Mark Sardella kicks some biomass.
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SFR: Your organization, Local Energy, is about to put a biomass heating system online at the community college and proposes the same for downtown Santa Fe. Is it strange to talk about alternative energy sources when New Mexico has been living high on the fat of natural gas income?
MS:
No. In fact, there's a depletion tax on all the gas we produce here. The idea is that, in recognition of the fact that it's a finite resource, we're supposed to be using that money to develop the long-term industry that's going to sustain us down the line. But it won't be easy to move away from oil and gas because they are incredibly useful for building enormous economies in a very short time. We are not going to be able to switch to renewable energies and keep those enormous economies, so the question is: Who wants to make that economic transition?
But biomass is economically viable on a local level to heat downtown?
The rate of return on investment is estimated at 15 years. The system we're looking at costs around $23 million. Based on the life cycle cost, the financing, the labor, the fuel, if you actually estimate out the whole cost of the life of the system, which is 50 years, you can say that the whole thing will produce heat at something on the order of $16.5 dollars per million BTU [British Thermal Units]. People used to say, 'That's so much more than we're paying now.' Well, this year, it's not. From a pure financial standpoint it's about a wash, except for one major difference, which is that the cost of biomass, because it's a waste product, is expected to increase very slowly whereas natural gas is likely to continue to rise.
And a new local economy can be built around such a system?
Oh yeah. More than 85 percent of every dollar you pay to a utility leaves town. That's because the owners of these utilities are primarily investors in Wall Street. So, here, we can flip that around and get roughly 80 percent retention per dollar in the local economy. If the fuel comes from a local source, if the labor is local, if the company that owns it is local, if the finance is local-that's a huge one-if we can get a consortium of locally owned banks to buy the bonds to finance building this system, it more than doubles the benefit of building it. Suddenly you have an enormous amount of energy dollars being spent and if they're spent here, they stay in the economy and multiply.
What about the emissions?
You have to consider them. The obvious benefit is a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. It's the result of working within an existing carbon cycle rather than digging up 300 million year old carbon. The reduction of carbon is on the order of 90 percent. I can't say emissions are zero. Natural gas has no particulate pollution whereas biomass does have slight particulate pollution, but there's no smoke.
What about depletion of biomass?
Absolutely a concern; it has to be addressed. The hope that I have is that because we're addressing it prior to doing it, we can say, 'Let's do it sensibly.' Nobody was asking that question when we all got hooked on oil and gas. Everybody thought getting hooked on a finite depleting resource was a good thing to do. And now we're looking at getting hooked on a renewable resource. It's easier to ask the question this time because nobody sees the intrinsic value of oil and gas but everybody sees the intrinsic value of a tree. The risk is that many times the government and this country have forsaken the environment for the sake of the economy. What was the elapsed time between Hurricane Katrina hitting shore and the federal government suspending all oil refining air regulations? If you're used to that model of sacrificing the environment and we stick with it when we go to renewable energies we'll have an environmental crisis.
So drawing from our local green waste how long can we operate biomass systems on a large scale?
There is a sustainable rate of biomass harvesting. I guess you could say the jury is still out on exactly what that rate is. Here's the scientific answer: The amount of biomass that you can sustainably take out of the system depends on your ability to close the cycle. When you pull trees out of the forest, you're taking minerals out of the forest. Most of those minerals actually fall into the ash that you create when you burn it. So to the extent that you can reintegrate that ash as fertilizer back into the forest, you can take a greater amount of biomass out of the forest.
How did the system at the community college come about?
When we came up with the project for downtown Santa Fe, we announced it with a big bang, a lot of people were excited, a lot of people were nervous and by and large nobody knew what biomass was. We realized there's a whole lot of infrastructure building and education to do. The college is an ideal partner for a smaller, demonstration project, first because they have their own thermal network already. We're just going to shift it from natural gas to biomass. And second because as a learning institution and a vocational training institution, it can begin to teach the jobs that are needed to operate the system. In addition to those jobs, I think that the biomass providers, which is a fancy word for those pickup trucks parked down on Old Las Vegas Highway, can, rather than sitting on the side of the road, bring wood that's cut in a certain way to sustainable standards, and get paid on the spot.
What was your favorite toy as a child?
I had a little yellow dump truck that ran on batteries. I remember at one point it stopped dumping. I cleaned the switch, I filed the battery terminals-I did everything I knew to get that dump truck running and I couldn't make it work. It pissed me off for years. It's probably why I became an engineer because making things work is just a fascinating science.
Local Energy's biomass system at the Santa Fe Community College will be unveiled 11 am-2 pm Saturday, Dec. 10 at the Early Childhood Education Center.
