Air Burner Website Tailored for Australia Debuts at airburners.com.au
Air Burners has shipped its air curtain FireBoxes to Australia for many years. Most of our machines are used in the eastern states on the Pacific Coast side, but they can be found in Western Australia as well. The Australian market for Air Burners systems very much resembles the US market. Hence, the attention that we have given that continent. Australians have a keen interest in waste recycling and forest and agricultural land management. As are we, they are concerned with global warming and the forcers of it that can be managed, such as smoke (PM or black carbon), CO2, and toxic emissions from incomplete hydrocarbon fuel combustion. Methane from decomposing organic waste is another concern. The country with its vast forests, shrub lands and savannas is also constantly battling wildfires, or bushfires as they call them there. You can read more about wildfires at our Blog Resource.
As our air curtain FireBoxes are one of the essential and most suitable tools for strategies to mitigate forest fires and to rehabilitate lands in postfire cleanup projects, the theme of our Australian website is bushfires and the role of FireBoxes with respect thereto. The website includes plenty of technical information on our machines and highlights the PGF FireBox, the innovative system that converts part of the energy from the wood waste combustion into electricity and thermal energy for practical applications, like onsite kiln drying. Links to our main website allow the Australian visitor to quickly garner more detailed information on our company and its products, if desired.
The fact that our focus is presently on bushfires and forest fuels management does not mean that we are downplaying the deployment of FireBoxes for other applications in Australia, that is to the contrary. In agricultural industries, for example, vineyards in South Australia, the largest wine production region in the country, but also in all the other states and Tasmania, would benefit greatly from air curtain burn boxes. Another application would be the use of FireBoxes at landfills that are hard-pressed to deal with the massive amount of wood waste coming their way since China no longer accepts wood pellets (and most other waste material) from abroad. Australian government sustainability authorities in the various states are forced to rethink many of their aggressive recycling plans and look at the longevity and pollution controls in place at landfills and whether it is a good idea to burden them with biomass that could be utilized by energy conversion in a PGFireBox or at least eliminated more efficiently in a standard air curtain burn box with less climate forcing agent release than what is practiced throughout.
Australians have learned also, as we in the US, that many of the promising biomass-to-energy conversion technologies, like gasification, or captioning landfill methane do not work as well in real life as they do on a slide presentation or on paper, and especially not, if government subsidies and tax breaks are fading away. The downfall of most of these once promising technologies lies in the cost of preparing the biomass to be in a form and condition for energy extraction, as in grinding the waste into perfectly sized chips to be acceptable by co-gen power plants or making it into little pellets. That takes external energy, time and causes plenty of pollution and is called “pre-processing” and most of the time is ignored or misunderstood when these technologies are evaluated. Why rely on a system that needs energy from one source to make energy from another where the net gain is often questionable?
Air Burners PGF systems must deal with none of that – no preparing or “pre-processing” the biomass to turn it into energy. None – if the chunk of wood waste fits as it’s collected, it turns into heat and electric power. That fact lead to the fitting term “whole-log-burner”, and it is why the PGFireBox will stand high with success in the future where other much costlier systems of the past will rust into useless rubble.
An important Australian milestone was reached by Air Burners when the Australian EPA funded a comprehensive air emissions test of our FireBox under its auspices in Canberra, Australian Capital Territory (ACT). The tests were carried out under the very astute guidance of Australian Government and independent air emissions experts and state accredited laboratory technicians, and the FireBox was operated skillfully by one of our local clients. The emissions factors officially released, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proprietary design features of our FireBox systems and because of the provided government oversight, the emissions factor reports have been accepted and used by many government agencies in other countries, including the US, for their regulatory compliance assessment of our machines.
The Air Burners representative in Australia is Craig Wills. He can be reached at PH +61-417-650-414 (or 0417-650-414 locally). Australian customers who are in need of help with permitting our machines should get in touch with the factory (Contact Us) or our local representative. We have a close relationship with environmental consultants in Melbourne, VIS, one of the foremost expert companies anywhere in the field of air emissions and related air curtain burner technologies.
Air Burners is looking forward to expanding its Australian base significantly, especially with the PGFireBox systems to help turn some of the massive quantities of timber waste that is being generated annually with few places to go into clean, costs effective renewable energy.
