Who Pays For What You Throw Away
10,826 BTU's of fuel oil are required to produce one kilowatt of electricity. According to API's "Heating Oils, 1984" the average gross heating value of Number 2 fuel oil is 140,000 BTU's/gallon. Dividing the gross heating value per gallon by the input rate of oil per kilowatt, one gallon of Number 2 fuel oil can produce 12.93 kilowatts, rounded to 13kW/gallon of fuel oil.
At our location in Stuttgart, AR, we produce 12.8 MW or 12,800 kW. If this plant were fired on fuel oil, 985 gallons of fuel oil per hour would be required. Multiplying 985 gallons per hour times 24 hours per day times 350 days per year and converting to barrels at 42 gallons per barrel, we are replacing 197,000 barrels of fuel oil per year. The New York spot market for fuel oil as of this date, published in the Wall Street Journal, was from $0.50 to $0.61 per gallon, or $21 to $25.62 per barrel, averaging $23.30.
In summary, our plant in Stuttgart, AR will replace $4,590,100 per year of imported fuel oil. Since we import billions of dollars of energy as both crude oil and refined products, this may not have a significant impact on negative balance of trades, but this is representative of the potential of biomass energy conversion to reduce our foreign dependency and negative balance of trades.
Secondly, by using rice hulls as the fuel source for the Stuttgart facility, an alternate renewable energy source, we are reducing the amount of carbon dioxide production from fossil fuels by over (185,000,000) one hundred eighty five million pounds per year. The rice plant removed carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to make the carbon that we are releasing back to the atmosphere.
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