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Northern Jewel Pinnacle Opens Its Latest

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pellet producer ■

By Jessica Johnson

Entwistle, Alberta

Some pellet producers have successfully used a “cookie cutter” approach to building successive plants. But for Canadian producer Pinnacle Renew-

able Energy, one size doesn’t really fit all nine. Following a March 2018 startup, Pinnacle’s Entwistle plant is now hitting its stride in the commissioning phase with produc-tion records being set regularly according to Plant Man-ager Marcus Ziesmann. Pinnacle Entwistle is the company’s first outpost in the western province of Alberta targeting production of 400,000 metric tons of industrial pellets annually.

Senior Vice President of Operations Scott Bax says that the key to Pinnacle’s success has been right sizing their

plants for the areas in which they operate—taking the fiber basket and logistics into the equation. Almost every one of the nine plants is a different size. Technologies vary in the plants as well. For example, in the 125,000 metric ton Smithers plant, Pinnacle opts to run a bed dryer from Stela. In Entwistle, Pinnacle uses a single large rotary dryer from TSI.

“When we look at where we put our facilities,” Bax con-tinues, “we look at everything from how it can be integrated with local communities, the overall footprint of the plant and the size of the site to the proximity of local sawmills, optimizing our selections based on all those variables.”

There are a lot of variables, given that just in 2018, in addition to the startup in Entwistle, Pinnacle started up a partnership pellet plant in Smithers, BC and purchased the majority of the Westervelt pellet plant in Aliceville, Ala-bama. Stated capacity for the nine facilities is 2.2 million metric tons. Entwistle represents Pinnacle’s first big leap into monster production numbers.

Location certainly sets Entwistle apart, literally—over 1,350 km separate the facility from Pinnacle’s Westview terminal at the Port of Prince Rupert, BC and more than 1,000 km separate it from Pinnacle corporate headquarters in Richmond, BC. The hamlet of Entwistle isn’t that differ-ent from the other locations of Pinnacle plants, Bax ad-mits, saying at the heart and soul of what drew them there was a surplus of sawmill residuals that were left without a market following the slowdown of oil and gas production in the region.

“As our President and COO Leroy Reitsma says, ‘when I see a large pile of residuals, I see an opportunity.’ We were able to come in and enter into some long-term deals for the residuals. The sawmills had been stockpiling a fair bit.” Bax adds.

Like all other Pinnacle pellet plants, Entwistle uses

February 2019 / Wood Bioenergy 19

After celebrating a grand opening in September 2018, Pinnacle’s latest pellet plant in Entwistle, Alberta antici-pates coming through the winter running at three-quarters targeted daily production.

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100% softwood (mainly lodgepole and jack pine) sawmill residuals: sawdust as well as long, thin, fat shavings, which Bax calls “curly qs” and some bark material. The plant does not consume chips because, according to Bax, there’s already a natural home for them with the pulp facil-ities in the surrounding areas and it makes little sense for Pinnacle to attempt a disruption there.

Bax says the biggest difference for Entwistle compared to the company’s other plants is how the finished pellets get to the Port of Prince Rupert. Company wide product is hauled by rail, but in Alberta, Pinnacle runs a unit train concept.

The facility fills 90 rail cars with 100 metric tons per car, and then a dedicated locomotive takes it straight to Westview where Pinnacle has storage capacity of 50,000 metric tons, waits while the cars are unloaded and then takes the cars back to Entwistle. Bax admits it’s a pretty significant advan-tage in cost for Pinnacle, as this method also keeps timing as efficient as possible. Of course, he says the reason the method is working so well is because of the production and dis-tance.

Bax says that during the first six months of the commissioning curve, Entwistle hasn’t had many major woes. He credits strong relationships with suppliers to help with debottle-necking, and making sure that au-tomation, sequencing and flow are right. “So far it’s gone well,” he adds. “One of the biggest things we always learn during commissioning is impact of extremely cold weather. And I can’t really stress that enough.“

Bax jokes that in Canada there are

really only two seasons when it comes to pellet manufacturing: Winter and Getting Ready For Winter. “It’s literally like that,” he emphasizes. “In March we start talking about what we’re going to do for next winter. It’s that kind of journey.” The extreme weather conditions of -20° and -30° C also make commissioning critical in the winter months. Entwistle an-ticipates coming through commis-sioning this winter at more than three-quarters of its targeted daily production levels, with a lot of lessons learned and the ability to better prepare for next winter.

Hog fuel consumption in its fur-nace greatly increases in winter, as the plant fights to keep things warm—and moving. It is usually

the coldest in January and February, where temperatures in Alberta occasionally see the -40 mark. Bax laughs as he says, “We use water in the process. The challenge is keep water in its liquid form at those temperatures.”

Plant Flow Pinnacle broke ground on the 100-acre site in Entwistle

in May 2017. Construction lasted approximately 12 months. The first part of the plant was brought on-line in March of 2018—operating with dry shavings only—while the dryer island was completed and brought on-line in late June 2018.

Plant Manager Ziesmann, who came from a different manufacturing industry but has been with Pinnacle from the beginning of the Entwistle startup, says the startup victories were mainly focused on the team. “Understanding this is a jour-ney, a multi-million dollar investment and state-of-the-art-facility, yes; but it also requires tuning and the personnel to move along at the same pace,” he explains. “We celebrate those small successes. It’s a pizza here, a cake there.”

Both Ziesmann and Bax point to the team in Entwistle for the commis-sioning success and keeping their heads during upset conditions. Find-ing the right team, and motivating the right team Ziesmann says is the real key. “After setting our first produc-tion record, we thought ‘hey that was a good shift!’ Then two months later we look back and say ‘hey, we’re 50% better.’ We were all frustrated by challenges, but we knew we would

20 Wood Bioenergy / February 2019

Plant operates on 100% sawmill residuals.

