MT - Fight over biomass - Law making it difficult for businesses to expand

After generations of disrespect, wood refuse is the material of the moment

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By ROB CHANEY of the Missoulian

Photo by Michael Gallacher of the Missoulian

Rumpelstiltskin spun straw into gold. Now he's coming for sawdust.

After generations of disrespect, wood refuse is the material of the moment. It took two days to run through all the ways it can be thermochemically converted into gasoline, mixed with coal dust for clean-burning pellet fuel or cooked into charcoal to capture carbon emissions at the Montana Bioenergy Workshop in Missoula.

And that's assuming it hasn't been assigned to more traditional uses like paper and particleboard.

It's one of the biggest fears we have - that everybody else will take our fuel and burn it, Roseburg Forest Products Co. plant manager Ken Cole told a group of bioenergy pioneers during a tour of his Missoula factory Tuesday. The market for pellets and biomass is putting massive pressure on us.

Missoula's Roseburg plant squeezes out 575,000 board feet of particleboard a day, enough to fill 11 1/2 railroad cars. The 200 million-square-foot facility is remarkably clean. That's because virtually every mote of wood fiber that doesn't get pressed into a sheet of particleboard is swept up and pressed into another board.

Cole noted that dust from the sanding machines fires the plant's boilers, which heat-treat the boards. The exhaust from the boilers goes through a $5 million biofilter system installed last year, which removes 99 percent of the trace formaldehyde and methanol. But those efforts to be ecologically conscious are running into currents from another direction - the hunt for ecologically sustainable energy supplies.

We could run two shifts a day, seven days a week if we could get the supply, Christine Johnson said of her Eureka Pellet Mills business. It's not that it's not there. It's that we don't have the access to it.

Johnson said despite their smaller populations, Germany, Sweden and Canada all produce more wood pellets for heating fuel than the United States. Her facility would love to get hold of otherwise unmarketable beetle-killed trees, but hasn't been able to negotiate contracts on the forests.

U.S. Forest Service Fuels for Schools program manager Dave Atkins said moving public buildings to wood heat and power made economic sense.

We're spending money now paying people to burn piles of slash in the forests, he said. Smurfit-Stone Container Corp. in Frenchtown is generating 17 megawatts of electricity with its hog fuel burner, while the Darby Public School system saved $140,000 a year on its energy bill thanks to a wood-fueled boiler.

All this enthusiasm for twigs and branches makes many environmentalists cringe. In a recent e-mail discussion, writer and ecologist George Wuerthner argued that stripping dead wood from forest floors was an ecological disaster.

Most foresters are so focused on trees (as wood products), they can't see the forest (ecosystem), Wuerthner wrote. Little things like ants and salamanders may be critical to the long-term health of the forest - and large-scale removal of biomass threatens these small critters.

Getting past that suspicion will be the biggest challenge for biomass developers, according to Sustainable Obtainable Solutions director Gloria Flora of Helena. Her organization promotes a process called pyrolysis that burns wood for energy but traps the carbon in biochar which can be used to fertilize other plants.

We have too many painful examples of getting snookered, Flora said, referring to federal programs like the Healthy Forest Initiative that started as a fire prevention effort but was transformed into permission to log old-growth forests. And then there's another challenge. A crucial federal law, the Energy Independence and Security Act, sets up incentives and development support for all kinds of renewable biofuels - except wood from federal forests.

That just knocks the socks off of anybody's business plan, Flora said. The restriction was put in the law to allay fears that speculators would strip-rake the forest floor in pursuit of cheap fuel. All three members of Montana's congressional delegation are trying to get that rule changed, but have not had success so far.

The problem could be solved cataclysmically. Flora pointed to other research that a century of fire suppression in the national forests has left them so overstuffed with debris, trees are dying at twice the normal rate since 1986.

We have to get some of that material out of the forest, Flora said. It's going to burn one way or another, by pyrolysis or forest fire.

Additional Information

Web Site: http://missoulian.com

Category: Forestry>Biomass Energy

Region: Montana

Ad Running: 5/13/2009-6/12/2011

Ad Posted: 5/13/2009 5:33:12 PM

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