New Straw Pulp Plant

I'm Lacy Gray with Washington Ag Today.

Conditional use permitting has been completed, water rights have been acquired, the notice of construction permit has been submitted to the state, and a general contractor has been selected. With all this under their belt Dayton based Columbia Pulp's CEO, John Begley, says they are hoping to break ground and start site preparation for a new straw pulp plant in November or December of this year.

BEGLEY: Construction will be next year, probably be 8 to 10 months of construction, with final startup planned for after the wheat harvest of 2015.

The plant could generate over 100 thousand tons of straw pulp per year.

BEGLEY: Within a 100 miles of the plant (location) there's about 4 million tons of straw available, and currently in Eastern Washington there's still about a million tons of agriculture residue burned every year. So there seems to be plenty of raw material available for us. Our plant will be 140,000 tons per year of pulp and consume about 220,000 tons of wheat straw.

Begley says that they of course will be paying farmers for their straw.

BEGLEY: One of the options we've looked at is forming a co-op with the famers, and that co-op would get a percentage of the company's profits to share among the growers, in addition to covering their initial costs of the collection.

According to Begley the process of turning the straw into pulp will be fairly simple and environmentally friendly.

BEGLEY: When you think about pulp mill, you'll think about the sulfur smell generated from large wood based pulp mills. This is a non-sulfur based process. It's not done at high pressures - it's not a cooking process, it's more of a mixing process. It will be a closed system. There will be no discharge of water back into the snake. So environmentally it's very friendly.

That's Washington Ag Today.

I'm Lacy Gray on the Ag Information Network.