Loggers Adapt
Another aspect of the study was trying to capture the logger’s voice, as the study titled one of its chapters. There is a large body of academic literature on removing biomass for energy or forest management, but very little of it comes from the perspective of the operators who actually do the work of cutting the trees and moving them out of the forest. “We found that in many instances existing equipment could be adapted to biomass harvesting,” Arnosti says. “But operating training and experience greatly increased productivity. For example, a particular logger that worked on a number of our tests figured out on his own how to carry two or three times as much biomass in a forwarder as he did at the beginning of the project. He figured it out and it was very different than the techniques he used to forward round wood.” A forwarder is a piece of equipment used to move wood from the cutting area to the collection area.

Abbas did most of the formal interviews with the loggers. She says one of the most profound differences for the loggers is that they had to walk every area before they would bid on clearing and collecting the biomass. Usually experienced loggers, who have worked a particular region, are familiar enough with the costs and paybacks of gathering round wood that they can calculate the expected costs and paybacks just from looking at a map of a timber offering. Gathering biomass was so different for them that they needed to walk the land to understand the pitfalls they would be facing. “It was normal for them to go into an area and extract a larger tree from the site,” she says. “But this was the first time they would enter a site solely to remove the smaller material.”

Arnosti described logging work as something so familiar to the workers they could do it on “semi-autopilot” which allowed them to become very skilled at what they did. Abbas found that one of the skills that made loggers so efficient was that they knew how to fell trees and position them so that the workers moving the trees out of the woods could do so with the least amount of wasted time and effort. For biomass harvesting, the loggers had to relearn these skills. “It was important that operators communicated with each other on the site,” Abbas says. “For example, they learned which machine would follow the next. So the operator would cut the material to be forwarded in a way, even though it would have taken him longer, that made the entire operation more efficient. But if you get a divided operation, where someone is responsible for cutting the material without thinking of the best way to lay it out, then you get a lot of hours of harvesting and that isn’t a very practical option for the loggers.”

At current prices, Arnosti says biomass cannot pay its way out of the woods. Biomass is likely to remain an adjunct to fuel reduction, habitat management or disease control operations and timber harvests. “What I have concluded is that biomass, at least woody biomass will likely forever be a coproduct,” he says. “It cannot be seen as the single reason you are doing land management. In the case of timber, the value of the wood will cover the cost of harvesting it, moving it and delivering it to a market at a profit. Even with today’s high energy prices, and based on our analysis, even if energy prices doubled again, we would find the costs of cutting, processing, transporting and delivering biomass would exceed the market value of that biomass.”

If the Forest Service wants to make biomass harvesting an integral part of its forest management practices, it will have to be more flexible in its regulations. As Arnosti points out, these regulations were developed for high-value round wood timber operations. There were times during the study when operations had to be shut down because the wrong species or wrong size tree was felled. “You can’t just follow the existing guidelines and assume it is going to include biomass harvesting,” Abbas says. “They need to be more practical and open with the loggers.”

Along with the ecological and logistical concerns about the harvesting system, economic questions also had to be answered. If biomass harvesting doesn’t pay for any of the players in the economic chain, then the entire system breaks down. “If you are talking about sustainability, then economics is one of the pieces you have to look at,” Current says. “Right now, with the payments from the Forest Service you can do this economically—in other cases, maybe not.”

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