Wood pellets are among the most environmentally friendly fuels for heating your home. The pellets are renewable fuels made using fuel pelletmaking machine and come from different wood sources preventing any virgin number from going to waste. Good wood pellets should burn efficiently and emit very low carbon emissions than natural gas.
What kind of wood are wood pellets made of?
Wood pellets are normally a blend of different types of woods, for example, the Oak plus or the Alder. They could also be made of a mix of both of these woods. The type of wood used depends on the mill where the pellets were made. The mills could either be East or West Coast mills.
Most importantly, different organic materials are used to make wood pellets. These organic materials include sawdust, wood chips, brush, bark, and other lumber milling byproducts. Similarly, the byproducts from making wood products also form part of the components included in the wood pellets. Unlike hardwoods, softwoods are usually considered unfit for use with construction materials.
How are fuel pellets made?
When making the fuel pellets, the wood material is milled in a hammer mill to give a mass of dough matter. The wood material might be sourced from recycled wood streams or using the waste generated from timber production and the manufacture of wood products. The biomass materials are then kept in a manufacturing facility and sorted into different grades of pellet.
Sourcing the wood and minimizing moisture throughout manufacturing is an essential step of the process. Wood fiber is created from the pellets after loading the biomass in the grinder. A magnet is purposely located under the fuel pellet-making machine to assist in picking out any metal that might have mixed up into the wood.
Afterward, the wood fibre enters the pellet mill, extruded at high pressure through narrow holes in the thick metal die. The compression creates heat which softens the lignin that naturally occurs in the wood. The primary function of the lignin is to give the pellets their final shape by keeping the pellet intact. The lignin is a natural glue for the pellets.
Is making wood pellets profitable?
Making wood pellets is profitable because of the low cost of production that you might incur while making them. The money required to produce wood pellets may range between $150 to $200, including the financial recovery cost. When you spend this range of money, you expect to produce one ton of wood pellets.
So, you may consider investing your investment in making wood pellets because of the low cost of production and the market demand. Wood pellets are commonly used both in households and industrially. Thus, they are popular biomass since they are considered better than wood when burning and attract high profits.
The cost of selling wood pellets ranges between $200 to $250 for each tone. For this, it means you would make a profit of $50 dollars for each tone of pellets. The profits would be notable after the sale of a few tones of pellet.