The low price of natural gas is clobbering every other fuel for electric power plants – nuclear, coal, whathaveyou – and biomass is no exception (as Concord Steam found out).
One of the groups being hit is loggers, who can no longer sell low-grade wood for chips – and it’s hard to profit off a woodlot job, if you can only sell the sawlogs and firewood.
I wrote about their situation in today’s Monitor, and you can read it right here – you’ll learn tidbits like the fact that Maine pulp giant Vesco cut back its purchasing by 800,000 green tons a year, equivalent to the wood burned by more than 13,000 combined-heat-and-power units.
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it’s not hard to profit on logging jobs without chip or pulp markets. it is hard to avoid highgrading woodlots with minimal or nonexistent chip or pulp markets, as this low quality, poor value wood is left to continue growing. it will get bigger, but not better, resulting in a forest with very few valuable trees, replaced with the junk for which no market was available.
i assume you refer to Verso, which continues to struggle financially.
The article mentioned the problem of “highgrading” and how it degrades the value of forests over time.
i’m not a monitor subscriber, so i missed the article to which you refer. that might have clarified the context of your statement.
still, having made note of the role low-grade wood plays in managing forests, i don’t immediately see how not cutting it will reduce profit (to the logger), unless your premise is that low-grade products generate the most profit to a logging contractor on a unit basis. if that is your point, perhaps that is a subject itself worth looking into.
to be sure, there are limited numbers of loggers operating with conventional equipment (cable skidder and chainsaw), yet those who do tend to produce sawlogs, pallet, tielogs, and firewood, for a profit. logs are what such contractors want to produce; firewood has typically been a byproduct of harvesting sawtimber, and is often stockpiled in order to have something to do on rainy days or during mud season.