Baker and biomass

The biomass business we’ve been hearing about for years finally seems to be gaining traction in Baker County.

But we see some muddy patches looming ahead, and these bogs will have to be negotiated if this fledgling industry is to fulfill its economic and environmental potential.

First the good news.

The owners of Elkhorn Biomass in Baker City are planning a $2 million expansion of their operation.

Owners Lane Parry and Kyle Dunning, who started the business last year, have been chopping logs from private forests into firewood.

Now the pair wants to use other types of biomass — basically, logging slash that used to be piled and burned out in the woods — to produce briquettes and fireplace logs.

At the same time, Randy Joseph, a local alternative energy proponent, has secured a $10,000 grant for the Baker School District to look at heating Baker High School with biomass.

Both the BHS proposal and the Elkhorn Biomass expansion exemplify the elegance of the biomass concept: Thin overcrowded forests so the remaining trees grow faster and sequester more atmospheric carbon, then use the trees and brush to heat our homes and schools rather than a patch of forest where nobody lives.

Now about those mudholes.

Both of these slippery obstacles are related to supply.

First, although there are hundreds of thousands of acres of private and public forest in Eastern Oregon that could benefit from thinning, someone has to wield the chain saws and operate the loaders and drive the trucks.

More to the point, the biomass has to be worth enough that there’s money to pay the people who harvest and transport the stuff.

Second, a sustainable biomass industry can’t exist in Baker County unless public forests, which constitute the majority of the acres in the region, can supply a consistent volume of material.

We are ambivalent about the prospects for this.

On the positive side, Congress seems to be coming around to the notion that harvesting biomass can benefit the forest and help to curb global warming.

On the negative side of the ledger, a study published this month in the journal Ecological Applications is being touted as proof that forests are better left unthinned so as to maintain them as carbon sinks.

We’re concerned that people who oppose commercial logging on public lands will cite the study, done by researchers at Oregon State University, in their campaign to curtail thinning.

They won’t succeed, though, if people simply read the study.

The researchers concluded that forests east of the Cascades are sort of a special case. Although thinning such forests reduces their ability to hold carbon, at least in the short term, thinning can also prevent massive wildfires that cause far more damage, primarily by spewing tons of carbon into the atmosphere.

The bottom line is that thinning is a valid technique for managing forests. That thinning can also help the local economy makes the idea sweeter still.