“You bring employment into rural areas. In
that part of rural California, I mean, there’s
great trout fishing, but the population’s not
growing in those neighborhoods. You would
certainly get local support for the work.”
— Peter Paul, CEO, West Biofuels
government agencies to design fuel
breaks.
Because of their effectiveness,
Gordon says his association would
like fuel breaks to be allowed as an
exemption to what’s called a Tim-
ber Harvest Plan. A THP needs ap-
proval from several agencies, takes
months to develop, and can run from
$30,000 to more than $100,000, he
says; an exemption would hasten the
process. “We’re hopeful one role pri-
vate industry can play is to be more
proactive and work with the state
and the dollars that are available for
forest management to create more of
those kinds of fuel breaks, particu-
larly around communities at risk,” he
says.
As the state grapples with how to
increase pace and scale, some envi-
ronmentalists have expressed con-
cern that thinning activities could
lead to the logging approach of the
past. The biggest trees are the most
fire resistant — but they’re also worth
the most money. They worry that
calls for increased thinning are real-
ly efforts to increase widespread log-
ging. The problem trees that actually
need to be removed are small trees,
which flames use to climb up into the
canopy. “Of course, the downside is
they don’t have much of an econom-
ic value … usually there’s no way for
these trees to pay their way out of the
woods,” North says.
Smaller trees can become com-
posite material for things such as sid-
ing, flooring and ceilings. Thinned
debris could become sawdust or
landscape bark. Some material could
be ground up and left to biodegrade,
which enriches the soil but also re-
mains as a fuel and releases gases
as it decomposes. Sawmills would
be one destination for this material,
but they’re already at capacity. The
infrastructure for processing wood
has substantially dropped over the
past few decades; the mills that still
exist are often saturated with fire-
killed trees.
“The lack of timber that was com-
ing out of the forests [in the 1990s]
reduced the amount of mills that are
available now, so that’s an industry-
wide thing; mills just disappeared
because there wasn’t any wood to
feed the mills,” says Jennifer Hinck-
ley, a fire management specialist
formerly with the U.S. Forest Service
and now with the U.S. Fish and Wild-
life Service. “So now that we’re ramp-
ing back up again, the mills that used
to be there aren’t there anymore.”
To handle all the work California
wants to do, the forest-products in-
dustry would likely need to expand,
but that won’t happen without a
long-term business opportunity. It’s
expensive to open a shuttered saw-
mill, upgrade to increase capacity or
build a new one. “If folks know they
have assurance they’re going to have
the raw material, they are going to re-
invest in the infrastructure that they
need,” says Luster, of Sierra Pacific.
A sawmill costs about $80 million
to $100 million to build. “In order to
do that, you’re going to need to know
that you’re going to have to have
enough supply of materials that’s go-
ing to be there for 20 years, 30 years
down the road.”
Then there’s biomass, which has
been seen as a longshot by some, but
proponents say it could become a pri-
mary market to accommodate dis-
carded forest thinnings. The indus-
try has struggled to gain a foothold
because bioenergy is more expensive
than other renewable sources such
as wind and solar. There are trans-
portation costs, for example, to get
the feedstock out of the forests and to
a biomass plant.
Biomass companies want the
opportunity to handle this material,
says Peter Paul, CEO of West Biofu-
els, which has a research and devel-
opment facility in Woodland. The
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