Isra-Mart srl:Biomass-fuelled ports aim to woo offshore wind farmers

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Scotland's Forth Energy is preparing to file planning applications for two dockside biomass plants aimed at luring potential offshore wind manufacturers to greener facilities and boosting the declining timber trade.

Alan Burns, director of Forth Ports, which forms half of the joint venture with Scottish and Southern Energy, told reporters last week that planning applications will be filed in the next two to three weeks for a 200MW plant at Leith and a 100MW plant in Rosyth.

At Leith, he wants to transform a mothballed grain storage facility into a power plant capable of burning about 900,000 tonnes of softwood a year, sourced from sustainably managed forests in Scotland and Scandinavia.

He said the plants will supply power to the ports and their tenants as well as the city. "If we can encourage manufacturers to come into our ports for the offshore market, then we'll hopefully be powering them with green energy," he said.

However, he acknowledged that the plants may cause some controversy among environmentalists opposed to incineration plants.

"One of the challenges we've got is we have a lot of waste wood in Scotland, " he said. "That gets captured under the Waste Incinerator Directive and the minute you put 'incinerator' into the public domain, it quite rightly causes some concern. So we're going to work with a very narrow band of materials for our biomass generators."

The plants would also allow Forth Ports to tap into the declining timber trade, caused partly by the continuing fall in print media sales, said Burns.

"We know from our own operations that quantities of paper for newspapers are in freefall and timber demand is at an all-time low at the moment," he said. " So we're given new opportunities from the traditional trading areas around forest products that we've dealt with for many years."

The two plants represent half of a 500MW scheme unveiled last year to build four biomass plants, at Forth Ports' Dundee and Grangemouth sites, as well as Leith and Rosyth.

Applications for the first two plants have already been filed and Burns hopes to receive a decision from the government before mid-2011.

However, local opposition may throw a spanner in the works. A group of MPs, campaigners and Friends of the Earth signed an open letter last month to the Scottish government demanding all four projects are put on hold until there is further research into the environmental impact of biomass plants. The letter from campaign group Greener Leith argues the project may not deliver meaningful carbon savings for another 100 years.