Archive for September, 2011

The Pacific Northwest biomass industry received a huge boost this week when U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced $136 million in biofuels grants, including $40 million each to University of Washington and Washington State University to develop fuel from woody biomass.

The $80 million in grants for Washington state came just a few months after the creation of Sustainable Aviation Fuels Northwest, a coalition of aviation companies and other stakeholders committed to turning biomass into jet fuel. It’s no coincidence that much of the $80 million will be spent on jet fuel projects.

From the Seattle Times:

The UW grant will be used to investigate turning wood into two formulations of a new fuel: one that would fuel jet engines, and another that could replace gasoline and run in any car, said Richard Gustafson, a professor of chemical engineering in the UW’s School of Forest Resources…

WSU’s part of the grant will focus on making aviation jet fuel from slash — the unusable branches and bark left after lumber is harvested — said WSU professors Norman Lewis and Michael Wolcott, co-directors of the WSU project. The process also could use scrap wood destined for construction landfills.

Besides being a significant financial boost for the biomass industry, the grants also are another indicator that federal and local officials believe that biomass will bear fruit for a region and a country in desperate need of alternative fuel sources. The $136 million is one of the largest grants ever given by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Secretary Vilsack himself announced the grants at Sea-Tac International Airport.

Vilsack said 23,000 jobs could be generated just from the Washington-state grants, and he told the Seattle Times he was confident that woody biomass would soon be a major fuel source.

In a phone interview Tuesday, Vilsack said he was confident that at the end of the five-year grant, a new industry would be churning out fuel from trees. “I’d bet my life on it,” he said.

What has changed? “I think we’re that far advanced,” Vilsack said. “I think the question now is, what is the most efficient and effective way to do it, and how do we use what nature gives us?”

The grant money is so large that many Northwest timber companies will likely take part. Weyerhaeuser, for instance, announced it is a subcontractor on the WSU grant and will create a research site near Springfield, Ore, to study the effect of “biomass removal, compaction and fertilization on soil, water and wildlife.”

The grants drew widespread acclaim from Washington state community leaders and politicians from both sides of the aisle. Even environmental groups could only muster a “proceed with caution” and some, like Climate Solutions, were fully supportive.

Congratulations to the biomass industry on this very positive development.

There’s a financial crisis afoot across the Pacific Northwest, but unfortunately a lot of people probably don’t know about it because it affects many of our rural counties. For years the federal government has given a share of the federal timber harvest to timber-dependent counties in Washington and Oregon as a way to make up for the loss of revenue from a timber industry hit hard by lawsuits and the spotted owl. But those timber payments are set to end Sept. 30.

This will imperil the quality of life for hundreds of thousands of people across the Northwest. Skamania County in Southwest Washington says its budget will be cut in half, and Curry County in southern Oregon may dissolve completely. With no government to provide any services, including police and fire, lives will be put at risk.

Lawmakers in Oregon and Washington are attempting the fix the problem. U.S. Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Oregon) has proposed a plan to divide federal forestland into two trusts that would provide money for the county, a plan supported by the Eugene Register-Guard and not surprisingly, opposed by short-sighted environmental groups. Lawmakers have proposed other plans, but what they have in common is federal legislation moves very slowly and it’s unclear whether any solution will arrive in time to help the rural counties for this year’s budgets.

The Wallowa County Chieftain in northeast Oregon isn’t optimistic.

Too easily overlooked or tossed aside in any federal budget-dealing are the needs of rural Western communities, whose small populations can hardly raise a clamor loud enough to be heard over the Eastern-dominated din in the nation’s halls of power.

This is why it’s so critical that something be done. Faye Stewart, a commissioner in Lane County, Ore., wrote in the Register-Guard this week that Congress can reach a solution that will provide “both a healthy environment for all things wild while also ensuring that our communities have every opportunity to thrive.”

Stewart also criticized Oregon Wild, the environmental group that opposes any plan that would allow a private company to harvest federal timberland, even if most of the revenue would go to keep rural counties afloat.

It is ironic that (Oregon Wild’s) leaders believe their work will “ensure that Oregon remains a special place to raise a family,” when the position they take would result in the further destruction of our families by reducing revenues for Oregon schools, public safety and public health, and the continued demise of family-wage jobs in our local communities.

To illustrate the dire straits of timber-dependent counties, take a look at Washington’s Skamania County. According to the Vancouver Columbian, county commissioners have been trying for years to wean the county off the federal timber payments, but have been “fraught with constant challenges.”

Those include acquiring the Forest Service’s former Wind River Nursery, which the county has attempted without much success to turn into a business park; a proposed destination resort on the site of the closed Broughton lumber mill, which is tied up in legal challenges; and a proposed wind farm just outside the boundary of the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area, which is awaiting approval by state regulators but faces opposition from environmental groups.

The county has spent the money it set aside in two trust funds, said (Skamania County Commissioner Paul Pearce). Its $4.5 million salary and wage reserve was drawn down to cover salary and wages for county employees as federal payments dwindled. Its capital reserve was spent to remodel two county buildings. “We had buildings that were falling down,” he said. “We knew eventually we would not have that kind of money for maintenance and to keep those buildings going.”

Pearce has made repeated trips to Congress to lobby for reauthorization of the county payments program and for more timber production on federal lands.

“I would gladly trade these dollars for the jobs we once had on the Gifford Pinchot National Forest,” he said.

The news sounds great: West Coast log and lumber exports went up by 79 and 83 percent in the first six months of this year, according to the U.S. Forest Service. But as this Oregonian story points out, reaction to the news isn’t that simple. Yes, China’s building boom means big business for West Coast lumber producers, but forestry advocates point out that increased exports are bad news for Pacific Northwest lumber mills.

