Domestic and Industrial Wood Pellets
Tim Portz, executive director of the Pellet Fuels Institute, provided a snapshot of the domestic U.S. pellet market. A total of 1.79 million tons of wood pellets were sold in the domestic market in 2023, slightly less than in 2022. Portz explained that this reduced volume—significantly lower than the most recent peak in 2017—is due to the unusually warm winter throughout the U.S. “All across the upper Midwest, including the whole Great Lakes region, up into New York State, it has been the warmest winter ever,” he says. “That doesn’t bode well for wood pellet sales, which is why we saw a relatively soft year.”
Portz emphasized the importance of wood pellet producers sharing their industry’s value and message with policymakers and expanding their support amongst forestry product interests and environmental organizations. Wood residuals are the “lifeblood” of the wood pellet industry, and their use is key to the industry’s value proposition, he explained. Wood pellet producers paid sawmills and wood processing facilities $270 million to purchase 7.7 million tons of wood residuals in 2023. “We pay for those materials, because we recognize their inherent value as a Btu,” he said. “We manufacture and engineer heating fuel from those wood residues; we recognize the value in it. We pass some of that value upstream to our partners in sawmills and wood-processing sites.”
Portz also outlined risks the wood pellet industry faces, including shifts in the clean energy landscape. He explained that since 2008 and 2009, words like “renewable” and “combustion” have been replaced with “low carbon” or “zero carbon,” and the priority has shifted to pursuing electrification first. Policymakers are prioritizing a net-zero narrative and want different things than they did several years ago, and wood pellet producers need to be mindful of this when they present and defend their value proposition to policymakers. “This comes into some of our big objectives in Washington, D.C., making sure that the federal government recognizes that biomass is carbon-neutral,” he said. “We’re taking materials that are biogenic in nature—the carbon’s already there—and we’re just recycling it and capturing the Btus from it; it’s a virtuous zero-carbon [process].
Accusations of deforestation and causing land use change are lodged at the wood pellet industry frequently, Portz explained, and the industry needs to be wary of statements from government bodies such as the White House and the United Nations as well as environmental groups that recommend avoiding the usage of biomass in favor of electrifying everything, even if it means doing it before the grid is green.
From the industrial wood pellet perspective, the challenges the industry faces are similar. Elizabeth Woodworth, interim executive director at the U.S. Industrial Pellet Association, stressed the importance of U.S. forests as the source of its “No. 1 and only raw material” and emphasized the value that forest education and the wood pellet industry’s role in caring for them brings to combating misinformation. In the U.S., 800 million acres of forest are responsible for absorbing 14% of the country’s annual greenhouse gas emissions. The majority of U.S. forests—57%—are privately owned, and most of that private ownership consists of property owners with a hundred acres or less. The wood pellet industry works alongside logging companies, sawmills, pulp processing and other forest product industries to use the entire tree. “A lot of the misinformation you often see is when people take pictures of log carts going into a wood pellet mill and saying, ‘You’re cutting down whole forests, and [that’s] deforestation, and why are you using whole trees to burn in boilers?’ I just want to pick that apart because there’s nothing further from the truth, honestly, in terms of what the wood pellet industry is using as raw material,” Woodworth says.
When a tree is cut down, different parts of it go to different industries, she explains. Wood pellet mills help utilize waste and ensure that the entire tree is used, everything from treetops, limbs, thinnings, wood chips and sawmill residuals. The industry has a particular synergy with sawmills, consistently sourcing some of their feedstock to make wood pellets. The percentage of residuals used in the industry varies depending on the demand for lumber in a given year.
Although the carbon used in wood pellets is renewable, detractors of the industry struggle to understand that cutting down a tree does not necessarily have a negative impact on the environment when done responsibly. Woodworth said that she sees “defossilization” as a better term to use when championing the wood pellet industry. She explained wood pellets are made up of carbon, but they are a renewable and biogenic carbon that can help reduce reliance on fossil-based fuels like coal and petroleum.
Note: The information in this article is for reference only and may change depending on the manufacturer and source of raw materials. For the most accurate information, you should consult experts, wood pellet suppliers or contact Overc.vn to answer your questions and problems related to wood pellets and wood chips.
Source:
- Biomass Magazine
- Overc Team synthesise, analyse and write articles.
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Our main activities are manufacturing and distributing Wood Pellets and Wood Waste. Our wood pellet products, which are made from Acacia veneer residual 100% or wood waste (logs, sawdust, wood chips, wood shavings,…), have been exported to many countries around the world such as Japan, Korea, EU, etc.
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