Improving energy efficiency of sawmill industrial sites by integration with pellet and CHP plants

An essential strategy to lower energy and resources consumption is the development of highly integrated industrial sites including different kind of plants complementing one another. Sawmills are huge biomass suppliers to other industries, such as pulp and paper mills, pellet plants and CHP plants, and part of the biomass is also used for the internal heat requirement. In this paper the integration of a sawmill with a pellet plant and a CHP plant is investigated using advanced process integration techniques, so that the thermal energy and the electricity produced in the CHP plant by burning part of the sawmill biomass output are used for the heat and power requirements of the other two industries. The results show that up to 18% of the biomass by-products from the sawmill can be saved, but from the economic point of view the ratio between prices of the thermal energy sold for district heating and the low quality biomass has to be lower than the present one to make the integrated design solution more attractive than separate plant operation. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.