Technical Note SB38: Dangers of using CO2 to quench wood pellet silo fires

A Canadian Biomass, 12 February 2018 news article

On July 5, 2010 a wood pellet silo in Norway exploded when firefighters released inert carbon dioxide into the headspace to lower the oxygen content and suppress a smouldering fire. The lesson from this incident is that the use of carbon dioxide to suppress silo fires is unsafe.

Smoldering fires produce flammable pyrolysis gasses. The gasses can travel and accumulate, for example in the headspace of the silo. The release of carbon dioxide from high-pressure cylinders can generate static electricity with sufficient energy to ignite the pyrolysis gases.