Wood Pellet Promises Go Up In Smoke | Fitchburg firm stumbles on startup, hopes to make a recovery
Photo/Livia Gershon
CREATIVE REUSE: The United Co-Operative Farmers grain mill in Fitchburg was purchased by Creative Biomass in the spring of 2008. Today, Creative Biomass has struggled to meet orders, but its owners say they are on the way to making amends with angry customers.
It was a classic story of industrial renewal. An old grain mill in Fitchburg reopened with a new, 21st century mission: making wood pellets for environmentally friendly heating systems. The New Hampshire-based startup company running the operation, Creative Biomass, was prepared to convert much of the old equipment for its new purpose. And, despite the ongoing recession, it promised to hire 20 to 30 workers.
That was last spring. By December, things looked different. Some customers who had preordered wood chips for their home stoves hadn’t gotten them, and dozens had filed complaints with the attorney general and the Better Business Bureau. Some had asked for their money back and been refused.
“It’s been a nightmare,” said Shawn Pieterse, president of Creative Biomass. “But fortunately, all horrible things must come to an end.”
Hard Times
Pieterse said a series of unforeseeable setbacks, along with a few misjudgments, sent things spinning out of control for his company. But now, he said, things are on track to improve and no one has any plans to give up the endeavor.
As its name suggests, Creative Biomass’s operations in Fitchburg started as an unusual effort, some might say a foolhardy one. Charlie Niebling, general manager of another wood pellet manufacturer, New England Pellet in Jaffery, N.H., said he and others in the business were “a bit taken aback” to see the company buy a grain mill to use for pellet manufacturing since the processes are very different.
“Our perception is that they didn’t have a clear sense of what they were getting themselves into,” he said.
But David Streb, director of community development for Fitchburg, said it made sense for the company to buy the building because of the deal it got.
“They got the space fairly inexpensively,” he said. “It was a building that only had a few appropriate uses, and this happened to be one of them.”
State land records show Creative Biomass paid $400,000 for the hulking industrial building.
Looking back, Pieterse said he and his partner, Kevin Bell, don’t think they did anything “super stupid” in terms of their equipment or manufacturing process. But he said the mistakes they did make combined with problems outside of their control.
Ice And Rain
Pieterse said the trouble started even before he and Bell bought the plant, during the December 2008 ice storm. The plant, which the entrepreneurs had previously toured and liked the looks of, went without power for more than a week, and the outage left the sprinkler system running for days. The outcome, he said, was not just that they ended up buying a flooded building complete with bloated rat corpses, but also that some of the equipment they planned to use was damaged before they even touched it.
Later, practically constant rain for a long stretch of the summer prevented the local utility from installing a power upgrade for the company. And that, in turn, meant a piece of equipment that handled the first step in the production process didn’t get started up for an extra month and a half.
“Until we were able to grind stuff we had no idea what expect from everything else,” Pieterse said. “We weren’t able to tell what kind of issues we were going to run into.”
Niebling, who, in addition to running the Jaffrey plant, is chair of an industry group for biomass heating, said getting a pellet manufacturing facility off the ground can be difficult even without the complications of using equipment that wasn’t originally designed for the job. He said turning a variable raw material like wood into a uniform, clean-burning fuel is more complicated than many people would imagine, and the only way to perfect the process is trial and error.
“There are subtleties and nuances in the manufacturing process that you can’t learn about in a recipe book somewhere,” he said.
Ultimately, Pieterse said his biggest mistake had nothing to do with the production process. Rather, it was the decision to pre-sell pellets that the company didn’t have on hand, something he said he’ll never do again.
“Had we not done that we would just be here quietly dealing with our issues,” he said.
Backlash
Now, Creative Biomass is dealing with a lot of anger. Online forums about pellet stoves are filled with complaints from customers who didn’t receive the pellets they ordered, and two local papers have run stories airing the same grievances. Particularly vexing to many is the fact that Creative Biomass has not provided refunds to those who requested them. But Pieterse said the company simply doesn’t have the money to pay everyone back and still keep functioning.
Nancy B. Cahalen, president and CEO of the Better Business Bureau of Central New England, said her organization has received “numerous” complaints about Creative Biomass since November.
“What’s going to be the telling thing here is what they do with all these complaints,” Cahalen said. “It’s not like there are a number of issues here. It’s all pretty much the same issue.”
Cahalen said it may be possible for Creative Biomass to redeem itself in the eyes of customers as long as it fixes its problems and doesn’t let them crop up again.
That’s what Pieterse is counting on. So far, he said, of 2,000 tons of pellets that the company presold, it owes about 600 tons. Once a final piece of equipment is shipped in from Colorado, he said, it should take only a week or two to make those final pellets.
After that, Pieterse said, Creative Biomass will be in the business of winning back trust.
“I guess we’re just going to have to see how that goes,” he said. “The ones that have gotten pellets from us and like them, I’m sure they’ll come back.… I’m sure there’s some people we’ll never sell to, or it might take a couple years.”
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