Colleges wean off fossil fuels

The Minnesota-Morris facility is completed but has yet to open, having encountered technical hurdles that the general contractor must first fix, Mr. Tallaksen says.

•The University of New Hampshire in Durham plans to provide 80 percent of its heating and electrical needs by buying and burning methane gas given off by a landfill a few miles away, making it the first university in the United States to be fueled primarily by landfill methane gas.

“There are some really outstanding examples everywhere” around the country, says Dr. Cortese of Second Nature.
At Middlebury, the wood-chip boiler represents a big step toward the school’s goal of becoming entirely carbon neutral by 2016. It reduces the school’s carbon footprint by about 40 percent, making it “a big, bright spot on the path to carbon neutrality,” says Jack Byrne, the campus director of sustainability integration.

Ahead lies “the next million gallons” question, he says: How to eliminate the rest of the fossil fuels still being burned each year for heating, cooking, and cooling. One option may be to replace the rest of the oil-fired boilers with wood-chip or other biomass boilers. The school will buy carbon offsets – which pay other organizations to reduce their carbon emissions to compensate for emissions – only as a last resort.

Middlebury’s wood chips currently cost about 40 percent less than the equivalent amount of heating oil. The expected break-even point for the cost of the plant is about 12 years, less than half its expected working life of 25 years. The payback could come even sooner if energy prices spike as they did last year, says Mike Moser, heating plant engineer at Middlebury College.

The wood-gasification process differs somewhat from the workings of a wood or wood-pellet stove. The chips are delivered by conveyor belt to a giant box, where they are “roasted,” driving off combustible gases. The gases are sent into another combustion chamber, where they are burned at temperatures up to 2,000 degrees F.

The college’s administration and governing board were very receptive to the idea of building a renewable-energy heating plant, says Tom McGinn, project manager at Middlebury, and liked the idea of cutting the need for imported oil. By using local wood, he says, you don’t end up with oil from Venezuela or the Middle East, but with fuel from some local “guy with a chain saw.”

“We’re supporting the local economy, and we’re definitely providing a financial benefit to the institution here,” Mr. McGinn says. “Where’s the downside?”

The college, which opened the first undergraduate environmental studies department in the country in 1965, is also experimenting with solar energy and has one wind turbine in operation. The college’s new environment center, opened last year, became the second academic structure in the nation to achieve LEED Platinum certification, the highest rating for a “green” building, and only the seventh LEED Platinum building in the US.

David Hales, president of the College of the Atlantic, argues that, as stock markets plummet, getting donors to sponsor campus environmental projects actually can be an easier sell. Projects that will pay back their cost in energy savings in two to seven years have great appeal, he says, when compared with donating stocks that may shrink in value.

“There are a lot of donors who say, ‘Oh, that makes a lot of sense. I can do that,’ ” he says. The projects act like “an endowment,” Dr. Hales says, that keeps growing in value through the years.

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