Global food producer Danone is planning to cut carbon dioxide emissions at one of its plants in New Zealand by 20,000 tonnes per year, with the installation of a new biomass boiler.
The €17.5m boiler, which is to be installed at the company’s Nutricia spray drying plant in Balclutha, on the country’s South Island, is the first stage of Danone’s plans to make the facility entirely carbon neutral by 2021.
The Balclutha plant processes raw milk sourced from 18 local farms into a powder that is used as the base for the production of its Infant Milk Formula (IMF) brands, including Aptamil and Karicare.
Finance agreement triggers world’s largest biomass power project
Spray drying plants convert milk into a dry powder using heat from a boiler. As a result, around 85 per cent of the plant’s energy consumption comes from steam production.
The new biomass facility will replace the gas or coal typically used as an energy source in boilers with sustainable, locally-sourced wood fuels, according to Cyril Marniquet, Danone’s New Zealand operations director.
‘Biomass’ is energy from plants or plant by-products, in which solar energy is captured and stored via the process of photosynthesis. When biomass is burned, it releases CO2 and other by-products, but this is largely offset by the CO2 which is absorbed in the growth of the plant.
“Danone’s biomass boiler at the Balclutha facility will be fuelled by by-products or residue of forestry activity that may ordinarily go to waste,” said Marniquet. “These lumber production by-products, while traditionally disposed of or burned, are valuable sources of heat, steam, and electricity when used in a biomass boiler system.”
With four commercial forests within a 50km radius of the Balclutha plant, the facility will have a reliable source of biofuel, in addition to providing an economic benefit to the local forestry industry, Marniquet said.
“Danone will source fuel from local partners who participate in New Zealand’s Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certification scheme, to ensure fuel is being sourced from sustainably managed forests,” he said. “Danone also plans to broaden its source of fuel to include urban wood waste.”
The boiler is due to be installed by the end of 2020 and will be commissioned in 2021. Resource management company Veolia will design and manage the construction of the biomass boiler.
Overall Danone will be investing approximately €25m in the Balclutha facility, which also includes the installation of a new water treatment plant to more efficiently treat water waste.
Danone also plans to switch to renewable sources of electricity at the plant by 2020, which it claims will cut the facility’s CO2 emissions by 96 per cent.
The remaining four per cent of CO2 emissions will be generated by the plant’s gas consumption at times when the biomass boiler is undergoing maintenance. The company is also working towards finding a renewable source of energy to cover these maintenance periods, which it hopes to complete by 2021.
The Balclutha facility will then be the first carbon neutral plant to serve New Zealand’s dairy industry, the company said.
The development is part of Danone’s “One Planet. One Health” vision, in which it aims to become completely carbon neutral by 2050.
Valuable proposals: but I recall that in the early 60s there were similarly ‘fired’ boilers [the name of the material was bagass, ] used to ‘power’ the sugar-processing factories (steam and electricity) on the many estates which grew sugar cane in B Guiana, SA. The bagass was the residue (biomass) after the sugar content had been extracted by crushing. If I recall its calorific value was equivalent to that of wood.
Whilst cannot argue with the underlying intention re Co2, I see the statement as concealing rather than revealing. The carbon cost in the manufacture and installation of the boiler has been ignored, perhaps? Despite this I can but applaud the direction in which they are going. Who is it who will be checking the actuals against the target statement? Surely timber is but another fossil fuel. The money spent might have been better applied to reuseables such as wind, solar and battery tech.
If the local environment can support growing crops for ‘biomass’ instead of human consumption that’s fine but converting crop fields where land mass is lmited, the UK being and example, this will limit the opportunity to use the technology at the expense of food crops.
A factor not mentioned is how much CO2 is generated from transporting the biomass to/from the factory from the 4 forests within 50km. Is it more or less than burning on-site and is the CO2 generated from transport taken into account in the carbon-neutral calculation?
As an engineer I find these “innovative ideas” a little short sighted. I live near such a plant here in the UK, in the southeast and the deforestation of the local woodland is alarming. The number of articulated lorries used to bring the wood into plant, creating the large stockpiles needed is also quite staggering. I’m not sure when biomass became a carbon neutral fuel source, as I for one, along with my colleagues in our building consultancy practice, see these plants as far from carbon neutral. Perhaps investment in alternative technologies that do not consume our carbon sinks at such a rate would be a better idea, maybe they are just too expensive or difficult to design for these process plants…or just not as convenient?
A seriously worried engineer
I seem to remember finding a UK government report that noted how the net contributions of biofuel pellets was half that of natural gas – and the main issues were the transportation and drying contributions).
This possibly underplays – as I suspect that harvesting reduces the efficiency of the carbon sink (and possible soil damage) too.
It might be better if Danone sequestered their carbon wasted and used zero-carbon energy – which would be a truly carbon free and truly environmentally responsible thing to do.
Burning biomass for energy releases large amounts of carbon into the atmosphere all at once. But depending on the type of tree, forests may take decades or even a century to draw the same amount of carbon back out of the air. The concept is really a wrong one and doesn’t help environment