Keeping home fires burning ( Logging for Bio Mass Fuel )

Rocky Mountain News ^ | November 9, 2007 | Roger Fillion

[george76]

New mill to turn dead trees into pellet fuel.

Colorado's first wood-pellet mill owes its birth to pine beetles that are killing millions of trees near the town of Kremmling and across northwest Colorado. The diseased trees will be the new Kremmling mill's chief input - a new twist for the pellet-fuel industry.

The 18,000-square-foot plant is billed as the largest west of the Mississippi. It's slated in February to start grinding trees into environmentally friendly pellets for wood-pellet stoves and industrial and commercial pellet boilers.

Many of the trees are too skinny or too cracked and old to be valuable as lumber.

"The dead and dying beetle kill was just piling up and was going to be a fire danger," ...

The plant will process trees as small as 2 inches in diameter and from as far as 100 miles away. When fully operational, the mill will produce up to 120,000 tons of pellets a year for homes, schools and buildings.

The region is estimated to contain 600,000 to 700,000 acres of dead and dying trees. The outbreak is expected eventually to cover more than 1 million acres.

Lovgren said the mill gives land managers more options to dispose of beetle-killed trees, particularly since the lumber often isn't attractive to commercial mills.

"There really aren't a lot of options to take your wood, especially the smaller-diameter logs and the dead and dying timber,"

[sinanju]

I remember the seventies when wood-burning stoves were all the rage. Some fashionable ski-lodge communities sure got a living-history lesson on old-fashioned air pollution when everybody in the valley started doing it.