There's no question that Eagle County leaders are supportive of a company's plans to build a woody biomass power plant in Gypsum.

The looming question for the project currently centers around a possible land deal to preserve nearby riparian habitat on the Eagle River.

On Tuesday, the Eagle County Commissioners and staff met with three representatives of Eagle Valley Clean Energy LLC for an update on the project.

“We expect to break ground this year and finish in late 2013,” said Dean Rostrom, an owner of EVCE. “We are moving very quickly. This technology is nothing new — it's proven. We know how it's going to work and what the efficiencies are.”

Commissioner Jon Stavney agreed that many of the nuts and bolts for the project are already in place.

“A lot of the heavy lifting has already been done,” he said.

On the county's end, a letter of intent was recently formalized in which the Eagle County Landfill agrees to segregate clean wood waste and give it to EVCE to be burned at the plant for energy.

“This is a mutually beneficial arrangement,” said Ken Whitehead, the director of Eagle County Solid Waste and Recycling. “We will save about $15,000 per year in what we normally pay to have wood waste mulched.”

The primary resource for the biomass power plant, however, would be “junk wood” that is collected and chipped in the forest before being hauled to the plant to be burned for electricity generation.

“We would be using beetle-kill wood, pine needles and dead branches,” Rostrom said. “We would not be harvesting healthy wood or competing with logging.”

The 45,000 square foot biomass plant would be located next to the 345,000 square foot American Gypsum plant. EVCE is in a purchase agreement to buy the land — which is on the east side of American Gypsum — from LaFarge North America for a confidential price.

LaFarge is a construction material company that has gravel-mining operations and interests in the area. Part of the purchase agreement allows LaFarge to keep its mineral rights to the property.

The biomass plant will only take up a very small part of the property but EVCE had to buy all of the 94-acres from LaFarge. In addition to the land that would remain unused on the main part of the industrial-zoned parcel, there is a flood plain on a lower bench of the property along the Eagle River that EVCE would like to protect from development.

“We have shared conservation values and you are a clear partner in a real regional issue,” Stavney told the EVCE representatives, expressing the county's interest in seeing the riparian habitat preserved.

Access, zoning and the LaFarge-owned mineral rights are the main obstacles to accomplishing that goal. Access to the lower bench requires use of the upper bench, and the land might fetch better money without such an easement. Additionally, open space funds can't be used to buy property that is zoned industrial or might be subject to gravel mining, so the county's options for buying the land are even more limited.

“We have prospective buyers, which are fundamentally sound, such as schools — right now we're just talking about possibilities with the county,” said John Helmering, a private land consultant with EVCE and longtime real estate agent in Eagle County.

EVCE is based in Provo, Utah, where Rostrom lives, but includes at least three Eagle County residents.

Other support

The town of Gypsum is on board with the biomass plant as well.

Gypsum Town Planner Lana Gallegos and Town Manager Jeff Shroll are wrapping up a tour of similar-sized biomass plants in Oregon. The plants are most prevalent on the west coast and Gypsum's would be one of the first in Colorado, Rostrom said at a Gypsum Town Council meeting in January.

About the plant

The biomass power plant would generate 11.5 megawatts per year by burning “forest waste, agricultural waste and clean urban wood.” It would use 1.5 megawatts to power itself and the rest would be sold to Holy Cross Energy. A 20-year electricity sales agreement is already in place.

Rich Stem, formerly with the U.S. Forest Service and now a consultant with EVCE, said the power plant would require about 1,200 acres of forest per year as a fuel supply. The fuel would be collected is dead fall and thinnings that would mostly be chipped on site and hauled to the plant in trucks. None of the fuel would be sourced from sensitive areas such as designated wilderness or roadless areas.

“We are targeting a 50- to 75-mile haul radius from Gypsum,” Stem said at the Jan. 10 Gypsum Town Council meeting. “There is plenty of forest fuel available, in terms of dead wood. If we had more of these plants, it would go a long way toward cleaning up the forest. The Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management and the state would like to treat 15,000 to 20,000 acres of forest a year if it was feasible.”

Much of the ash — 99.95 percent — would be filtered out from the burning's exhaust. The vapor plume resulting from steam generated at the plant would also be “much smaller” than American Gypsum's vapor plumes, Rostrom said.

The plant would employ about 40 stable, long-term skilled jobs, amounting to a payroll of about $2.25 million per year.

Truck traffic and noise pollution would be relatively minimal, Rostrom said. About 11 to 14 enclosed semi trucks (not logging) would deliver chipped wood to the plant each weekday and chipping would almost always be done off site.

In terms of noise pollution, “there might be a steam release about once every six months that makes people turn their heads and go, ‘What's that?'” Rostrom said at the Jan. 10 meeting.

Regarding carbon footprints, EVCE representatives told Gypsum Council members Jan. 10 that biomass plants are labeled “carbon neutral” because their fuel (in this case, wood) grows as opposed to being taken out of ground like coal.