The first commercial-scale operation of a heat-treating system for wood chips for overseas shipment occurred at the Port of Eastport on July 27 and 28. The phytosanitation of 40 tons of southern yellow pine chips was conducted by Phyto-Charter Inc., which had developed the shipboard heat-treating system and has a temporary sub-license for the units that are now owned by the Eastport Port Authority and are located at the Estes Head port terminal.
      The two modified shipping containers of wood chips were trucked up from Arkansas for phytosanitation in Eastport before being sent on to the Port of Saint John for shipment to France, since there is no container ship service to Eastport.
      Stephean Chute, managing director of Phyto-Charter, says that, following the successful heat-treatment of the wood chips, incremental steps will be taken for more shipments in the future, perhaps first with containers then with phytosanitizing wood chips in the hold of a ship. While the heat-treatment will be done in Eastport now, eventually additional phytosanitation units would be built and placed at other ports. The phytosanitation is needed to meet European Union (EU) requirements for importing wood fiber from the U.S. in order to ensure that the pinewood nematode does not enter the EU and contaminate the forests there. The acceptable protocol to prevent that contamination is to heat treat the wood at 560 Celsius for more than 30 minutes.
      The 40-ton shipment is for an independent oil refining company in the southern U.S., which is sending the chips to a pilot biorefinery plant in France to determine the yield and quality of ethanol and lignin that is produced. The company is considering building a 2,000-ton-a-day biorefinery in the southern U.S. and is using the plant in France, which uses one ton a day, to test the feasibility of the cellulosic ethanol project. The ethanol would be used to blend with gasoline for sale to companies in California to meet the state's Low Carbon Fuel Standard, while the lignin is a co-product that can be used for combustion heating or power generation.
      The operation was watched by officials with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), which helps exporters meet the EU requirements by issuing a phytosanitation certificate for the wood chips being exported. David Hirsch, an export certification specialist with USDA APHIS who was among the USDA specialists watching the operation in Eastport, notes that the country importing the chips will also inspect the shipment to ensure the requirements are met and no insects are present. The USDA APHIS team checked the temperature data from inside the containers to determine that they were fully heated from top to bottom. They will need to inspect each shipment of any softwood chips that are sent to the EU, although Hirsch notes that their confidence level will increase as the number of shipments grows.
      Assisting with the heat-treatment process were workers from Fastco Corporation, which is a fabrication company based in Lincoln that works on gas plants and pulp mills. The phytosanitation system uses propane to heat air in furnaces that then goes into the containers and keeps circulating through them.
      As for future shipments, Chute notes that while wood chip shipments to biomass plants in Europe have been explored for quite a few years by Phyto-Charter and the Eastport Port Authority, the European mandate for sustainable aviation fuel by blending in biofuels could lead to the largest market for wood chips in the EU. "Where there's a mandate, there's a market," he says.
      The sustainable aviation fuel mandate will mean the price will come up for the wood chips, which has "been one of the biggest issues," Chute says. "It's been tough to make it work," he says of the wood chip exports into Europe. "Then COVID knocked the markets out in Europe for two years."
      Chris Gardner, executive director of the Eastport Port Authority, notes that while the current shipment is for "a niche market for smaller shipments, it lends itself to full deployment on shipboard. We can manage the risk better, and it's easier to learn on this size deployment. It makes a full-scale deployment more manageable." He notes that the heat-treating of a container, instead of a ship's hold, provided "a way to work out the bugs" and "a chance to vet the system for a larger scale." He adds that the Maine forest industry is trying to find new markets, and the aviation fuel market in Europe is one of them.
      The port authority still has about 4,500 tons of wood chips that were acquired in late 2020 for a phytosanitation test that didn't end up happening in 2021. Gardner says there's still "a long-term interested party" that would like to import those chips into the United Kingdom, and he hopes that shipment, with phytosanitizing being done in the ship's hold, can take place this year.
      "We want to build precedent with more and more shipments," says Chute, with Gardner adding, "We want to build up the comfort level with the process for everybody."