Visit to Balcas

12 members of the Club travelled out to Balcas where they were received by CEO Brian Murphy, fulfilling his invite when he talked to the club at the end of last year.

The members got a guided tour of the 72 acre site and and were amazed at the incredible complexity of the plant. Before the visit one was surprised that the piles of timber visible from the Killadeas Road could generate such a turn-over of £100m but when you travel through the site you soon realise that was only the tip of the iceberg.

The plant receives something like 70 articulated loads of round timber each day. Although there are 3 mills on the site it is the CAE Plant built in 2000 that is totally futuristic. When the logs are received they are scanned to enable the computer controlled sawing to guide the cuts to maximise the high value timber and minimise the lower value cuts. Nothing in the plant is wasted with even the bark and sawdust utilised. The optimisation control room was like out of a space ship there were so many screens on every inch of wall space.

It is estimated that the plant can process an articulated load of timber in 10 to 13 minutes. There are 100 'bins' where like profiles of timber lengths are stored as they are cut. Even odd shaped logs can be sawed off line to maximise the size of the timber member from the cut.

One of their trademark products is the PERMAPOST, this is a post made from the spruce tree, it is used for fencing, in recent years the company have lengthened the life span of the post by inserting incisions into the post, the post is then treated with a chemical, resulting in a lifespan of almost fifteen years. The company produces 2.5 million posts each year.

The sawdust is also sorted to maximise its value with the 'clean' sawdust retained for 'Brites' while the 'dirty' sawdust containing bark is used to generate electricity. On the site 2.7MW of electricity is generated each year with 58,000 tonnes of Brites produced.

The guides advised that they had 260 direct employees on site which was hard to believe as everything seemed to be so much automated with the odd man staring at a computer screen. On the site they operate two shifts - a day time and a night time shift so that the output of the machinery is maximised.

As we finished the tour we very much appreciated why Balcas is regarded as one of the leading timber producing companies on these islands; the number of pallets of kiln dried timber or fencing materials stacked up for delivery was never ending.

It was very satisfying to learn that a firm on our 'doorstep' is at the cutting edge of timber producing technology and a jewel in the crown of energy production / recovery.