Forever Fuels' bespoke wood-pellet depots

Forever Fuels has been working with Eurofab Engineering Structures Ltd to design the ideal wood-pellet depot.

We deployed the prototype in Okehampton in the winter of 2010/11.

We refined the design on the strength of what we learnt from Okehampton, and are deploying five of the second-generation depots during the winter of 2011/12, at Middlewich (Cheshire), Newmarket (Suffolk), Capel Hendre (Carmarthenshire), Fishburn (Durham) and Carlisle (Cumbria).

The depot incorporates many features to ensure the quality and cost-effectiveness of our wood-pellet supplies:

• The wood pellets are screened over a high-capacity screen with a 4mm aperture to ensure that the fines are removed as much as possible at the last point before loading onto our delivery trucks for delivery to our customers.
• We have a suction system to remove dust and equalise the pressure while the wood-pellets are being loaded onto our specialist pressurised tankers. A cyclone extracts the dust from the exhaust air of the suction system, to prevent any emissions.
• A magnet is used to ensure that any iron or steel that may have got into the wood pellets by accident is removed before loading.
• The wood pellets are loaded into the hopper via conveyor belts. Conveyors are the gentlest way of handling wood pellets (much gentler than pneumatic systems or augers) and minimise any degradation after the screen.
• We have sampling points at the last point before the pellets flow into the tankers. We take samples of the wood pellets loaded onto each delivery, for regular testing of key factors such as the fines content, and so we can run more specialist tests later if there are questions about the quality.
• The loading platform between the hopper and the truck provides a safe platform for our drivers to check the temperature of the loaded wood pellets (a high temperature would indicate a problem in the hopper) and to inspect them visually for any obvious problems. We have a maintenance hatch that can be opened if necessary to get wider access to the top of the truck, but thanks to this platform and pneumatically-opened hatches on the trucks, our drivers enjoy a safer working environment than normal.
• The hopper is elevated so our tankers can position themselves underneath for loading. Gravity feeding allows us to load the trucks very quickly, which means we can keep them busy supplying you rather than standing around at the depot waiting their turn to load. For even greater speed, we have four outlets (with different spacings for different trucks) and can typically load through two hatches at once. High-speed loading helps us to keep your costs down.
• The four outlets are equipped with loading "bellows". These are chutes that are lowered down onto the hatches before the pellets are released. They fit snuggly with the hatches to prevent emissions while loading the tankers (something that's impossible to do with tippers). They contain an inner and outer chute for the pellets to flow through the inner chute while the suction air is sucked up the outer chute to extract the dust and control the pressure in the tank to make loading as smooth as possible. They are also equipped with high-level sensors that automatically close the valves when the tanker is full.

The depots are dedicated to A1-grade wood pellets. They are equipped to meet all the requirements of ENplus accreditation. The hopper holds nothing but A1 wood pellets and the trucks carry nothing but A1 wood pellets. The staff are trained and focused on all the requirements to give the best service to wood-pellet customers.

Along with our existing sites at Retford (Notts.), Maidenhead (Berks.), Avonmouth (Bristol), Okehampton (Devon), Andover (Hampshire) and Grangemouth (Falkirk), these new depots (and our large fleet of 15 specialist tankers and 3 tippers) will give us the infrastructure to provide efficient wood-pellet delivery across most of mainland Great Britain.