PT Paper adding natural gas, cutting oil

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Port Townsend Paper Corp. (PTPC) is taking new steps toward reducing its use of petroleum products as fuel for its boilers.

The pulp and paper company expects to be the first manufacturing plant in Washington state to use compressed natural gas (CNG), a move it says will reduce fuel costs, improve efficiency and help the environment.

Matt Denton, chief financial officer for Crown Paper Group, which owns PTPC, presented the mill's intentions on Friday, Aug. 28. He also introduced Chris Christopoulos, the fire chief of Lebanon, New Hampshire, whom he has brought in to help train first responders at East Jefferson Fire Rescue, as well as state officials, on how to deal with CNG.

For now, the CNG is expected to be delivered by four or five trucks daily from Puyallup, starting sometime in 2016.

Although it is considered safer and cleaner than oil, gas, diesel or propane, CNG is new for most emergency responders in the state, which is why Denton wanted local officials to become familiar with it.

At a gathering of invitees last week, Denton touted CNG, as firefighters, police officers and city officials learned about it and heard Christopoulos detail its safety features.

“It's a lower cost, and it improves boiler efficiency and reliability and significantly reduces environmental emissions,” Denton said. “Gas is a clean, domestic product,” he added later.

The new owners of the mill seek to switch fuels as part of a long-range plan for improvements. Chief executive officer Steve Klinger estimated earlier this year that Crown would invest about $40 million over the next two years. Klinger had said in March that the mill wanted to reduce the amount of petroleum it is burning.

How much money the conversion work is costing the mill is not known. Denton deflected questions about cost.

STATION IN PUYALLUP

Because there is no gas pipeline on the Olympic Peninsula, a new station is expected to be built in Puyallup by Xpress Natural Gas , based in Boston, Massachusetts. That new station, the first in the state, will tap into a gas pipeline that follows the I-5 corridor from Canada.

Washington will be the 16th state in the U.S. to have a CNG facility capable of serving large manufacturers.

“There is no compression station in Washington that's capable of providing a manufacturing company with this amount of fuel,” Denton acknowledged.

The mill has signed an agreement with Xpress to supply the mill with between four and five truckloads of CNG a day. Each truck holds approximately 355,000 standard cubic feet of gas.

Xpress also is to build a platform near the mill's boilers to stage the trailers, which are specialized Titan containers on wheels. And there also will be a hub that is to house equipment that decompresses the gas, converting it into natural gas for the mill to use to run its kiln and boilers. Both the kiln and the boilers will be able to use both oil and CNG.

The mill needs to obtain permits from the state Department of Ecology as well as building permits from Jefferson County. PTPC expects to apply within the next few weeks, Denton said. The system could be up and running between May and August 2016.

Denton has experience with CNG. The first CNG-manufacturing facility in the U.S. was a tissue, towel and napkin paper mill in Putney, Vermont, which was operated by Denton before he came to Port Townsend earlier this year as CFO.

“CNG will result in significant emissions reductions, including greenhouse gas emissions, by converting to natural gas relative to oil, which will be displaced,” according to a PTPC statement released on Friday .

Asked how much of a reduction there would be, Denton said, “It's significant.” He said he had been advised not to be more specific.

SAFETY ISSUES OUTLINED

Much of the conversation on Friday revolved around what Xpress Natural Gas chief technology officer Doug Hanson said were safety features of both the gas and the trailers that serve as “virtual pipelines” to carry CNG.

“Is it safe? Yes,” was one question and answer presented to local officials in a PowerPoint presentation.

“But just like any energy source, you have to handle it properly,” one official noted.

Washington State Patrol Sgt. G. Hester of the field operations bureau in Port Angeles asked if there had been any incidents of the product being released during a collision on any major highway.

Hanson said there have not been any incidents involving Xpress’ fleet.

“To my knowledge, we have not had gas released due to a vehicle accident of a Titan trailer,” Hanson said, adding that the Titan trailers being used in the past three years are new to the U.S.

CNG, according to a website touting it, consists mostly of methane, is “odorless, colorless and is tasteless” and is made by compressing natural gas to less than 1 percent of its volume at standard atmospheric pressure. Sulphur is added to CNG to make any leak detectable at the compression station, it was noted.

Although CNG is used for tractors, buses and other fleet fueling around Seattle and Tacoma, it's relatively new in Washington.

Christopoulos went into detail with firefighters, paramedics and others, showing them a number of safety features in a demonstration on a near-empty trailer that had been brought to East Jefferson Fire Rescue's Critter Lane station. The truck also was taken to the fire station in Chimacum, where first responders looked it over.

Natural gas cannot combust as pure methane, which is how gas is delivered, a press release states.

“Natural gas requires oxygen to be flammable. Inside the tanks, the gas is too concentrated to burn or sustain a flame and cannot explode,” the release says. There also is no risk of a spill or ground contamination because CNG is lighter than air and would disperse into the air if it leaked.

“Any ignited gas would burn back to the venting point and burn as a flare,” Hanson said. “It would not detonate like you see in a movie. That is the main thing. People think it's a rolling bomb. It's not.”

The fuel would be compressed at the station in Puyallup, taken by Titan trailers to Port Townsend and then decompressed at the mill to make the fuel usable.

At the mill, the hub where the trailers would sit would have a built-in automatic emergency shutdown system and other fail-safe measures that are continually monitored, Hanson said.

As for safety issues, Denton said, “There's less energy in the CNG truck on the highway than the trailers of gas that pull up into the gas station in Port Townsend.”

Kevin Scott, director of sustainability for the mill, said oil use is down 60 percent from where it had been, and CNG would help bring oil use down even further.

“It's very good for Washington,” Denton said of bringing CNG to the state. He made it clear he feels the move is also good for the largest private employer in Jefferson County.

“We compete not only in the United States, but around the world,” Denton said.