Biomass-fueled County Road & Bridge Facility

About the Program

Category: County Resiliency (Best in Category)

Year: 2010

The biomass-fueled Gilpin County Road and Bridge Facility represents one small rural county’s efforts to economically and efficiently provide basic services—in this case road maintenance—in an environmentally sensitive manner, while at the same time offering a solution to an increasingly threatening local situation. Through the use of forest by products to heat a new, state-of-the-art maintenance building, Gilpin County offers an outlet for individual homeowners, neighborhood associations, other local jurisdictions and state and federal agencies attempting to deal with the ongoing crisis caused by the devastation of local lodgepole pine forests due to the growing infestation of the mountain pine beetle. By fueling the heating system with biomass, the county Road and Bridge Facility is able to process beetle infested wood for homeowners. In 2009, from June through November, the County received over 151 truckloads of logs. As the infestation of the mountain pine beetle is likely to spread, creating more visible and dangerous dying trees, the inflow of logs in only expected to grow in the coming years. As an added benefit to the project, biomass emissions create far less air pollution than wildfire, controlled burns or pile burning—ways in which this timber would otherwise be disposed. The resulting operation has sharply reduced energy expenditures for the new facility, facilitated local fire mitigation projects, helped promote healthy forest development and contributed jobs to the area’s economy by reducing expenses for local woodcutters. The total cost of heating the building with biomass is estimated to be over $30,000 less than the cost of using a gas-powered heating system.