Northern Woodlands Magazine

[ THE TRADES ]

We love trade magazines for the raw, primary-source-type look they provide at a given industry. The catch, though, is that the writing is often shop-talky enough to be inaccessible to people outside the club. Below is a column by Bill Bell from a recent issue of Biomass Magazine that offers some insights into the current bioenergy markets in the Northeast; Bill was kind enough to let us reprint it. We took it upon ourselves to annotate the column to give readers who aren’t from this world a little more information that hopefully helps illustrate just how intertwined the relationships are between paper mills, biomass energy, home heating, demand for low-grade wood, and the forest industry in general.

Expanding Wood Heat in New England

By Bill Bell

As previously outlined in this column, last year’s closure of a number of Maine’s paper mills and biomass electric facilities [ 1] has given rise to a number of initiatives designed to stem, and then reverse, the tide. These initiatives are now being placed on the table. Which will succeed?

First, what about homeowners? The nonprofit Northern Forest Center, serving northern New England and upstate New York, acknowledges that there have been “significant investments in the modern wood heat economy, but consumer demand hasn’t yet responded in kind.” [ 2] Branding and creative materials are being developed to feed homeowners into [ 3] a persuasive and informative website. Communities with favorable demographics (affluent and older folks) will be especially targeted with appeals to environmental and “heat local” considerations.

Perhaps even more helpful will be the recent study – commissioned by the NFC but coauthored by John Gunn, at times a sharp critic of biomass energy – that points out that heating with pellets from northern New England’s mills will immediately cut greenhouse gas emissions by over 50 percent when compared to heating with oil or natural gas. [ 4] The NFC is working with environmental groups, particularly local chapters of The Nature Conservancy, to counteract generalist attacks on biomass energy such as the recent Chatham House “study.” [ 5]

While converting homeowners to modern wood heat is one of the most important components to expansion of our Maine pellet fuels industry, it is also proving a very elusive target. Two years ago, the $5,000 Efficiency Maine incentive, supporting installation of a residential pellet boiler, was producing an average of one installation a day in the state. [ 6] This winter, despite the fact that the per-Btu price of heating oil now exceeds that of wood pellets, there are very few takers. In fact, the number of homeowners using the $500 incentive for installation of a pellet stove exceeds the pellet boiler installs.

Focus has shifted to larger-scale biomass heating projects. Key Maine legislators have joined in sponsorship

1 Last year’s closures were just the latest in what’ve been decades of decline. Since 1999, the Northern Forest region has lost 11 pulp mills – two in New York, two in New Hampshire, and seven in Maine. There are only seven left. According to Eric Kingsley of Innovative Natural Resources Solutions, regional purchases of woodchips in the Northeast have decreased by almost 4 million tons since 2014. To make a pile that big, imagine 300 chip trucks dumping a load every day of the week for the past three years.

4 Gunn was one of the authors of the 2010 Manomet study on woody biomass that caused a conflagration in wood-energy-policy circles. In the 2010 study, pellets were found to have a 25 percent lower greenhouse gas emission rate than oil after 50 years. We asked Gunn about this, and he said that the analytics were fundamentally the same; the difference is in the assumptions. The Manomet study assumed that the regional consumption of wood was static, and that any additional wood energy plant or plants would necessarily create an increase in harvest rate. The NFC study factored in the effects of the declining pulp and paper industry and assumed no increase in the harvest rate – the raw material for the pellets would be wood that was redirected from shuttered pulp mills to pellet mills. Another difference is that the Manomet study focused primarily on thermal uses from wood chips; this newer study explicitly analyzed pellets, and found that about half of the wood used in pellets comes from sawmill residue, which factored into their lower environmental footprint.

6 All states in northern New England and New York have some sort of incentives; you sign up for the program, buy your new, efficient wood boiler or stove from a certified dealer, and then get between $500 and $5,000 off the price. To learn more, go to https://northernforest. org/programs/modern-wood-heat/overview.

3 Phrases like this are another reason we love trade magazines.

2 According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 75 percent of households used coal or wood in 1940, but only 1. 6 percent of homes used these fuels in 2000. The 2010 census found that 2. 1 percent of households used wood as a primary heat source in 2010, with an additional 10 percent using it as supplemental heat.