Local blown deliveries of wood pellets
One of the points of wood pellets is to extend the range that it is feasible to transport wood fuel. But all the same, many people would rather buy their biomass from a local depot.
Forever Fuels has established dedicated depots across Great Britain, to enable good-quality, local, blown deliveries.
As of January 2012, we are operating from sites at:
- Maidenhead (Berks.)
- Avonmouth (Bristol)
- Okehampton (Devon)
- Retford (Notts.)
- Andover (Hampshire)
- Grangemouth (Falkirk)
By the end of February 2012, we should have opened depots at:
- Middlewich (Cheshire)
- Newmarket (Suffolk)
- Thurso (Caithness)
By the end of April 2012, these should be followed by depots at:
- Fishburn (Durham)
- Capel Hendre (Carmarthenshire)
We are trying to identify suitable sites to open depots around:
- Carlisle - Lockerbie corridor
- Newry (Northern Ireland)
And we may also start running deliveries from other pellet factories in the Republic of Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England.
Local depots improve the economic and environmental efficiency of delivering wood pellets. More fuel is burnt and carbon dioxide emitted per tonne-mile by the smaller, rigid trucks used for deliveries to customers than by the articulated bulk tippers that can be used to transport 30 tonnes of wood pellets at a time from factory to depot. Local depots enable pellets to be transported as efficiently as possible as far as possible, and minimise the distance that has to be traveled in the smaller, less-efficient blower trucks.
They also make better use of the blower trucks, which are highly specialist and very expensive, if the supplier uses equipment designed for the purpose. The more time these trucks spend traveling and the less time they spend delivering, the less value the supplier is getting from the investment in specialist pressurised tankers. That is why the suppliers who run long distances to make blown deliveries are generally using converted animal-feed trucks rather than specialist pressurised tankers.
