February’s Speech from the Throne is a case in point. “Energy opportunities will transform the future of forestry in British Columbia with clean, carbon-neutral bioenergy, fueled by biomass from beetle-killed forests. It will mean new jobs, new revenue streams and new electricity.”

Sounds promising. But I have my doubts. It costs money – lots of it – to move trucks onto old logging sites, pay workers to gather and grind up waste wood, then load the chips onto trucks that drive back to facilities that take the chips and burn them under intense heat to fire turbines that generate electricity. Which is why the bioenergy industry has historically relied on chips and sawdust from sawmills as a “secure” source of extremely cheap fibre for its feedstock.

But what happens when all – or most – of the sawmills close? Well, we’re about to find out. And much may hinge on the outcome. In Williams Lake, EPCOR owns North America’s largest biomass power plant. The 66 MW facility, capable of supplying power to 33,000 homes, has been in operation since 1993, and has historically relied on 70 truckloads of waste wood chips and sawdust per day from the city’s lumber mills.

Now, most of the city’s mills are closed and EPCOR, locked into a 25-year power supply agreement with BC Hydro, must begin to pay – and pay dearly – for companies to go out and find the wood it needs to keep its facility running.

EPCOR, given its considerable size, is an exceptional example. But the bioenergy giant is not alone in feeling the pinch. Like EPCOR, BC’s infant wood pellet industry has so far hitched its fortunes on accessing waste wood from sawmills. That supply source is a shadow of its former self.

Ironically, in a province awash in “waste” wood in the form of millions upon millions of dead pine trees, supply issues may prove the undoing of the vaunted bioenergy industry. Cheap, readily available supplies, that is. Businesses used to getting something for virtually nothing often have a hard time making money and profits the old fashioned way – by earning them.

A longer shelf life, combined with “new” sawmill technology that allows beetle-killed logs to be scanned and rotated prior to cutting so as to avoid defects, will help to ensure that maximum value is extracted from the dead pines for as long as possible, Bell said.

Unfortunately, Bell’s optimism stands at odds with people whose job it has been to try and figure out how forest companies can economically cope with the increasing numbers of dead, defect-riddled pine logs entering their mills.

Three years ago, Igor Zaturecky, a research scientist with Canfor’s Wood Products Research and Development Centre, co-authored a paper with fellow researchers at Canfor and the University of British Columbia. The paper showed how the scientists had successfully subjected dead pine logs to special stress tests that revealed hidden defects in the logs prior to them being milled. This was big news because, as Zaturecky said, interior sawmills were even then overwhelmed with droves of sub-standard, beetle-killed logs that were wreaking havoc with their equipment.

“I’ve been in mills and seen wood processed into lumber that was full of spiral checking,” Zaturecky said in a summary report on the research project he had participated in. “In one [mill] shift there’s so much breakage and waste it’s unbelievable, and that happens over and over.”

Coincidentally, the facility where Zaturecky witnessed all the log breakage was a new, state-of-the-art Canfor mill in Vanderhoof, with the same log-rotating equipment in it that Bell now boasts about.

Asked about conditions in interior sawmills today, Zaturecky, now an independent researcher, said in a telephone interview this week that log breakage due to beetle-attack-related defects “is still a big, big issue.” And it will continue to be so, he said, because “you can only do so much” to avoid log breaks by rotating logs prior to cutting them.

As droves of dead standing pine trees continue to age, more of them will develop defects that lead to messy and costly log breaks in mills. Such outcomes can be avoided, Zaturecky said, but will require investments by companies to “commercialize” the stress-testing he and others developed. In other words, companies like Canfor will have to spend more money up-front, perhaps at the logging sites themselves, using stress tests to sort logs into two streams – one stream for the sawmill, the other for pulp and paper mills or wood-based “bioenergy” plants.

If Bell’s optimistic projections are to have a shot at being credible, he better pray that an economic recovery happens soon and that ideas like Zaturecky’s catch on. Otherwise droves of dead pine trees won’t go anywhere any time soon.