[ 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.