Maine Woods

These both involve heating biomass (mainly wood), largely in the absence of oxygen, at temperatures from a few hundred degrees centigrade (thermolysis) up to 1500 °C (pyrolysis). At the lower temperature char or... 

Today, large amounts of biomass are already used to generate heat and electricity (mainly wood) and are predicted to increase further (e.g., wood-pellet-fuelled boilers, wood-chip-fuelled CHP plants, electricity generation from biogas). 

In the forties more than 50% of its energy was obtained from biomass (mainly wood). In order to produce liquid fuels from biomass, basically two routes can be adopted ... 

Fig. 10 Influence of stoichiometric ratio in the reduction zone on the NO emissions for air staging UF-chipboard Tr= 1050-1080°C, CO <250 mg/Nm at 11% O2) and fuel staging UF-chipboard main, wood chips reburn fuel ...

Apparent kinetic parameters have been obtained for mass-loss and noncondensable gas evolution. The activation energy, above an ambient temperature of 370 "C, was found to be about 30 kJmol under the present circumstances. The activation energy for the imss-loss below 370 C agrees with those found in the literature for the kinetics of the main wood constituents. 

But that was thirty years and many seventy-hour workweeks ago, and today she had come to sell ideas, not products. Her company wasn t small anymore. It had become a 60-million-dollar-a-year enterprise, the leader in natural personal care products such as shampoos, salves, and her trademark lip balm, featuring the funny little pen-and-ink drawing of a sharp-nosed, bearded fellow in a railroad cap Burt, a melding of myth, man, and marketing that took off in a way no one could have predicted. In the last few years she had cashed in and turned her formidable and iconoclastic business skills—not to mention a few hundred million dollars—in another direction, conservation. Her focus was to chart a possible future for the immense Maine Woods in which spruce, pine, and icy blue lakes prowled by moose and lynx and loon would trump the real estate investors vision of resorts, golf courses, and suburban homes on clear-cut lands. 

Then, in 1998, the Plum Creek Company of Seattle, the largest private timberland owner in the nation, bought 1 million acres of the Maine Woods near Greenville, and promised a better future. 

Plum Creek was a new kind of corporate entity in the Maine Woods—a real estate investment trust (REIT), rather than a traditional timber company. An aggressive buyer, seller, and developer of land that offered consistently high earnings to investors, Plum Creek delivered a 20 percent return in 2007 (five times what Standard and Poors delivered that year). Such bounty is not obtained by growing... 

Less than two years later, Plum Creek announced plans to create in the Maine Woods the largest development in the history of Maine. 

It would protect some of the most significant terrain, scenery, habitats, and wildlife corridors in the northeastern United States set aside areas for snowmobiling and other, traditional recreational uses and still reserve two-thirds of the Maine Woods for commercial use. 

A soft-spoken outdoorsman and former state planning official, St. Pierre is passionate, reasoned, and convinced he has a vision that s right for Maine. He also may be one of the most patient men in the state, somehow maintaining his enthusiasm for a Maine Woods National Park despite a dauntingly long list of setbacks and disappointments. 

Whether the Maine Woods National Park could follow that same pattern is unclear. St. Pierre certainly thinks it can. As he has often pointed out, at the 200 an acre working forest price, the land needed could be purchased for less than the price of one fighter jet or two days of the Iraq War (at the rate it reached in 2008, 10 billion a month). Americans spend twice as much on Christmas trees each year as would be needed to buy land for the park. 

But the controversy over the lynx and the proposal to extend its habitat did not provide a path to resolving the debate over the future of the Maine Woods—it only polarized the factions further. As record numbers of Mainers submitted comments on Plum Creek s proposal during the public hearing process, it became clear that none of the options on the table had generated much enthusiasm—not St. Pierre s cherished proposal for a national park, nor Plum Creek s proposed mega-resort complex. Both ideas had large, vocal groups of opponents. It seemed the perfect time to propose a third way. 

Quimby made her initial purchases in relative obscurity, amid a mad scramble of real estate transactions in the Maine Woods as land changed hands more in a year s time than had happened in the previous century. But then in May 2003, Quimby joined the board of Restore as part of its campaign Americans for a Maine Woods National Park, in which 100 celebrities, artists, businesspeople, and others signed on to support the effort. A press conference on the initiative was covered by the media throughout Maine, and Quimby was quoted in her role as the campaign s cochair. She made it clear that her land purchases would be part of the national park effort. Her days of purchasing forestland in relative anonymity were over. 

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