Becoming the “greenest” paper mill in North America wasn’t on Bill Quigg’s mind when he began to look at alternate sources of hog fuel after mill closures on the Olympic Peninsula forced GHP to source material from farther distances, raising costs.
Instead, he looked to his own backyard, where logging operations have generated untold tons of slash piles—biomass and energy that has traditionally been openly burned, reducing air quality while needlessly wasting energy. Decades ago, 28 sawmills operated locally in and around Hoquiam, but by the early 2000s nearby sources of hog fuel for GHP’s boilers dried up as more facilities closed.
“There was too much cost and competition to source outside the local area when every mile costs real dollars,” Quigg says. “Chips were more expensive, and we were needing three or four hundred thousand tons of fuel, so we were forced to be entrepreneurial. We decided to start looking into collecting slash piles in 2002-2003.”
A separate company, Barrier West, was formed to collect and transport biomass to GHP. The operation invested time, money and a lot of trial and error to develop custom biomass collection and handling equipment, some of which has been patented, such as specially designed grapple and major trailer innovation.
Quigg describes the company as a “skunkworks” venture in some ways, with lots of experimentation, constant fine-tuning, evaluating and job costing to develop efficient procedures. “We’re always looking to develop the right tools to get high volume at lower costs,” Quigg says.
“We’re en route to the ultimate goal,” Quigg continues. “The loggers and landowners are learning and we’re experimenting and trying to develop (biomass collection) into just another part of logging activities.”