Last week I roadtripped with one of my colleagues to Averøya near Kristiansund in order to take a look at the construction of the worlds second largest pellets factory. Based on it’s imported biomass (From Canada, Estonia and Liberia) BioWood Norway will have an annual production capacity of around 450 000 tonnes of pellets when it opens in June next year. Heavy hitters like Hafslund are involved on the investment side. At a glance you’d think the idea is pure megalomania beyond all sanity, but up close it’s quite impressing. One thing is the sheer size of the scheme, another thing is the reasoning behind it.

There is a quite boring economical side to this, of course, but I won’t go into that. What many I’ve been talking to have been skeptical about, however, is how it adds up to be beneficial climate-wise. Won’t shipping all that lumber around the globe and back again as cause more harm than good? Of course it burns a decent amount of oil, which is bad. However, it’s main customers throughout Europe more than makes up for this. How you ask?

Well, basically you can convert coal power plants to burn wood pellets in stead of coal, or you can co-fire coal and pellets. The pellets are pricier than coal, but burning it to generate electricity is a cheaper option than both windmills and solar power. EU policies aiming to produce 20% of all electricity with renewables from 2020 has created a booming pellet market, but there aren’t enough pellets around to cater for the needs of these giant customers. This is a gap BioWood aims to fill. This will obviously mean large cuts in CO2 emissions – it’s difficult to argue against the replacement of coal, even if it means burning some oil for transport.

The factory isn’t up and running yet, and a healthy dose of wait-and-see attitude could be called for. None the less I think it’s quite exciting to see that bio energy doesn’t necessarily have to be small scale, gyro gearloose-inspired highly localized oddities (even though I really like those..). If BioWood can make money AND cut emissions they should be a source of inspiration for many green entrepreneurs.

Yesterday Gard Hopsdal Hansen and I had another small article on print, this time in the Norwegian tabloid Dagbladet. Again – it’s not published online, so I’ll paste it here.

I won’t be writing anything in the newspaper for quite some time now, promise!

In todays Dagens Næringsliv Gard H. Hansen, Jøran Solli and I encourage the establishment of a Norwegian  ministry of the climate, or a ministry of renewable energy and environmental technology. Unfortunately DN doesn’t publish these things online. Thus,  to boost our 2.0-presence slightly I’ll paste the article here. I might return with something on this in English at some point in the future, for now you can read the article in Norwegian below.

A couple of days ago I visited a farm near Verdal, North-Trøndelag to meet a local Gyro Gearloose par excellence. Over the last four years he has invested more than ten million Norwegian kroner (NOK) (…as well as the additional investment of two cardiac infarctions*) in the construction of a small plant for production of heat and electricity based on biogas. This is the only scheme of it’s kind in Norway, and as such a very interesting case of study for my research. In short I was very impressed with the whole thing…

Basically the scheme works like this. Our friend collects about 6000 tonnes of food-waste on a yearly basis (which he is payed to collect, of course). In addition his pigs produces roughly 6000 tonnes of.. eh – “manure”. These components make a hefty mixture, which if stimulated with the right heat and pressure produces a gas that can be burned to produce heat. It can also be used to power an engine producing electricity. In a resource perspective this is great – junk and crap (literally) is used to produce a high value product in high demand – heat and electricity. The residue from the production is used as manure on his fields, leaving no pollutant remains to be thrown away.

Care for a snack?

To boost the recycle-karma of the project the entire setup is built using a number of dismantled and highly modified dairies which he has purchased relatively cheaply throughout Norway.

It all sounds great, of course, but there is a serious drawback. So far he’s making no money, and is barely making a break-even.  The standard story about cheap Norwegian electricity and a poor supportive framework seems to apply here as well. This is emerging as the standard story of entrepreneurs in bioenergy-related businesses, and it seems that gas is no different from pellets or wood-chips in this respect. With rising electricity prices, however, it will be really interesting to follow this project in the times ahead.

*) I looked that word up – I was also suprised, it sounds Norwenglish, doesn’t it?

There’s been some talk about software for data analysis around the office lately, particularly with those involved quantitative number punching. There’s also been talk about purchasing some licenses for the qualitative data analysis package Atlas, which I would be interested in checking out. However, I’ve recently stumbled across and experimented with an alternative that I find promising – the free, open source package Weft QDA.

Basically, Weft QDA is a Computer-Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis Software (CAQDAS – Nice abbreviation, eh?). It’s very simple to use, with a fairly intuitive interface. Best of all, of course, it’s free and apparently open-source, which means that you’ll be analyzing your data good-guy style. No evil corporation with gloomy headquarters to worry about here..

In it’s simplest use (which is all I’ve tested, really..) the program works something like this: 1) You create a ‘project’ and 2) import any number of written documents, which in my case would be transcribed interviews. 3) You establish a set of categories (codes or whatever you want to call them) by which you want to sort the data. 4) (…and now for the real work, *sigh*) You read the text while coding it into the proper categories. 5) Once this is done there are a number of ways to display the data, there are even some very basic stats for those who need to play the numbers-game.

Basically it seems like a nice way to sort out, organize and code data, and after just fiddling around with it for a while I think I might put it to the test for real in the not too distant future. The screenshot below shows off the basic interface of the program with your project documents on top, and the category “tree” below. Double clicking any category instantly provides all text sorted under this header in your project. All very simple, no?

The next screenshot simply displays how you’d typically be working in the program. The dropbox down in the left corner contains your codes or categories, in addition to three buttons – “mark”, “unmark” and “find”. Again – all very, very simple. Mark text, choose category, press “mark”, and voila..

So, will I be a full-blown user of this tool from now on? I’m not quite sure. I’ll play around with it for a little while longer, and I’ll probably try Atlas if it surfaces at our institute. On the downside it only supports text, no video, images and sound like some other packages do. You also need to convert your documents from standard word or open office files to plain text, which is a minor hassle. I really like the idea of free, open source software, though, and the simplicity of this thing is pretty appealing.