Fledgling biomass industry struggles without federal dollars

That lack of financial support, which is needed “to stave off the complete annihilation of the region’s decimated timber industry,” is the focus of the Baker County Private Woodlands Association’s Sept. 24 meeting, said Bob Parker, Oregon State University Extension forest specialist for Baker County.

The agenda includes the ongoing investigation of woody biomass and other new marketing strategies for forest products.

“The low prices for chips and sawlogs, plus the steady loss of infrastructure as mills close down in the region necessitate development of  reasonable alternatives,” Parker said.

Without stimulus money or other assistance to help build woody biomass plants and markets, Parker said most biomass left over from forest health and fire mitigation thinning will be piled and burned, wasting the renewable energy resource and polluting the environment with carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

The Baker County Board of Commissioners and the Baker City Council, Gene Stackle with the Baker City/County economic development team,  and Steve Ellis, supervisor of the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest, have all thrown their support behind requests for federal and state stimulus money to build factories that turn biomass into power, wood pellets, biofuel and other products.

So far, Parker said most stimulus money seems to be going into wind farms and other forms of renewable energy, but biomass has not received a similar level of funding despite its potential to help reduce the nation’s dependence on foreign oil.

 Meanwhile, the ranks of loggers, lumber mills and other remnants of Oregon’s once-thriving timber industry are disintegrating, Parker said.

Stackle said requests for federal stimulus dollars were submitted for two projects proposed for Baker County.

Planning for one of those projects, spearheaded by the private woodland’s association, Wallowa Resources and Elkhorn Biomass of Baker City,  resulted in a $4.1 million request to help pay for construction for a $9 million plant combining firewood processing, as well as a steam energy plant that would generate energy and provide heat for a wood pellet manufacturing process.

“I still have never heard anything about what happened with that request,” Stackle said.

The same goes for the $2 million request submitted on behalf of Eric Twombly to buy a portable plant to process woody biomass into biochar soil amendment products and biodiesel.

Stackle said Twombly is moving ahead with his project even though he didn’t receive any stimulus funds, and expects to create five to 10 jobs initially with a portable plant he intends to operate in forests and at a landing site in the Halfway area.

Eventually, Stackle said, Twombly’s concept of using a portable processing plant could expand into a cookie-cutter operation with small portable biomass processing plants operating in several areas where thinning work is producing woody biomass.

If that happens, Stackle said five to 10 people would be employed to operate each of the plants, and other jobs would also be created to transport raw materials and distribute and market finished products.

The combined biomass plant proposed by private woodland owners, Wallowa Resources and Elkhorn Biomass could also add 10 jobs to start and more as markets and production expands, according to an analysis completed on that project. 

During the Sept. 24 meeting, Parker said Baker County woodland owners will hear what forest owners in other parts of the state and around the country in similar situations are doing to create markets for their logs and to develop woody biomass industries.

“One good example here in Oregon is the Oregon Woodland Co-op, headquartered west of Portland in the Banks area,” Parker said.

At the Sept. 24 meeting, the Oregon Woodland Co-op’s representative, Tom Nygren, will be on hand to tell Baker County woodland owners about the cooperative.

While private woodland owners are struggling to develop a sustainable forest products industry based on woody biomass, Parker said the region’s logging infrastructure is rapidly disappearing.

At the same time, an Oregon Department of Employment survey found an estimated 51,402 Oregonians are currently employed in what the state classifies as green jobs.

That survey also found that employers expect to add 7,409 green jobs over the next year.

The report listed the average pay rate for green jobs statewide at $22.61 per hour (42 percent of green workers in jobs with no minimum education requirement earn $15 per hour or more, and most workers with a bachelor’s degree earn well over $20 per hour).

Activities such as gathering, transporting and processing woody biomass qualify as green jobs, according to the Employment Department report.

“For the purpose of the report, green jobs are defined as those that provide a service or produce a product in any of these categories:

• Increasing energy efficiency

• Producing renewable energy

• Preventing, reducing or mitigating environmental degradation

• Cleaning up and restoring the natural environment

• Providing education, consulting, policy promotion, accreditation, trading and offsets, or similar services supporting the categories listed above.”

The purpose of the survey, according to Nick Beleiciks, senior analyst with the Employment Department, was to estimate the number of green jobs in Oregon, gather information for workforce training and policy-makers, and to identify future growth trends in green jobs.

With timber payments to counties and schools from commercial logging on federal forests dwindling to near nothing, and federal county payments in lieu of timber harvest revenues also expected to expire over the next few years, Fred Warner Jr., Baker County Commission chairman, said the county is pushing for federal stimulus funds and is also willing to do what it can to help establish a new woody biomass industry.

Payroll taxes generated by year-around forest jobs that would be created by a biomass industry are needed to help fill the gap created by the demise of the region’s timber industry and the pending end of county payments, Warner said.

Stackle said other than the lack of funding to build biomass plants, the lack of a guaranteed accessible and affordable 10-year or longer supply of biomass is the biggest hurdle to developing a viable biomass industry in Baker County.

Parker said private woodland owners are looking at the cooperative model as one way of filling the need for a guaranteed supply of biomass.   

Ellis recently told members and county commissioners that there’s plenty of woody biomass generated on federal forests to provide a sustainable supply of biomass.

Given the Obama Administration’s goal of reducing carbon emissions, including smoke from slash burning and large wildfires, Ellis said the Forest Service would be happy to increase thinning to reduce the risk of fires, and make biomass available to private enterprises.

Ellis said he’d like to see the industry grow and succeed to the point it could afford to pay the Forest Service for biomass.

Over the past two decades, as the region’s the timber industry shrank to near extinction due to a combination of past logging practices, lawsuits and court-ordered logging restrictions, Ellis said timber sale revenues have plummeted and firefighting costs have soared, leaving fewer dollars to pay for forest management activities such as thinning sickly, overcrowded, bug- and disease-infested forests.

Those are the very projects, though, that produce biomass.

Ideally, Ellis said, the Forest Service could use revenues from biomass sales to pay for a backlog of thinning needed to improve forest health, reduce fuel loading, enhance wildlife habitat and improve water quality and quantity.

Warner said the Baker County Commission strongly supports requests for federal stimulus funds to assist in the development of a viable biomass wood-processing industry in Baker County.

During a private meeting earlier this month with Oregon’s junior senator, Jeff Merkley, Ellis, along with County Commissioner Tim Kerns and Baker City Mayor Dennis Dorrah, urged the senator to help steer stimulus money toward biomass.

During that meeting, Dorrah said Merkley asked him and the others what their top concerns were for Baker City and Baker County.

“I told the senator I had three concerns — jobs, jobs, jobs,” Dorrah said.

“We talked about biomass and the potential it holds for creating jobs,” Dorrah said.

Kerns said he pointed out several things he felt were important to Baker County, including “finding a way to help us use the biomass.”

He said low log prices have also made it financially unfeasible for private woodland owners to do all the thinning needed to deal with forest health and reduce fuel loading and fire risks.

“I told him it would really help if we can get some government help to build some infrastructure out here, so we can do something with the biomass,” Kerns said.

After that meeting, Merkley brought up the biomass issue during his town hall meeting and told the crowd “I’m onto that.”