Useful Waste- Development group, mills try to turn logging slash into energy.
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| June 3, 2004 |  View for printing |
It just seems wasteful, Craig Rawlings said, leaving all that logging slash in the woods.
By Sherry Devlin, Missoulian
Polluting, too, since the slash must eventually be burned, lest it create a fire hazard.
Thus the experiment Rawlings and a contingent of foresters and engineers were conducting Wednesday in the log yard at Stimson Lumber Co.’s Bonner mill.
First came a truck pulling two king-size trash containers full of slash from a nearby timber harvest.
Then came a king-size grinder that reduced the slash to wood chips about the size of golf balls and sprayed them into a waiting chip truck.
Finally came the delivery of chips – called hog fuel at this point in the process – to Smurfit-Stone Container Corp.’s pulp mill in Frenchtown, where they will be used to produce electricity, steam and heat.
“I can use 20 loads of ground slash every day,” said Chuck Seeley, Smurfit’s forest lands assistance forester.
And thousands of potential loads are just sitting out in the woods, he said. “Ninety percent of logging slash is burned.”
So, too, does the push for thinning small-diameter trees from fire-prone forests create a ready supply of hog fuel, said Rawlings, small wood enterprise agent for the Montana Community Development Corp http://www.mtcdc.org/ .
It just makes sense, Rawlings said, to find uses for everything culled from a timber harvest.
But the whole operation has to be economical and convenient or foresters will be forced to stick with the decades-old tradition of burning slash piles on site, he said.
Wednesday’s trial was intended to bring slash to a central collection point – the Stimson log yard – where it could be chipped and loaded into semis.
Chip trucks cannot negotiate logging roads since they need a turning radius of at least 75 feet. And rough roads can tear up trucks and trailers not designed for off-highway use.
Neither can the grinder – this one was owned by Johnson Brothers – be easily hauled from slash pile to slash pile.
The solution: Bring the slash to the grinder and chip trucks aboard roll-on/roll-off containers like those used to collect garbage at construction sites.
Those trucks can make their way up and down logging roads, Rawlings said.
But how much time does all the collecting, hauling and grinding take? And at what cost?
“That’s what we are here to learn,” said Rawlings, who brought together the participants in Wednesday’s demonstration: the U.S. Forest Service’s Missoula Technology Development Center, Missoula Cartage, Johnson Brothers, the Forest Service’s Forest Operations Research Unit, Smurfit-Stone and Stimson Lumber.
Plumb Creek Timber Co. provided the slash from a cutting unit on a hillside above Bonner.
For Smurfit-Stone, logging slash and small-diameter trees are part of a mix of sources needed to provide the hog fuel that produces 8 megawatts of electricity for the mill.
“Sawmill residue is a little cheaper,” Seeley said, “but the supply is limited because most mills use their own.”
At most, he can find 20 or 30 loads of sawmill shavings per day. And he needs 40 loads of hog fuel to produce 8 megawatts of electricity (which the pulp mill uses to supplement other, increasingly expensive sources of energy).
So Seeley is always on the hunt for fuel: at slash piles, forest-thinning projects, log yards, post-and-pole yards, loghome builders, furniture makers and construction sites.
On Thursday, the experiment will move into the woods, where slash will be loaded directly into the waste containers – so a pile is never created.
“If we adopted this type of system, we could load material right into the containers as we cut the logs,” Rawlings said. “You could even locate containers in subdivisions where private landowners were thinning their property.”
The accumulated wood would then be delivered to the highest bidder, he said. “It might go to compost or for use as landscaping material or to a hog fuel boiler.”
“We are just looking at all the possibilities here,” Rawlings said. “We are saying here is a resource that exists, let’s find a use for it.”
Reporter Sherry Devlin can be reached at 523-5268 or at sdevlin@missoulian.com
Reader Comments:
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This is all good and fine, until the distance from the useful site is increased, which will increase the cost of the operation. I am proposing that the slash from the logging NOT be burned but instead be ground up into mulch on the site and spread back on the land floor where it came from to assist in regrowth. My new grinder is self propelled which is controlled from the operator in our 330 cat excavator and can negotiate virtually any logging road and most skid trails. I have a blower truck which can broadcast the chips back into the woods, or, we can grind the chips and then load it on a big dumpster and then haul it to the useful site. It is less expensive in terms of the handling of the material. My proposal to the U.S. Forest Service to follow. Thank you. Dusty Hall www.dcsmontana.com |
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