Foreign log buyers are willing to pay $650 per thousand board feet, while Northwest mills struggle to pay $500 to $550 per thousand board fee, said Tom Partin, president of the American Forest Resource Council in Portland. That leaves mills more dependent on timber from public land.

By law, logs from U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management and Oregon Department of Forestry lands cannot be exported. But those agencies aren’t providing enough timber to keep local mills operating consistently, Partin said.

“Domestic processors are caught in a real lurch right now,” he said. “It’s very important to keep domestic sawmills going right now. We’ve been asking the BLM and Forest Service to ramp up (timber harvest) programs and deliver more raw material, or we’re going to see more downsizing.”

According to Partin, “these private timber owners have to go to bed with themselves every night and ask if they’re doing the right thing or not. Log exports wax and wane. If we lose domestic (lumber) processors and exports drop off, private companies won’t have anyone to sell to in the future.”

In other, less bittersweet, news, a new coalition of timber industry leaders has formed to advocate for more active management of federal forestland. The Federal Forest Resource Coalition will push for more federal timber sales, Forest Service funding and issues around endangered species, according to the Capital Press.

When we hike or fish on federal forestland, we see the people around us, but it’s hard to tell in any comprehensive way how that forestland is being used or who’s using the land. But the U.S. Forest Service recently released a survey that shows how many people are visiting our country’s national forests and the demographics of those visitors.

Here is a press release about the survey results, and you can go here to crunch the numbers for yourself. The results are fascinating and come to conclusions that most people wouldn’t expect. Did you know, for example, that a lot of older women visit the Columbia River Gorge?

From the Oregonian:

The typical Oregon forest visitor is most likely a white, male, baby boomer on a day trip. In many of the forests, about two-thirds of visitors are male. But the gorge national scenic area, which stretches 85 miles east from Troutdale to The Dalles, is a striking exception: 48.5 percent of visitors are women.

“You set up at any of the (gorge) hiking trails, and what you see on any given day is a carload or two of a whole lot of gray-haired ladies,” Frayer said.

Taking a look at Region 6, which covers Washington and Oregon (20 national forests in all), here are the top five most visited national forests, in terms of number of visitors:

1. Deschutes: 1.89 million visitors
2. Mt. Hood: 1.83 million visitors
3. Columbia River Gorge: 1.81 million visitors
4. Wenatchee: 1.4 million
5. Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie: 1.37 million

Another interesting conclusion: some minority groups aren’t visiting the national forests nearly as much as they’re growing in population.

From the Oregonian:

Other data is puzzling, Frayer said. The Latino population in Oregon has increased dramatically — rising 63 percent in 10 years, according to the 2010 Census — but there hasn’t been a corresponding increase in Latino visitors to the forests. Latinos make up only 2.9 percent of visitors to the Mount Hood National Forest despite its proximity to Gresham and East Portland, which have heavily Latino neighborhoods.

“If the back door is to Mount Hood, and they’re not going there — the question is why,” Frayer said.

But forestry also continues to be a critical use, according to Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell.

While the survey emphasizes the economic impact of recreation, forest service Chief Tidwell said commercial use of the national forests — primarily logging — is important as well. Thinning operations, for example, can reduce the threat of catastrophic fire that might burn through popular recreation sites.

“It takes a certain level of active management, and one of the benefits is to maintain these beautiful settings,” he said.

With newspapers cutting their budgets every year, the Capital Press performs an increasingly valuable service of covering agriculture, including forestry, across the West. The Oregon-based paper recently interviewed William Ruckelshaus, the first administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (which we wrote about here), and now the paper has weighed in on similar issues with its take on the Endangered Species Act.

According to the Capital Press editorial, the ESA is in serious need of reform.

While it is well-intentioned, it has met with limited success in achieving its goal of protecting major species on the verge of extinction, and its other major shortcomings cannot be overlooked. They fall in four areas: cost, ineffectiveness, property rights and misuse.

One of the most critical needs is to limit the number of species that have been protected over the past four decades.

Currently, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service lists 71 clams, 60 insects and 29 ferns as endangered or threatened. In total, 584 animals and 795 plants are listed in the U.S.

These facts would likely surprise many members of Congress who in 1973 passed the ESA hoping to bolster efforts to recover the bald eagle and other major species. That 36 snails would join the nation’s symbol on that list could not have been foreseen…

…If a major animal or plant is facing extinction, that would certainly warrant designation as endangered. But if it no longer lives in one area but is plentiful elsewhere, does that really make it endangered? Sixteen “species” listed as endangered are actually local populations of single species.

Similarly, if a lichen becomes rare, what resources should the federal government invest in “saving” it? And should there be a monetary limit?

In other news, the co-president of Oregon’s second-largest landowner, Forest Capital Partners, is speaking out against the recent Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision to treat logging roads like industrial sites. (We wrote previously about the case here, here and here.) Matt Donegan, whose timber management company owns 600,000 acres in Oregon, told the Medford Mail Tribune that the legal decision “could kill the Northwest timber industry.”

Donegan added that the decision could threaten Oregon’s status as the country’s #1 producer of lumber and plywood and the timber industry’s position as the second-largest employer in the state.

Donegan said the effect of the ruling would be to cast doubt on the value of investing in private forestlands, since harvest efforts could be tied up for years by litigation.

“A big chunk of what we do would be gummed up,” he said.

The decision also could backfire on those seeking to protect forestlands because once the private lands were no longer valuable for the timber they produce, they would be more prone to development.

“The single-largest threat to working forestland is when a mill shuts down,” Donegan said. “The land gets developed and there is fragmentation, rather than good forest practices.”