An industrial equipment manufacturer in Manitoba expects to save about 50 thousand dollars a year in heating costs by switching from natural gas to waste wheat straw fuel.
In 1999, Vidir Machine replaced the coal fired heating system at its Arborg, Manitoba manufacturing plant with a three million BTU wheat straw fueled heating system and the company is now installing a smaller one million BTU unit at its manufacturing plant at Morris.
The greenhouse gas displacement system, developed by Vidir Biomass Systems, relies on primary combustion followed by secondary combustion to get a complete burn.
Vidir Biomass president Raymond Dueck says the unit is fueled using large round bales of wheat straw. They place 16 bales on a conveyer that feeds them into the system. A shredder shreds the bales into finer particles and delivers it into the primary combustion chamber, doing a low temperature burn, or creating smoke. The systems sends the smoke into a secondary chamber, or afterburner, where it burns at two thousand degrees Fahrenheit, producing full and complete combustion, clean gas that moves into the heat exchanger to heat water. The water, in turn, heats the facilities.
“Since 1999 it has saved us up to 50 thousand dollars a year at our Arborg plant,” said Dyck. “Before we heated the Arborg plant with electric hot water heaters, using hydro power. Now we’re using the straw.” The estimate is that one bale of straw is worth 200 dollars worth of electricity or about 200 dollars worth of natural gas. Dueck notes the cost of heating with wheat straw is similar to that of using coal but straw fuel is about 90 percent less expensive than heating with either natural gas or electricity.