Duane Hicks
FORT FRANCES—Compliance testing on the biomass boiler at the AbitibiBowater mill here is underway this week, and will continue next week.
“We’re testing the boiler at 50 percent of it rating capacity, and 100 percent of its rating capacity to make sure we pass all our testing,” mill manager John Harrison said Thursday morning.
“It’s a big step for us,” he added. “From all the indications we have, everything is going really good. But we have a testing protocol that we agreed to with the Ministry of the Environment.
“We have a third party in here doing the testing for us, and they will write up a report, submit it, and we’ll hear back from the ministry,” Harrison noted.
Harrison said there’s been “continuous fine-tuning of the operation to get us to where we want to be” with the biomass boiler, but the compliance testing hopefully will yield a
“final sign-off from the ministry.”
“From a compliance standpoint, our certificate of approval gets the final stamp. Then we’ve really got the environmental licence to operate,” he explained.
“They set parameters for you, but you’ve been approved and we make sure we stay in compliance,” he stressed.
Harrison said the boiler first was fired up to run on natural gas back on Dec. 19, but since January has been running at least partially on biomass.
“There’s been interruptions, of course, but every day it gets better,” he remarked.
“We have had two months where we have been up in the high 70s, as far as percentage of steam produced by biomass [as opposed to natural gas],” Harrison continued.
“We’re counting on pushing our way past the 80 percent mark this month, and getting to 90 percent very shortly.”
In other news, AbitibiBowater is taking proactive measures to prevent future leaking from the effluent line that runs from the mill to the lagoon north of Eighth Street.
Harrison said crews this week started to dig at the point where the effluent line crosses the CN tracks at the 100 block of Fourth Street West, as well as where it comes out at the lagoon.
He explained the effluent line there runs through a culvert, and that the crew will be pouring a grout to fill in the gap between the line and the culvert surrounding it.
“We’ve had a couple of breaks in that line, which we’ve repaired internally,” he noted. “As a more permanent fix, we went out and found a technology that you can actually use to grout the space between the pipe and the culvert.
“So, it will secure the pipe in place and prevent future leaks.
“They are digging up both ends of it, to get ready so we can do this grouting to make sure don’t have to worry about the line under the tracks anymore,” Harrison added.
“It’s part of our long-term plan to not have any more effluent leaks.”
The line has leaked several times in recent years, including a minor leak this past January and a more significant one last May.