Entwistle uses 10 Andritz LM26-II pelletizers.

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master them. We celebrate the small little changes, the optimizations. Right after initial commissioning, we had 10 upset conditions in two days. Now, we have a couple upset condi-tions a month,” he says.

Bax says the actual pelleting process is fairly straightforward. Sawmill residuals from up to 200 km are trucked into the wood yard either by walking floor trailers, which self-unload or Super-B style trailers, which are dumped using one of two Phelps tippers. From there, product is segregated depending on which part of the process it’s going to be used.

The segregation in the wood yard is matched at the infeed. One infeed is dedicated to sawdust and other green fiber, which is primarily pel-letized. The other infeed is hog fuel and primarily for the furnace. Mate-rial flows under an Eriez magnet, a series of scalping rolls, taking out any big ice chunks or bigger particles that will end up going down toward the Brunette Grizzly hog and getting broken down to fuel the furnace. Green product is con-veyed to the dryer island.

The TSI supplied furnace, dryer and wet electrostatic precipitator (WESP) is designed to produce more than 80 tons/hour of dry material for pelleting.

The furnace is a Sigma Thermal de-sign 60 m2 reciprocating grate with primary and secondary combustion chambers to optimize combustion and minimize ash carry-over. It is designed to burn wet bark or other wet hog fuel and will automatically de-ash on a continual basis.

The dryer is a TSI 22 ft. diameter x 100 ft. long single pass recycle dryer, which Bax says is quite large compared with ou r other plants. The combination of the Sigma Thermal grate and TSI dryer recycle technol-ogy provides optimal performance in terms of BTU/lb of water evapora-tion. It also runs at very low oxygen levels improving safety; the O2 level in the drum during operation will not sustain a fire. The flighting design in the drum classifies the material as it dries making the outlet moisture tol-erance very tight.

On the back end of the system the TSI WESP is an upflow design with more than 1,000 large diameter stain-less steel tubes, each with a high volt-

age rigid electrode that creates a charge in the airborne particulate as it passes through the tubes, causing it to pre-cipitate out of the airstream onto the inner surface of the tube where it is periodically flushed out with heated water. The water is subsequently cleaned through a decanter cen-

With the 10 machines, Pinnacle owns the world’s largest amount of Andritz pelletizers.

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trifuge. This leaves an almost particulate free, very clean gas stream going out of the stack and is able to meet the strictest emission standards for particulate.

Once the green fiber has been dried, dry shavings are conveyed into the mix prior to hammering. Bax believes having the product streams merge prior to hammering al-lows them to mix more effectively. The combined stream goes through Bliss hammermills. “We target an optimum particle size distribution,” he says, “which, depending on customer is about 92% less than 2 mm. We try to get close to that and let the pelleters do the rest.”

Hammered material flows to one of ten Andritz LM26-II pellet machines, including the 50th Andritz machine installed at a Pinnacle facility, making Pinnacle the world’s largest owner of Andritz wood pellet mills. In the pellet machine building, there is a space for an additional Andritz machine, should the market dictate a ramp up in production, Bax says.

From the Andritz pelletizers, where pellets are brought to 6.5 mm finished size, pellets are cooled in Bliss coolers, conveyed to final screening before being carried to Scafco storage silos and to rail load out. In order to maintain opti-mum quality and size, dies are changed as needed with die life heavily dependent on the fiber mixture. All conveyors supplied by Continental Conveyor.

The baghouse is a baghouse cycofilter, which Bax ex-plains is a cyclone on the bottom and baghouse on the top. Large particles separate through cyclonic action and then the residual air, as opposed to just being emitted, goes through the baghouse and emits from there. “It’s actually quite effective,” he says. “It has a small footprint and is re-ally efficient.”

Pinnacle Entwistle makes use of GreCon spark detec-tion, as well as SonicAire fans to help control com-bustible dust. Air systems were supplied by Allied Blower. CV Technology provided critical explosion pro-tection equipment.

Owning Safety

For Bax, the single biggest victory while building the plant was doing so safely, a huge testament to the con-struction teams. It was the first statistic the team at cor-porate looked at, and for Ziesmann it was the first victory the on site team looked at as well. Ziesmann adds, “It’s a core value. It’s who we are, but it also has to be a per-sonal value. We are interested in taking care of each other.” He leads the team under the guiding idea “I watch your back and you watch mine,” and believes that re-minding everyone safety is about making sure they get to go home to their families is a great motivator.

In addition to making sure plant employees are in-vested in the safety culture, Pinnacle built Entwistle with engineered solutions to stop, mitigate or otherwise mini-mize potential for issues. Bax says leaning on CV Tech-nology for explosion suppression and explosion isolation design and engineering of solutions was a huge leap for-ward. He believes that understanding the inherent risks of combustible dust and realizing engineered solutions is one part of creating a great safety solution for a facility. “Clearly the training and competency of your people un-derstanding the risks is really important,” Bax adds, “For us it has been really powerful.”

Bax echoes Ziesmann that really the people are what make Entwistle special. “In the end you can have all the best equipment in the world but it comes down to your people. Putting a lot of time and energy into competencies has been really important. We are fortunate to have an amazing workforce in the local area and 85% of all of our employees are from 30-40 km away.”

The heart and soul of the safety culture at Pinnacle is called “Owning Safety.” The company believes that means every single person in the organization has a true owner-ship in not only keeping themselves safe, but also other people safe.

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Entwistle runs a unit train concept to get pellets hauled to the Port of Prince Rupert, BC—filling 90 rail cars before dedi-cated locomotive hauls them back and forth.

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