A company that’s been planning since 2006 to build an ethanol manufacturing plant at Longview’s Mint Farm Industrial Park has decided instead to build a facility that will burn wood waste to produce electricity.

Northwest Renewable, LLC, a Vancouver-based company owned by U.S. Ethanol, estimates the $72.5 million “biomass” power project will create up to 400 construction jobs and up to 70 permanent jobs through logging and processing of the wood products.

In addition to jobs, the 24-megawatt “biomass direct combustion electric power plant” also would significantly add to the city’s tax base when it is complete at 1100 Weber Ave.

Various wood-waste sources — including wood chips and hog fuel — would be burned to generate steam. The high pressure steam would drive a turbine to churn out power.

The company hopes to start construction next year.

“This is really good news. … It’s been a long time coming. We’ve been working with this company for three or four years now,” said Cowlitz Economic Development Council President Ted Sprague, adding that he expects the jobs created will pay above-average wages.

Northwest Renewable’s original plan was to begin producing corn-based ethanol at the Mint Farm in June 2008. But the company’s 31-acre property has sat idle since the company broke ground on the $100 million project in December 2006. In the years since, U.S. Ethanol’s parent company, Makad Corp., has been redesigning the plant to incorporate the newest technology and comply with air emission laws, Makad Corp. told The Daily News last November.

As bankruptcies and shutdown wracked the ethanol industry over the last year, Longview city officials say they’ve been working for several months with Northwest Renewable to develop the biomass power plant project.

“With the collapse of the corn ethanol industry, they were looking at other opportunities to develop the site out there. With a lot of the emphasis national on green energy, they started looking at a biomass power plant,” City Manager Bob Gregory said Thursday. “I was very excited about it. … It’s a very sound technology, very simple technology that’s been around for awhile.”

Northwest Renewable still intends to eventually build a cellulosic ethanol plant at the Mint farm as a “spin-off companion” to the biomass plant, Gregory said. (Cellulosic ethanol comes from cellulose, a common plant fiber, instead of sugar. So instead of using corn or sugar cane, cellulosic ethanol plants can extract fuel from many types of vegetation, such as grass clippings or tree limbs.)

Northwest Renewable is pursuing the biomass power plant now because it’s easier to get financing these days through federal economic stimulus money and other funding sources for biomass projects, said Assistant City Manager Dave Campbell.

Partly due to the federal stimulus package, which includes $800 million for biomass energy, converting scrap wood products into power is an idea that’s growing in popularity. During a House Energy and Environment Subcommittee briefing in April, U.S. Rep. Brian Baird, the committee’s chairman, said biomass energy production could help pulp and paper producers weather economic downturns and prosper during better times. The expanded business would help mills stay open, he said.

Following that subcommittee briefing, Weyerhaeuser spokesman Bruce Amundson said his company was exploring combining with Chevron to harvest the brush between trees for fuel, which could add jobs in the company’s timberlands.

Northwest Renewable hasn’t determined where it will get its wood products, but the company is happy to be able to develop the Longview property, spokeswoman Tawni Camarillo said Thursday.

“We put a lot of money in the property. We don’t want to abandon Longview or our property.”

According to city documents, Northwest Renewable intends to finance the project through the issuance of the Washington Economic Development Finance Authority’s tax-exempt economic development revenue bonds. The City Council must approve a resolution stating its support of the bond issuance before WEDFA will proceed.

Campbell emphasized that approving the bond issuance does not in any way obligate the city or state to the project. The city has supported such bonds in the past for other private developments, including Waste Control’s new transfer station and collection facility, he said.

Longview lands grant for Mint Farm upgrades

The city of Longview learned Thursday it was awarded a $1.4 million Economic Development Administration grant to build roads and extend utilities in the remaining undeveloped portion of the Mint Farm Industrial Park.

The infrastructure will serve Northwest Renewable’s property, on which the Vancouver-based company intends to build a biomass electric power plant. The improvements also will serve about 50 other acres of Mint Farm land, which will make the land more marketable and “shovel ready” for future development, said City Manager Bob Gregory.

“It’s more good news for the city, absolutely,” Gregory said Thursday. “I just think this really puts the Mint Farm in an excellent position when the economy turns around again.”

The grant was issued as part of the federal stimulus package. The EDA is an agency within the U.S. Commerce Department and supports the economic development needs of distressed communities throughout the country.

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