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OT - My wood pellet stove cooks!

In Colorado we have a pine beetle infestation that words can't describe. It is soon going to reach 1,000,000 acres! When you drive into the infested areas it looks like a copper-brown forest, not just a few trees here and there but ALL of the trees. Now a company is starting up a plant to convert the trees into wood pellets. I bought a pellet/corn stove a couple winters ago and it's great! I put it in the basement and it heats the house to the point that the natural gas forced air furnace only kicks in when it's really cold. What I really like is the tile on the main level is actually warm in the mornings and makes it very comfotable to your stocking feet. I have a Harmon and here is a link: http://www.harmanstoves.com/features.asp?id=26
When I first got it corn was $2/bshl and I burned the heck out of it, now it's around $4/bshl and wood is cheaper. It will be a great use of the beetle kill to burn it in my stove. Here is the story:


Keeping home fires burning
New mill to turn dead trees into pellet fuel

By Roger Fillion, Rocky Mountain News
November 9, 2007

Colorado's first wood-pellet mill owes its birth to pine beetles that are killing millions of trees near the town of Kremmling and across northwest Colorado.

The diseased trees will be the new Kremmling mill's chief input - a new twist for the pellet-fuel industry.

The 18,000-square-foot plant is billed as the largest west of the Mississippi. It's slated in February to start grinding trees into environmentally friendly pellets for wood-pellet stoves and industrial and commercial pellet boilers.

Many of the trees are too skinny or too cracked and old to be valuable as lumber.

"The dead and dying beetle kill was just piling up and was going to be a fire danger," said Mark Mathis, president of Confluence Energy, the mill's operator. "The community desperately needed to do something with this material."

Enter Mathis - who dreamed up the mill while pouring fuel into his home pellet stove - and about a half-dozen local property owners who are Confluence Energy investors. They've begun building an $8 million mill south of Kremmling, adjacent to the airport and a shuttered fiberboard plant. The Colorado Housing and Finance Authority has agreed to provide about $6 million in funding.

The mill will employ 18. Logging and trucking jobs are expected to bring Confluence Energy's employment to between 40 and 50. Pay will start at $34,500 a year.

"We wanted the starting pay to be 25 percent above the average paying job in Grand County," Mathis said.

The plant will process trees as small as 2 inches in diameter and from as far as 100 miles away. When fully operational, the mill will produce up to 120,000 tons of pellets a year for homes, schools and buildings.

"That would be a sizable mill," said Don Kaiser, executive director of the Pellet Fuels Institute.

The Virginia-based institute counts more than 80 pellet plants in North America, with more than 70 in the United States. The 80-plus mills produce more than 1.1 million tons of fuel a year.

Wood pellets were introduced in the 1970s, when the OPEC embargo sent oil prices soaring. While their use has been rising in this country, pellet stoves capture just 5 percent of the hearth industry marketplace vs. more popular gas and wood fireplaces and stoves.

By contrast, they're far more widespread in Europe and Scandinavia, where oil costs have been much higher.

In North America, the pellet mills often sit in the Northeast and Pacific Northwest, far from Colorado. Mills have been sprouting in the Southeast and Midwest.

The raw materials vary based on location. Maple, hickory and Douglas fir are among the woods used, in addition to other organic matter such as corn.

The institute's Kaiser said Confluence Energy's use of pine-beetle kill is novel: "This is the first I've heard of a plant using it as a primary source."

The pine-beetle outbreak has ravaged the Kremmling area and other parts of northwestern Colorado.

The region is estimated to contain 600,000 to 700,000 acres of dead and dying trees. The outbreak is expected eventually to cover more than 1 million acres.

The beetles, considered a natural part of a pine forest's life cycle, have been feasting on crowded, drought-weakened forests across Grand County, Summit County, Eagle County, Jackson County and elsewhere.

The problems arise when beetles drill through a tree's bark and lay eggs that hatch into wood-eating larvae. In a year or two, the green trees turn rust-colored and then lose all their needles before turning gray.

"There's not going to be a lot of lodgepole pines left over the next five to 10 years," said Eric Lovgren, Eagle County wildfire mitigation specialist.

The county agreed to sell Confluence Energy about 2,000 tons of diseased trees removed in and near Vail. The company agreed to buy the wood for $18 a ton.

Lovgren said the mill gives land managers more options to dispose of beetle-killed trees, particularly since the lumber often isn't attractive to commercial mills.

"There really aren't a lot of options to take your wood, especially the smaller-diameter logs and the dead and dying timber," Lovgren said.

The mill reportedly has generated little controversy in Kremmling, where residents once complained about the emissions from the old fiberboard plant. State regulators will monitor the pellet factory's emissions.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, pellet stoves are "some of the cleanest-burning heating appliances available," and "because they pollute so little" don't require EPA certification.

In the Denver area, approved pellet stoves are exempt from state residential burning restrictions when a high-pollution advisory is in effect.