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Green opening: Steele City plant will produce pellets earmarked for Europe
[June 11, 2008]

Green opening: Steele City plant will produce pellets earmarked for Europe


(News Herald, The (Panama City, FL) (KRT) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Jun. 11--STEELE CITY -- When JCE Group owner and founder J. Christer Ericsson first visited Northwest Florida, he followed a guided tour of the region with his own look at the area and its plantation-style yellow pine forests.



Ericsson, whose JCE is the parent of Green Circle Bio Energy, said he initially was skeptical about building a wood pellet plant here until he saw the region's abundance of trees.

"All I saw was forest, forest, forest," Ericsson said.


Green Circle unveiled its estimated $116 million, 300,000-square-foot Steele City wood pellet plant Tuesday, leading visitors on tours of the company's state-of-the-art production facility. Jackson County beat out Alabama for the plant, touted as the world's largest wood pellet production facility, after an intensive 18-month site search.

After breaking ground in April 2007, Green Circle started production at its 225-acre Jackson County site a year later, with plans for a first European shipment in late June or early July. The company is shipping its pellets via Bay Line Railroad to Port Panama City, where the wood product will be stored in the port's new 80,000-square-foot bulk warehouse.

From the warehouse, which can hold up to 35,000 tons, the wood pellets will be loaded onto Europe-bound ships for use as fuel in power plants.

Green Circle estimates the amount of renewable energy produced from its pellet production process is 11 times higher than the amount of fossil fuels used in the growth, production and transportation of the wood pellets to the international market.

How it works

Though the Green Circle plant is not yet at full production capacity, rows of harvested trees were stacked in a yard west of the main facility Tuesday.

The Green Circle plant has an annual capacity of 600,000 wood pellet tons, a figure that would require 350,000 acres of timber to support, project consulting engineer David Melvin said in July 2007.

Bill Waller, Green Circle's wood procurement manager, said the company is buying about 30 loads of ground wood, 10 loads of sawdust and shavings and eight loads of bark on a daily basis. All the wood is being secured from suppliers within a 50-mile radius of the facility, Waller said.

"We expect that to ramp up to 160 loads, five days per week when we get to full production," Waller said.

The pellets fit between a person's thumb and forefinger (roughly 8 millimeters in diameter and a maximum length of 32 millimeters), with a bark content of less than 1 percent and moisture content between 7 and 10 percent.

Wood transported to the facility is debarked, chipped like particleboard, and pulverized, before being put through a drying system and placed in a hammermill.

After the wood pellets have been put through all of the plant's processes, a conveyor belt dumps them into rail cars for eventual shipment to Port Panama City.

Company President and CEO Olaf Roed led one tour of the facility Tuesday with Ericsson and plant manager Roger Lehtonen.

In the facility's control room, about 20 computer screens help workers monitor the plant's processes. Two computer screens monitor the plant's furnaces, which burn bark from the wood as part of the drying process. About 90 percent of the control room is automated and controlled by two operators.

"From this room, you can control the whole plant," Roed said.

Roed said Green Circle had a lot of land left over at the Steele City site, located off U.S. 231 south of Interstate 10, and would study the possibility of future expansion.

Visitors at Tuesday's grand opening ceremony included several state and economic development officials.

Included in the $12.5 million of local, state and federal funds directed toward the $116 million Green Circle project were two Office of Tourism, Trade and Economic Development, or OTTED, grants totaling almost $1.7 million.

OTTED deputy director Keisha Rice said the state understood the potential ramifications of the Green Circle plant and was thrilled to land the facility in Florida.

Rice said the state hoped that "tiered" companies, which would provide services to Green Circle, also would locate to the area.

Jackson County's board of commissioners committed more than $2.7 million in county funds to the Green Circle project.

Commission Chairman Chuck Lockey said Green Circle would remit $700,000 annually to Jackson County's ad valorem tax base.

To see more of The News Herald or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.newsherald.com.
Copyright (c) 2008, The News Herald, Panama City, Fla.
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
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