to excite a lot more interest in large-scale biomass heating systems. But, actually, there are additional benefits. State-of-the-art wood-fired systems produce less pollution and contribute less to global climate change than many oil-, coal- and gas-fired systems. And using wood for heating fuel, rather than burning it as slash or leaving it standing for the next forest fire, also is better for air quality and the environment.
The Darby schools' new heating system is a demonstration project financed largely by the U.S. Forest Service and Bitter Root Resource Conservation and Development. It's a fully automated "Cadillac" version intended to show off the promise of biomass in the schools. The economics of converting to biomass are something that other schools and institutions have to pencil out site by site. But the kind of fuel savings they're seeing in Darby certainly are fuel for thought in this era of $48-a-barrel oil.
