This is Forest to Frame, where we explore how restoring forests creates beautiful spaces. A podcast dedicated to conversations with industry leaders shaping the future of the forest industry. And now, here's your host, Russ Vaagen

Welcome everybody to this episode of Forest to Frame Today I want to talk about biomass power and energy. I see a tremendous opportunity for us in particular in the US to use a lot of the biomass that's going unused right now to turn it into on-demand energy and biomass power generation. So I've had a lot of experience in this over the years. At Boggan Brothers Lumber, we had a four megawatt power generating station. And just to put that in perspective, that is a lot of power. That's a lot more than the mill actually takes. I think the mill maxed out with everything running was a little over a megawatt. So if you were able to produce four megawatts of power, you're able to produce another, you know, two and a half or three megawatts for the grid. I can't remember how many thousand homes that supplies, but it's a lot of homes. And a four megawatt power generating station is quite small. We have a 50 megawatt, approximately 50 megawatt power generating station owned by our regional utility of Vista Utilities in Kettle Falls. So that's, you know, over 10 times the size of the the one that we operated in Colville for years. And A lot of people don't know where the feedstock comes from for those power generating stations, but primarily it's the bark that comes from sawmills and plywood plants and other places. They take the bark off the log before they turn it into lumber. And that bark holds a lot of BTU value, but it's also the lowest value piece of the, of the log through the process. So it provides a low cost input and they build, you know, essentially mountains of this stuff, and then they push it into the feed system and then they burn it. That burn then heats up a chamber. That chamber has water pipes in there. Those water pipes are then heated up to a point where they get superheated with steam, and that steam creates pressure, and then that gets piped out to a turbine generator, which spins and creates the power. So there's been a lot of concern over biomass power. Is it really green or is it gonna cause us to value the forest differently and we'll cut them all down just for the use of their biomass for the energy? I think a lot of that's hyperbole and fear-mongering and misunderstanding. I don't think anybody intentionally wants to take a green energy source and you know, drive concerns that it's not green. But I think a lot of those are, you know, if we open the door to biomass energy from our forests, will we then value them for the power that they can provide more than the forests themselves? And We are under-utilizing the material in our forests at a scale that would drive most people crazy if they really knew. But when we go out and thin these forests, you know, as many times, they have 10 times the number of trees per acre than they're supposed to have. And these aren't big trees, they're little trees and they're medium-sized trees. And the forest floor isn't really growing with vegetation because the canopy is drowning the light out that gets to the forest floor. And the trees that do survive are typically not very healthy because they don't have enough nutrient level to be healthy, so they don't get to their optimal size. So when you have that many trees there, when you go to thin them, you have all kinds of debris from the limbs, from broken tops, from dead trees, from other things. And so there's plenty of organic matter out there for the soil. What we need to do is thin the forest, leave the appropriate level of trees, the right species that are supposed to be there, so they can get to what's called their late cereal stage and become an old growth tree eventually. But when we go in there to do that, we create far more material than the sawmills take, even then the chipwood that comes out of there. And so the saw logs in our area go down to four and a half inch top and below that or anything with a lot of rot or, you know, that's really dried out and isn't suitable for sawmilling goes into a chipwood program. Now, thankfully, we have in this region a pulp mill and a series of pulp mills. There's one in Lewis, Idaho. There's one at Wallula outside of the Tri-Cities. There's another one in Castlegar, British Columbia, and they consume the wood chips, the clean wood chips. But in many cases, we don't have that pulp and paper industry. So if we were going to go thin and restore forests in, let's say, Colorado, there's an opportunity to use that woody biomass for green energy. So I'll get to that in a moment. But if we go back to the forest that we're managing here, and we have a very good infrastructure in Northeast Washington, North Idaho, this whole corridor here, where we've got markets for the wood chips, we've got markets for the sawdust, and shavings, they go to particle board plants, or they go to pellet producers for wood pellets to heat homes. And then, of course, the lumber, the plywood, and the other products that are produced. So even that, with all that utilization, all that pressure to pull the material out of the forest once it's harvested, we still have a tremendous amount of slash out in the forest, huge piles. And these piles typically get burned. And although there's nothing wrong with that, I mean, those forests would likely burn otherwise had we not managed them in a catastrophic wildfire. So the amount of carbon released by those slash piles is minuscule compared to a huge catastrophic wildfire. But what if for a portion of those lands that are you know within reasonable haul distance, we could pull that material out put it into a cogen plant. And I say cogen that means cogeneration steam and