Giant mounds of what appears to be black powdery charcoal or crushed pencil lead lie piled outside a towering industrial plant built in recent years on the Malheur Lumber property in John Day.
The plant’s operators have a long-term lease on about 5 acres on the property and a mission to utilize wood waste or wood that wouldn’t sell as well. The original plan was to produce a high-carbon solid fuel wood product through a process called torrefaction. Torrefied wood is wood that has been roasted — similar to roasting coffee beans — in order to obtain a product with a higher energy value for use as fuel in power plants.
That plan changed during the pandemic and the company pivoted to making an even higher-carbon product used to help crops grow better and clean up old mines.
Restoration Fuels, the company that built the plant in 2020 on the Malheur Lumber property, had planned to produce torrefied wood product to make high-carbon pellets for use as a greener alternative to coal at Portand General Electric’s Boardman Power Plant and to sell to other electricity-generating plants outside of Oregon and as far away as Japan, said company CEO Matt Krumenauer.
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But the closure of the Boardman plant in 2020, in addition to the high cost of shipping the product to foreign markets, led to the decision to switch to producing biochar.
Biochar is similar in appearance to charcoal used for cooking, but it can be added to soil to make it highly fertile for agricultural and gardening use. It can also be used as a carbon water filter to remove pollutants, such as chemicals and metals, from storm drains and old mines.
“We couldn’t find the economics to ship it to Japan or other power plants in the U.S.,” Krumenauer said. “We pivoted to biochar in late 2021. Over the past year we’ve made the transition.”
The plant, which employs 18 people, started production of biochar in April. It generated 100 tons of product in June and is expected to produce 500 tons this month. he hope is to ramp up production to about 10,000 tons per year and begin marketing the product to customers in 2024, Krumenauer said.
Restoration Fuels is a subsidiary of the U.S. Endowment for Forestry and Communities, and the plant in John Day was described as the first commercial-scale torrefaction facility in North America.
Operations manager Mark Allen said the plant’s supplier is currently Malheur Lumber. The raw material to make the biochar — low-merchantable wood — is delivered in the form of chips or sawdust and stored in giant piles at the plant.
“It’s really about giving the loggers and the Forest Service a way to clean up the forest,” Allen said. “Part of (the endowment’s) mission is to clean up the forest, to come up with a product that will use off-grade trees and give an incentive to clean up the forest and find a market for that stuff.”
The company also hopes to take advantage of the fact that biochar sequesters carbon from waste wood that might otherwise be releasd into the atmosphere. The operation aims to gain additional revenue by providing carbon credits to large corporations, which can use them to offset the carbon emissions they produce.
“The market for carbon credits associated with biochar took off in 2020 and 2021,” Krumenauer said. “That opened the opportunity to use the plant in a different way.”
Plant officials said they’re about to begin marketing the product to customers and hope to create a product that can be used locally to help with agriculture and remediate old mines in the region.
“To me it’s a much better story to be able to use these thinnings from the forest and residuals from various mills in town to create a product we can use locally and keep in the United States and not have to ship to Japan and not have to ship long distances,” Krumenauer said. “It’s something that addresses climate change that is real, tangible and you can pick it up with your hand.”