Last week I focussed on Inherred biovarme AS, an opperation run largely by farmers in North-Trøndelag. This morning I visited another company, much closer to home. Trondheim biobrensel is located just a few kilometres from Dragvoll at spot they call “bjørka”

Vis større kart

Basically this company produces compressed wood-chips that are used by Trondheim Energi in their Biomass-heater at Marienborg. They buy wood-residue from a sawmill in North-Trøndelag operated by Kjelstad. To this they add 20% wood-based waste (eerh.. pardon my engrish, I guess there is a proper English  word for this. Garbage/trash, and so on and so forth… you get the picture). Again, as with the company I looked at last week this sounds like a fairly basic opperation; 1) Accquire woodresidue, 2) Chop into finer wood-residue, 3) Compress, 4) Store, and finally 5) send to Marienborg with a truck. Unload and collect cash (Heh, transport tycoon flashbacks..). Along the way there are a number of impressively large machines involved. 

And for a few years the process above have worked pretty much according to the plan. This year is different, however. I will not be too bombastic about trying to explain why yet, but I will speculate. First – it seems to me like the company is extremely dependant on two other actors. They need Kjelstad to deliver raw materials and they need Trondheim Energy to purchase their final product. The latter is not a problem. This year (and at the end of last year), however,  Kjelstad has not been able to deliver raw materials. Their residue is a by-product of the activities in the construction-business, and with the economic crisis we are in the midst of the activity is, to be modest, low. This means, of course, no by-products. Which means there are hardly any wood chips produced, which again means that Trondheim Energi could risk problems with their heaters. The situation for trondheim biobrensel has become so severe that temporary lay-offs have been considdered by the management. Considdering the fact that they are Trondheim Energi’s only supplier that could be pretty severe, at least if the enviromental aspects are considdered. The second-best option sketched by the guy I spoke to today was import, possibly from the baltics. And cars use, well, petrol…

None the less, the guys I spoke with today seemed optimistic and had good hopes that the supply of raw materials would improve and stabilize within a year or so. That might very well turn out to be the case, and it will be interesting to follow them in the times ahead. Annyways, I guess it’s not all that much of a suprise that these types of technologies and businesses struggle theese days.

Eeerh. Below is a youtube thing that I though would be “cool”, but I realize now that it is probably lame, at best. You have been warned.

Yesterday morning  I jumped into my 1987 Peugeot and drove the 90 kilometers from Dragvoll to Levanger (Notoriously known for trying to become famous as Norway’s number one “slow city”). The goal: to visit one of the companies I’m currently doing a case study on; Innherred Biovarme (Innherred bioheat). I had a very fruitful day together with the extremely enthusiastic manager of the company.

One of the things that struck me as a bit of a suprise was how “high-tech” their opperation was. Basically, they are suppliers of heat for public buildings (so far only one building – more are planned). This heat is supplied through burners using wood-chips as fuel. In other words not very technically challening (one would think). A bit bluntly the  heatingprocess can be described like this: 1) Insert woodchips, 2) Set fire, 3) refill woodchips after a week or so. But there are possible complications, a whole range of them, actually.  There are about 20 things that could go wrong, all of which are constantly monitored by various sensors. The activity is registered by a software-application, constantly feeding the readings back to the company via the internet (Literally into the living room on the farm of the guy I interviewed). Also, if something goes seriously wrong, an SMS with a description of the problem is immediately sent to the guy in charge of maintenance. This system allows the company to correct errors – most of the time before the user even realizes that a problem has occurred. Basically I think the system was pretty cool, although  one can probably debate whether or not the dependence of these types of systems are ultimately good or bad things.

Another thing that strikes me is how heavily businesses of this type relies on import of (very expensive) equipment. There are several groups of researchers working practically on combustion of biomass on a technical level in various ways here in Norway, for example at Gløshaugen. So far, however, this technology has not been commercialized in any significant way (that I know of, at least – please correct me if I’m wrong), with a few exceptions for traditional stoves. These guys imported their first burner form Denmark, while their next purchase is planned from Finland. According to the Norwegian government a new installation of this type or similar was opened every other day (!) last year. This means, I guess, that there should be a significant number of millions to compete for if someone should want to produce these types of things locally. Not only are there millions, there are “green” industrial millions – a type of millions one would think Norwegian investors were fighting hard over.

The element of “localness” (in lack of a better word) is, with exception of the technology, indeed very important for this particular business. The raw materials are harvested, refined and converted into heat for the end-user, all within a range of a couple of kilometers. This makes for an environmentally very convincing argument, of course, because the need for transport and other emission-heavy tasks are kept at a minimum.

I’ll do more interviews in and around this, and other businesses in the days ahead, more will eventually follow.

Lately I’ve been working on an article with one of my advisers where we compare media coverage of the climate crisis in Norwegian and Swedish newspapers over two periods (2002-2005 and 2007). The article is to a large extent based on past research by my adviser where she does the same routine, with only Norwegian articles, and for only the first period (which is not so strange, since it was published in 2006). In terms of methods we decided on a sort of quasi-quantitative approach, reading vast amounts of newspaper texts, but not really quantifying and counting anything  per-se. Bummer. Because after writing a draft of the paper before Christmas, my other adviser convinced us both that our argument would be infinitely more convincing if we could quantify what we had found in graphs and numbers.

Basically our results indicated that there was a big difference in the way newspapers covered the climate crisis in Norway and Sweden. The Swedish focused on consensus, the Norwegians focused on scientific disagreement and conflict. The Swedish focused on personal strategies and ways of coping with climate change, while little coverage of this type was found in Norway. In the second period There was a shift towards more system-oriented coverage and the political way forward. We portray the different ways of staging the climate crisis as different dramas.

In retrospect I guess we could have foreseen the comments on how concrete quantifiable no-nonsense numbers would improve our point. And so I started re-reading while counting the Swedish articles, which is my main task on this thing (I had already scribbled a bunch of hand-written notes on the articles so it didn’t take that long). A good thing, though, is that I got confirmation about the quality of our qualitative “gut feeling”. I mean; as this diagram clearly shows (God, that makes me confident of a statement) we were right all along:

Notice the yellow bar in 2007 that wasn’t there in 2005? Object to that, why don’t you? Sorry about the Excel-uglyness and pardon my Norwegian (if it’s even possible to make out what is written down there). And that is only a little bit of what can be done with the numbers, ofcourse. Putting this graph next to a graph of the Norwegian articles? How could annyone possibly dispute our arguments.