power or heat. and power. A lot of sawmills use the steam power to dry the lumber in their dry kilns, and then they use the other steam to turn the turbine. So that's cogeneration. When I say cogen, or you hear cogen plant out there that's talking about biomass to energy, just using it in different ways. But the if we were to bring that material out and run it through a clean burn system, which includes what's called an ESP, electrostatic precipitator, which is essentially a active electronic screening for any ash or what we would call heavies that would make it out of the smokestack when it's burned. So you end up getting a really clean burn and you look up and you see a cogen plant running that is got an ESP on there, you can't actually see smoke coming out of the stack. Some people think when it's cold out and the steam coming out, that's smoke, but it's not. But in a hot clear day, you can see up there and you can see the heat escaping up the stack. I think there's opportunities to use that heat better than we do. But the point is, that by using this electronic system, it's basically like a bug zapper for smoke and ash content. So what it does is the electronic system zaps the pieces and gets them to collect and they drop to the bottom in a form of ash or even biochar. I think it's a little light to be called biochar at that point. But it's still, if you go, and we've got experience with this, if you go and apply it to like a field, you get a lot of green growth because that ash content holds the water. And so it doesn't leak through the soil system and out to the water table. It actually holds it closer to the surface. So there are beneficial properties that can be used rather than letting it out to the atmosphere. So we have a clean burn, we're burning something that would have otherwise either been burned in an uncontrolled environment or gone to waste, and it just rots and there's CO2 let out when it rots. If we really understood it, I think it would drive serious infrastructure investments in biomass, green energy, and it should be green energy. And by the way, it's on demand. So as long as you're burning it in that system and you're turning the turbine, you've got power. It doesn't matter if the wind's blowing or the sun is shining. So it's a great compliment to solar and wind, but it's also just great power in general. And I have this vision where we could go to an area, I like to use Colorado because most people can understand that in their head and what it looks like there, that has almost no sawmill infrastructure, no pulp and paper infrastructure, no mass timber infrastructure. There's some, I mean, no disrespect to those that are working there, but for its size, it's very, they're not even scratching the surface of the forest health issue there. But what if we were to build a right size sawmill to a large scale stewardship program where we were thinning the forest at scale 250, 300,000 acres at a at a at a scale over a 20 year period. But we were bringing all the material out. We don't have a chip market there because there's no pulp and paper. So we would be able to burn the chips, the sawdust, the shavings, and the bark. So all of a sudden, we're creating a tremendous amount of material. About 50% of the log as it comes in would be some sort of other product than lumber. So that's a lot of material. And if we're talking, you know, 250,000 acres, you can see that this is a huge amount of material. So I have this vision where we could build a biomass to energy facility that would be, you know, 100 megawatts possibly. We'd have a sawmill there, we'd have a mass timber facility, and then we partner with somebody that can use the green energy. And when we know we have a growing need for AI and for more advanced data centers, so we could partner with a data center, provide them with all or a big portion of their power. It's green energy. Now you have the circular economy for that community. We're creating mass timber to go from the forests into the cities and urban environments and housing. And we're creating a data center built with a mass timber building that's using green energy, and it's a new source. I think there's a lot for us to consider there and move that direction. And quite frankly, our forest service lands are so overstocked and we could do this and improve our forests, improve it for all the uses and all the desires that are out there, whether it's the aesthetic value, the environmental concerns, the business applications, recreation, hunting, fishing, you know, skiing, everything you can think of could benefit from this if we did it and we took a holistic approach. But I think biomass energy is green. I think I think that most of the biomass power plants that would be produced, we could align those with those values. So we weren't setting something up that is an extraction based. It's more of a byproduct of forest restoration and just adding more value to the forest management that we're already doing in some cases. So it's something to consider. I hear people talk about biomass energy as being something that's problematic for the environment. I completely disagree. And I think there's lots of facts on the side of it being green energy, much more so than it being a drawback. So that's this episode of Forest to Frame Appreciate you watching and reach out, let us know what you're thinking and we'll try to get to the subject matter that is important to you and to the audience. And we're gonna start having some guests here soon. So we're gonna do some interviews and talk with some of the experts and movers and shakers in this space. If there's somebody you know that you'd like to see on our podcast, let us know. We'd love to make that happen. Thank you, everybody.

Russ Vaagen

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