Biomass is a blessing

Reading the TTJ, listening to Confor, or the Scottish Executive's view would persuade anyone that absolutely anything would be a more pleasant task than promoting biomass.

You would think that the finest oak is being burnt rather than the brash, waste wood or offcuts from sawmills.

The panel board manufacturers in particular have drowned out any dissenting voices. These companies have a vested interest in sourcing raw material as cheaply as possible for their panel boards. Confor is supposed to be promoting all aspects of the timber industry, but it does seem to be heavily biased against wood fuel.

A few facts in this discussion wouldn't go amiss: the UK is overflowing in low quality forest extract and waste wood that has nowhere to go. This month Material Recycling Weekly has the headline "Recyclers swamped by a glut of waste wood". The waste wood aggregators are grateful to get rid of chip merely for the cost of haulage, and in 2011 650,000 tonnes were exported, including to biomass plants in Germany and even Scandinavia.

The Environment Agency is undertaking a consultation on banning waste wood being sent to landfill and estimates that six million tonnes of waste wood is disposed of in this way. This itself would provide electrical capacity for 950MW, enough to power almost two million households, ie Birmingham and Manchester.

If you are a builders merchant, you are paying £50 per tonne for gate fees to dispose of waste wood; many bigger firms are paying tens of thousands of pounds per year. If there was healthy demand for this as fuel, they could start to see a rebate.

Furthermore, Tilhill estimates that 20% of timber volume is left on the forest floor, in the form of brash and stumps, as it is not financially viable to collect it. If, as a forest owner, you could get £10 per tonne for an extra 1,000 tonnes currently left to rot, then that would be a boon.

While Sitka is sought after, try owning the barely viable Scots pine, or lodgepole plantations, then you would be eternally grateful for demand from biomass.

When I was a boy, thinning trees was worthwhile in terms of timber sales but, even with recent timber price increases, it isn't now. When you turn a saw log into planks, the offcuts and sawdust equate to a further 40% of volume. So if you assume a UK 10 million-tonne annual harvest, then a further four million tonnes are available to keep the lights on in the bonnie city of Edinburgh.

British renewable policy is relying almost entirely on intermittent wind power. Spinning only 20-30% of the time, turbines compare poorly with the 95% efficiency that biomass produces. Yes, biomass receives financial support but with the problems of funding new nuclear, and coal-fired power stations being turned off, there will be an energy crisis from 2017. We certainly have the fuel capacity in the UK to make a real contribution from wood, (perhaps as much as a gigawatt - enough to power Glasgow), which at the moment is a costly nuisance to dispose of.

So, in short, forest owners, waste wood aggregators, companies that produce waste wood and consumers of energy would benefit from biomass; those against just want to keep it for themselves.