PORT ANGELES — It is much like baling hay, but this baler punches out 1,000-pound, 10-foot-long cylinders of highly compressed wood waste after a timber harvest.
The cylinders of slash can be stored indefinitely, or ground into wood chips for hog fuel in steam boilers at paper mills such as Nippon USA in Port Angeles, and Port Townsend Paper.
This type of wood-waste baling is an environmentally friendly and safe option to burning slash in dry, habitat-sensitive forests, according to Dave Wellman, John Deere’s forest energy technical manager for North America.
It is also a source of electric power co-generation, Wellman said. Two of these wood-waste bales, or cylinders, are the energy-generating equivalent of a barrel of oil.
This past week Wellman and machine operator Tim West demonstrated John Deere’s Timberjack 1490D (the only “energy wood harvester” in the United States) for timber-product industry representatives.
The robotic harvester, which is controlled by a computerized joy stick from inside an air-conditioned cab, already is used in Sweden, Spain and Italy, Wellman said.
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The rest of the story appears in the Sunday Peninsula Daily News.
