Glacier High biomass boiler due for a makeover

$155,000 retrofit aimed to eliminate problems with fuel

Kalispell Public Schools hopes to fire up the biomass boiler at Glacier High School in about a month.

This year, the district hopes to avoid the smoke and steam that billowed from the school more than once in the boiler's first year of operation. Officials also hope they will be able to use the boiler more often than last year; various malfunctions led to the boiler sitting idle for about two months during the 2007-08 heating season.

In an attempt to thwart those problems this year, the district has hired Michigan-based Messersmith Manufacturing to install a cyclone separator, which will remove particulates from the air inside the boiler and, officials hope, eliminate the smoke that last year prompted several calls to the fire department.

Messersmith also will retrofit the boiler to burn hog fuel - shredded and ground bark and wood fibers.

The boiler work, which is slated for completion by Oct. 15, should cost less than $155,000, district Director of Transportation and Facilities Chuck Cassidy said.

The expense will be shared by the school district and a handful of partners, including CTA Architects and Swank Enterprises, the companies that designed and built Glacier High School. The district doesn't yet know what percentage those companies will pay, Superintendent Darlene Schottle said; they will hammer out the details once Messersmith finishes the upgrade.

A $33,750 grant from the Department of Natural Resources and Conservation's Fuels for Schools program will cover part of the retrofit, District Clerk Todd Watkins said.

The retrofit expense isn't one the district expected to pay when it approved a biomass boiler for the new high school.

Kalispell Public Schools thought it was getting a system that could burn a variety of fuels, including wood chips and hog fuel. Those are the products Fuels for Schools typically uses, Cassidy said; the program seeks to use biomass that has little other marketable use for fuel.

Pellets, another form of biomass, have a high market demand, high cost and locally aren't made from low-end products like hog fuel, Cassidy explained. Early numbers indicated pellets could cost about $90 a ton.

The district was interested in using hog fuel, which is produced by local vendors, he said. Kalispell Public Schools can buy hog fuel for the biomass boiler for about $30 a ton.

However, Glacier High's boiler was designed to burn chips or pellets. When the school fed it hog fuel instead, the augurs and conveying system sometimes malfunctioned.

"It really gets to be not so much a burning issue as a conveying issue," Cassidy said. "Some fuels flow better."

This spring, the district learned about an Idaho company that makes pellets from low-end forest waste, Cassidy said. Kalispell Public Schools may in the future look into purchasing a different type of biomass.

The numbers still indicate, however, that hog fuel will be the cheapest product to feed the boiler. Hog fuel is expected to cost about $35 a ton, chipped fuel between $100 and $150 a ton, and pellets around $135 a ton, Cassidy said.

For now, local vendor T.B. Gray will continue to supply Glacier High's hog fuel. He is in the second year of a two-year contract with the district.

Working with local vendors was part of the district's motivation for installing a biomass boiler in the first place, Cassidy said.

"The local guys can grind it but not pelletize it," he said. "We're trying to support local industries in what they can produce. If they've only got grinders or chippers, we're going to try to see if we can find a boiler to burn those.

"We want to be the ones making the choice," he added. "We want a system that can burn three or four things. We thought that's what we were getting."

Instead, Hayden, Idaho-based Precision Energy Systems installed a system designed to run on chips and pellets.

"They believed they were designing it more for a chipped product," Schottle said. "What was sent to us and installed was not a product that could successfully burn hog fuel, and that was what we were putting into the biomass boiler."

Precision Energy told the district it could make hog fuel work in the boiler, Cassidy said.

"There was concern by the manufacturer that we were burning the wrong fuel," he said. "The manufacturer said, 'I can make that work, but it's still the wrong fuel.'"

Last spring, Precision Energy discovered it couldn't make hog fuel work in the Glacier boiler, Cassidy said. Furthermore, because the district had been burning a fuel the system wasn't designed for, the company said the boiler's warranty was void.

There has been some disagreement from the district about that, Cassidy said. Schottle said she was hesitant to comment on issue because the district is still trying to work with the Idaho firm.

"No one has said, 'We won't work with you,'" she said. "We're trying to find out why the damage occurred and where the communication breakdown happened."

"Everybody, all the partners, have a really high interest in making this a successful endeavor," she added.

The district expected some kinks in using "creative technologies" that aren't mainstream, Cassidy said. The district was willing to be a guinea pig to help develop the boiler's technology.

"We were willing to be part of the process," Cassidy said. "But it looks like the product we got wasn't as flexible" as the district had hoped.

The district did look into buying the higher-priced fuel before approving the retrofit, Schottle said.

However, there was some concern that the boiler had been damaged because it had been burning fuel it wasn't designed for. Even if the district had bought chips or pellets, some work likely would have been necessary to repair that damage, Schottle said.

The adjustments Messersmith makes this month should give the system the versatility it needs to handle a variety of fuels, Cassidy said.

When the augurs and belts are adjusted to take hog fuel, the boiler should run much more smoothly than last year. The system was down for 60 heating days during the 2007-08 prime heating system, Cassidy said.

Because of that, the district only used about 25 percent of the biomass it expected to, he said. Glacier High School planned to burn about $67,500 worth of hog fuel.

Instead, the school was forced to rely on its four natural gas heaters, which were intended as backup for the biomass boiler and for use during the spring and fall, Cassidy said.

Glacier burned more than twice the gas it expected to last year, he said. The original estimate was about $18,500; the actual amount spent on Glacier's natural gas was about $43,000.

Even though the school wasn't able to use the biomass boiler as often as planned, it still saved about $26,000 on fuel costs. Furthermore, according to a cost analysis provided by CTA Architects, it cost about 36 cents per square foot to heat Glacier in 2007-08, compared to about 72 cents per square foot to heat Flathead High School.

This year, if Glacier runs its biomass boiler at least as long as it did last year, the district could save about $45,000, Cassidy said. This assumes the cost of natural gas is about $14 per dekatherm.

If the boiler runs for most of the season, as the district hopes, then the savings could reach nearly $100,000, Cassidy added.

"That's part of the reason we're obviously anxious to move forward" with the retrofit, Schottle said. "It's absolutely the right thing to move forward with."

Reporter Kristi Albertson may be reached at 758-4438 or by e-mail at kalbertson@dailyinterlake.com.