According to the Wood Resource Quarterly, the United Kingdom has became one of the largest importer of wood pellets in the world in a very short time. Through Wood pellets market started in the UK in the late 1990’s, it has a rapid development in recent 30 years. Both the consumption and production of wood pellet in the UK market have been increasing in the latest few years.
There was no wood pellet plants in the UK market until 2002, when the first wood pellet production was produced by the Wales Bio-Fuel Centre Welsh Biofuels Ltd. While the development of wood pellet production was really began in 2005, the commissioning of the pelletizing plant with a production capacity of 55,000 tons. Then in 2008, several new wood pellet plants were established and the wood pellet production increased. While in 2009, according to the estimation, the wood pellet production capacity in UK were amount to 218,000 tons. Then in the latest couple years, wood pellet production became very hot for the financial support policies on biomass. In 2012, the UK government announced, as part of its review on financial supports for the renewable energy that it wood continue to offer generous subsidies to bio energy. In addition, the United Kingdom Government has a target to provide 15% renewable energy by 2020 and wood pellet, as the most common kind of renewable energy, especially benefiting from the target.
Wood Pellet Application in UK
At the same time, wood pellet consumption has been also increasing in the past decades. Different from other countries which used wood pellets for residential heating, wood pellet productions in UK are mainly used as co-fired in the power stations for the production of electricity. While, part of wood pellet production are also consumed by individual households for space heating. Only the year in 2008, there were 538 pellet boilers been installed and in the following year 2009, about 750 to 1000 pellet boilers and 200 pellet stoves were installed. The increasing wood pellet consumption made it hard for the domestic wood pellet suppliers to meet the supply for lacking of wood pellet raw materials. So wood pellets are necessary imported from other counties. While for wood pellet prices in the UK wood pellet market, it has been risen in a stable way and in 2012 the average delivered wood pellet price is about £185/tonne to £190/tonne.
Materials Available in UK for Making Biomass Pellets
Though wood waste and wood sawdust are the main raw materials of making wood pellets, some agriculture residues are also used for making wood pellets in the UK wood pellet market. And since lacking of raw materials of making wood pellets, the UK government now are planning for develop more biomass waste to make wood pellets. Our company is specialized in providing wood pellet making machines such as wood pellet mills, and raw materials like wood sawdust, wood chips, wheat straws and husks and other agriculture residues can be made into useful wood pellet by using our wood pellet machine.
