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The source for Canadian and U.S. lumber and panel prices
A 60 year walk down forestry's memory lane. Click to find out more!
Last week's article "US Real Estate" can be found HERE
Changes to pine wood wrought by the beetle and its associated bluestain fungi have challenged pulp mills, but industry researchers funded by Canada's federal Mountain Pine Beetle Program and Forestry Innovation Investment have found solutions that may even save mills money, says the April 2010 issue of Information Forestry, published by the Canadian Forest Service. When pulp mills first processed beetle killed pine, kraft mills faced a slippery problem. Treating the wood produces soap—a mix of fatty acids and resins usually skimmed, converted to tall oil, and burned in lime kilns to reduce fossil fuel use in chemical recovery.
Breakthroughs and Developments
“When the beetle first struck, mills were swamped with soap because the pine trees reacted by trying to pitch out the invading beetle,” explained Vic Uloth, chemical recovery specialist at FPInnovations in Prince George.
This soap was sinking to the bottom of the black liquor tank, thus the concentrator began gumming up, and the recovery boilers began producing too much steam. Uloth found that adding canola plant waste to the mix increased the fatty acids sufficiently to make the soap float. Uloth and colleagues recently tried adding canola waste to the kraft process in trial runs at West Fraser's Cariboo Pulp & Paper Mill in Quesnel. Results were promising, and they hope to integrate the process into industry, which could save each affected mill up to $2 million a year.
Sawmill operators also increasingly face the challenge of processing beetle kill, needing to adapt operations to accommodate an increased diet of checked (split) logs. Checking is a result of rapid drying of the log after death caused by the beetle. This condition makes it more difficult to extract lumber value and volume from each piece processed.
FPInnovations and BC Forestry Innovation Investment in June released sawmill software called "Return to Log Calculator for Checked MPB Logs", which was designed to help measure the impact of the epidemic on their bottom line. The proprietary software simulates how check severity affects the outturn of individual lumber grades. After the operator enters costs, prices, and mill production statistics, the software calculates break-even costs for different logs, operating margins, and lumber recoveries.
Sawmills using this software will be better prepared for the challenges posed by the beetle situation rather than being caught by declining log quality and reduced sawlog availability. An important selling feature of the software, says FPInnovations Sawmill Operations Scientist Joel Mortyn, is that it comes pre-loaded with parameters related to actual beetle-kill check severity based on data collected by the software program. Sawmill operators will be able to develop recovery strategies based on the predicted volume, check severity, and diameter of beetle-killed logs entering the sawmill in future. This may include developing a sorting strategy for logs or changing the sawmill's production strategy by aiming at recovery of specific grades based on the characteristics of the beetle-killed logs entering the mill.
Preventing the spread of the pine beetle in Alberta and beyond continues to be of critical importance. In their presentation at July's International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software in Ottawa, ON, Liliana Péreza and Suzana Dragicevicb of Simon Fraser University explained that salvage harvesting is the most effective strategy to affect pine beetle infestation rates. In a study titled "Exploring Forest Management Practices Using an Agent-Based Model of Forest Insect Infestations", the researchers proved that sanitation and salvage harvest strategies diminish the total loss of timber in a period of five years. The use of this management technique generates a reduction of 25 per cent in the number of forest stands killed by pine beetle, compared to leaving the salvage behind in the absence of a management strategy.
The outcomes reveal that the implementation of this technique reduces the mortality rates of pine trees by successfully controlling the pine beetle population, because the outbreak is contained by cutting down all the healthy and mature trees with the purpose to reduce the wood loss.
This might seem like a drastic and severe solution, but it's preferable to abandoning the healthy trees to become infested within the ever-growing volume of dead and dry beetle-kill wood, while the pine beetle infestation marches resolutely on.
And what of the existing beetle kill, that which is too long-dead and dried out for even composite wood technology? Madison's has reported regularly on new technology in biofuels, and continues to be on the look out for further developments.
Cobalt Technologies, out of California, announced in April it had made a breakthrough in producing biobutanol from beetle-killed lodgepole pine feedstock using a drop-in replacement for petroleum and petrochemicals. While the product is primarily used as an industrial solvent, biobutanol is also a liquid alcohol fuel that can be used in today’s gasoline-powered internal combustion engines. Cobalt Technologies is currently collaborating with Colorado State University to evaluate the fuel’s viability for use in commercial vehicles. According to company spokesperson Rick Wilson, harvesting the affected trees could not only produce low-carbon fuels and chemicals, but could also create jobs and establish a "foundation for a sustainable biorefinery industry. With this breakthrough, we've been able to turn a problem into an opportunity. If we use only half of the 2.3 million acres currently affected in Colorado alone, we could produce over two billion gallons of biobutanol -- enough to blend into all the gasoline used in Colorado for six years."
Word gets around fast, and on August 20 the city of San Jose, CA, and venture-backed Harvest Power announced that there could someday be biomethane fueling stations around the city, according to the Silicon Valley / San Jose Business Journal. A second venture, announced at the same time, involves Cobalt Technologies, which is in the early stages of designing a demonstration-scale plant to process wood waste and manufacture an estimated 1 million gallons annually of biobutanol.
Working together, these new ideas can help pulp and lumber mills run profitably using beetle kill, reduce the scope of further infestation beyond British Columbia, and use the existing feedstock littering forest floors after the pine beetle moves on.
