The (letter to the editor) … by Professor Sarah Middlefehldt Ph.D. of Northern Michigan University’s Department of Earth, Environmental and Geological Science was misleading at best.

Every day we hear that the Earth is suffering global warming and climate change partly due to CO2 (carbon dioxide) in the air from burning fuel is trapping the heat and we need to plant trees as they capture carbon.

The professor is interested in cutting them down and burning them in the NMU co-generation plant and that we should explore the past, present and future of wood based bioenergy.

Well we have been exploring that since we were cavemen and that is why we developed better and more environmentally friendly fuels like natural gas and fuel oil.

The professor states that the NMU co-generation plant which was constructed in 2012-13 is currently burning NG as the price has plummeted.

This is misleading. That system has never worked as promised. NMU has been quiet about this so my details may be wrong.

The professor should have this information available. The cost and quantity of chips required and the operator labor are all more than anticipated. I believe the wood chip fuel train has been disabled and a gas burner installed.

Switching over takes days and is labor-intensive.

Let’s look at the longterm costs of NG. The cost of NG expressed as $/mmBTU (million BTUs) was volatile in the 2000s reaching as high as $14 but has been somewhat stable since 2010 averaging about $4 with a spike to $9 in 2022 before plummeting to near $2 currently.

You can Google this information, you don’t need to be a Ph.D.

I believe the reason they use NG is that the wood fired co-generation system is a failure. The original Ripley Heat Plant has been updated, well-maintained and capable of burning NG or fuel oil. Over this period how much of the time was the wood fired boiler used? How much of the time was the promised electricity produced? In 2022, when NG spiked to $9 was the wood fired boiler used?

Burning wood in a plant of this capacity is always difficult and projects are often abandoned. Let me point you to when K.I. Sawyer was still an air force base.

They did a remodel of the heat plant that was of similar use and capacity as NMU’s and built a wood-fired boiler. It was a failure and promptly abandoned.

This was a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers project, the biggest engineering group in the world.

The cause of these failures is mostly due to inconsistency in the feedstock. The species of the trees, size of the chips and moisture of the chips can vary and you have trouble controlling combustion and stack emissions.

It is also more work and time-consuming to fire and bring down the boiler as the cost of NG varies.

Having wood chip piles is a safety (fire) and health concern as we learned recently in Escanaba.

This co-generation project was introduced in 2009 by NMU President Wong and built in 2012 and 2013. I have found the cost to be either $13 million or $55 million.

This project was instigated, engineered and managed by JCI (Johnson Control), one of the biggest industrial technology firms in the world. JCI claimed it would save $1.9 million per year and President Wong said that JCI guaranteed it.

Was this goal ever achieved or the guarantee enforced? The project was a failure due to being a bad idea, bad engineering and terrible timing.

In addition to the cost of the co-generation plant, NMU acquired the two properties to the west of the Ripley plant to site the co-generation plant displacing the businesses and employees.

A large brick warehouse of a book/magazine distributor and the office/shops of Industrial Piping Co.

This took those properties off the tax rolls in a city that is crying that so much property in the city is not subject to property tax. These were local jobs providing better wages and benefits than loggers and truck drivers.

This workshop was sponsored by National Science Foundation and free lunch was provided. …

EDITOR’S NOTE: George Patrick is a resident of the Marquette area.