Fight over biomass – Law making it difficult for businesses to expand. Thinning projects help loggers find work

Rumpelstiltskin spun straw into gold. Now he’s coming for sawdust.

After generations of disrespect, wood refuse is the material of the moment. It took two days to run through all the ways it can be thermochemically converted into gasoline, mixed with coal dust for clean-burning pellet fuel or cooked into charcoal to capture carbon emissions at the Montana Bioenergy Workshop in Missoula.

And that’s assuming it hasn’t been assigned to more traditional uses like paper and particleboard.

“It’s one of the biggest fears we have – that everybody else will take our fuel and burn it,” Roseburg Forest Products Co. plant manager Ken Cole told a group of bioenergy pioneers during a tour of his Missoula factory Tuesday. “The market for pellets and biomass is putting massive pressure on us.”

By ROB CHANEY of the Missoulian

Full Story: http://missoulian.com/articles/2009/05/13/news/top/news01.txt

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Thinning projects help loggers find work

By MICHAEL JAMISON of the Missoulian

As lumber mills grind to a halt, their saws dulled against the blunt edge of a national housing slump, loggers and log haulers are likewise being forced out of their woods work.

No new home construction means no new need for lumber, and the trickle-down has snapped links in the entire supply chain, from stump to street.

But while millworkers continue to face a bleak future, sawyers and truckers are banking on recent investments in specialty logging – that is to say, thinning projects aimed at reducing wildfire risk, rather than providing boards.

Full Story: http://missoulian.com/articles/2009/05/13/news/local/news02.txt