Cascade Foods located in Albany, Oregon produces approximately 5,000 tons of hazelnut shells every year as a by-product from their hazelnut processing plant. Currently, they mill down their hazelnut shells into livestock feed pellets that sell for $7.50 per ton. Recently, they have become interested in the value and market opportunities of potentially producing biochar via a pyrolysis reaction. Our engineering team was tasked with developing a process to pyrolyze their excess hazelnut shells and determine if the entire project is economically feasible. Additionally, the potential profits from the pyrolysis process are compared to Cascade Foods's current method to see if the project is worth the initial investment costs. A market analysis is also performed on the US biochar market to determine if the current level of demand could sustain Cascade Foods’s entry into the market. The production of biochar has a plethora of values and benefits. Some of these benefits would include the environmentally friendly practice of carbon sequestration, which would reduce the carbon load being emitted into the atmosphere by storing it into the biochar instead. Biochar has a crucial role in agriculture, because it can be used as a soil additive to increase water and soil retention during the dry months of the year. Furthermore, the addition of a pyrolysis unit to the existing hazelnut processing plant would create many high paying jobs which would help the local economy grow. After some initial considerations regarding efficiency and design, it was determined that a pre-manufactured pyrolysis unit would be more economically feasible than designing a custom made unit. With the implementation of a pyrolysis processing unit, it is estimated that the initial investment cost can be recouped within one financial year. Therefore, based on the required raw material load from Cascade Foods, a continuous fast pyrolysis reactor could be a lucrative alternative compared to selling unprocessed hazelnut shells as livestock feed pellets or mulch.
