Are Biomass Incinerators Gobbling Up Firewood?

[While we are cer­tain­ly not advo­cat­ing for any form of burn­ing, includ­ing fire­wood, it’s inter­est­ing how the bio­mass indus­try com­petes with itself. ‑Ed.]

- by Anna Simet, Octo­ber 03, 2014, Bio­mass Magazine

Last week, I blogged about the pel­let avail­abil­i­ty sit­u­a­tion in the North­east (the “short­age” last year, what might hap­pen this year, etc.) What I didn’t mention—new to my radar this week— is that right now, the very same thing is going on with cord­wood that did with pel­lets. It’s been mak­ing head­lines in sev­er­al north­east­ern states.

So, I called up my friend and Bio­mass Mag­a­zine colum­nist John Ack­er­ly, pres­i­dent of the Alliance for Green Heat, to get some more details on the situation. 

He said he’s nev­er seen a sit­u­a­tion like this.

“It’s unprece­dent­ed,” he told me, adding that cur­rent head­lines could get envi­ron­men­tal­ists up in arms  because it sounds like the indus­try is deplet­ing wood resources, when that’s far from the truth. “That’s nev­er the case, it’s real­ly just been because of the per­fect storm of events,” he said.

The storm Ack­er­ly spoke of is made up main­ly of three dif­fer­ent fac­tors, the first being last year’s cold win­ter. “[For this heat­ing sea­son] Peo­ple bought ear­li­er, just like they’re sup­posed to,” he said.

The sec­ond issue is that the region expe­ri­enced a very wet spring, so log­gers couldn’t get into the woods. “Some­times log­gers are the fire­wood proces­sors and some­times fire­wood proces­sors buy from the log­gers, but regard­less, there wasn’t [an ade­quate] sup­ply this year,” he said. “A guy who nor­mal­ly sells 2,000 cords a year now only has 1,500. So they’re not able to han­dle exist­ing cus­tomers, much less new demand.”

And last, many log­gers are retir­ing and there isn’t a younger gen­er­a­tion ready to take their place. “We’ve seen this in gen­er­al in the pulp and paper and lum­ber industries…there just isn’t a new breed, a younger gen­er­a­tion that wants to get into the busi­ness,” he said. “Fire­wood [busi­ness] is hard labor, and doesn’t have a high-prof­it mar­gin, so it’s not nec­es­sar­i­ly the most attrac­tive work.

Ack­er­ly added that anoth­er impor­tant issue that isn’t being high­light­ed is that half of the woodus­ing por­tion of Amer­i­ca still gets its own fire­wood and knows the drill. “Lots of peo­ple in Maine, Ver­mont and New Hamp­shire are per­fect­ly fine, because they’re old timers and they know you should have mul­ti­ple years of wood stocked. The prob­lem is more com­mon for peo­ple who are recent­ly get­ting into it, who aren’t get­ting their wood ear­ly and don’t have an extra year’s sup­ply like they should. Even get­ting it in the spring still isn’t long enough to ensure that it’s prop­er­ly dried for that win­ter; many species need a full year.”

Inter­est­ing­ly, in some places such as around D.C., fire­wood can be obtained for free—it’s a bur­den to tree trim­mers. “There are signs around [D.C.] say­ing ‘free fire­wood,’ placed by com­mer­cial tree trim­mers who would love to get rid of it,” he said. “In big­ger, urban areas, the cost of tree removal is  high, and so many are com­ing down for dif­fer­ent rea­sons, so they love to drop it in people’s dri­ve­ways or yards or let any­body pick it up.”

Final­ly, I asked John whether or not bio­mass pow­er plants using more wood is exac­er­bat­ing the issue. He said that while the issue is at the bot­tom of the list of rea­sons for the short­age, increased com­pe­ti­tion for supply—including from these plants that use chips, as well as for pellets—does fac­tor into the equation.

One of the big-pic­ture results of this sit­u­a­tion is that there will be a lot more wood smoke, in Ackerly’s opin­ion. “Twen­ty per­cent of the coun­try will end up burn­ing wood that’s not as sea­soned as it should be—because of the short­age, because they got it too late—and it’ll result in retail­ers sell­ing wood that’s not as sea­soned as it should be, and it’ll have a health impact.”

I also asked him what he thought about the pel­let industry’s cur­rent sit­u­a­tion and if he thought they would expe­ri­ence any issues this year, and he seemed fair­ly con­fi­dent that they wouldn’t, or at least not to any degree close to last year. “My pre­dic­tion is that the pel­let indus­try got their mes­sage out loud and strong last year, so a lot of peo­ple have bought ear­ly,” he said.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, he added, he doesn’t think the fire­wood folks did.

I’ll leave it at this for today, but John will be dis­cussing this very issue in his next Bio­mass Mag­a­zine column—you’ll want to check it out in the Novem­ber issue, cur­rent­ly in production.