The Fuel Price You Negotiate, and the Steam Cost You Pay

How to read this sheet

Calorific value as received is the input most often wrong and it moves the whole answer: biomass is bought wet, sold on a dry-basis certificate, and burns at the wet value, so a husk or briquette entered from a supplier datasheet will look better here than it will in the boiler. Take it from your own lot analyses. Boiler efficiency is likewise per fuel and per boiler - a grate designed for coal does not reach the same efficiency on husk, and assuming one figure across the table quietly flatters whichever fuel the boiler was not built for. A fuel that loses even at zero price is flagged rather than shown with a threshold of nothing, because its ash, handling and carbon alone already exceed the best fuel's entire steam cost; that is a real and useful finding and it should not be confused with being the winner. The thresholds are the durable part of this sheet and the ranking is not: fuel prices move, and a mill with a dual-fuel grate should be watching the price at which the order flips rather than re-running the comparison each quarter. Nothing here prices security of supply, which is frequently the actual decision - biomass is seasonal, its price spikes at harvest, a mill that has switched its whole load onto husk has a counterparty problem rather than a fuel problem, and none of that appears in a cost per tonne. Ash disposal is entered as a cost, and where husk ash has a resale value it should be entered negative. Finally, the switching capital here is the equipment only; permits, storage, ash handling and the production lost during conversion are not, and on a boiler conversion they are rarely the smaller half.