Don’t Let Anyone Shame your Woodstove!

By Lloyd Irland

We’re in an era where “climate shaming” has become fashionable. Don’t eat meat! Don’t fly anywhere! Now comes a local writer urging us not to use our woodstoves, because of its carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. There are obvious forest practice considerations but this article cannot contain them, so they are left aside. Maine Woodland Owners’ members probably don’t need a lot of instruction on them.

Much of the technical discussion concerns biomass-fired electricity generation, high volume exports of wood pellets, or large plants that convert woody biomass to liquid fuels. Those are different debates. But it is easy to get confused by drawing information and arguments from those – right now, I’m talking about your wood stove or pellet stove. You can be forgiven for getting a bit jaded – it is possible on the same day to read a detailed scientific report asserting that a given practice or product ought to be banned because of its CO2 impacts, while yet another detailed report calls for accelerating the same practice on carbon grounds.

So many issues are being debated it is easy for the newspaper reader to pick up one assertion and not realize that it pertains to some totally different issue. In the US, for example, there is vigorous debate over rapidly growing pellet production in the South, both as to its effects on the forests there, and its net impact on climate change. The same debates rage in the European Union, where most of these pellet shipments are going. Some countries do not acknowledge imported pellets as meeting climate change reduction goals, even though the entire region wants to move toward renewable energy and to reduce reliance on Russian natural gas (wouldn’t you?).

To oversimplify, the debate over CO2 impacts of burning firewood, or wood pellets, hinges on two competing sets of assumptions.

One, we may call the stand by stand approach. This examines the net CO2 emissions of cutting down a stand entirely and burning it for heat or electricity. Then, one calculates how long it will take for the carbon put into the sky to be replaced by regrowth of that single stand. This turns out to be a long time. Yet, it would be rare to see an entire stand cut down and all go into firewood or pellets.

The other approach looks at the entire forest, and argues that if inventory and growth are sustained on a landscape basis, the forest as a whole absorbs the carbon lost in the single stand that is cut. This is the same as saying that the forest is sustainable, as the single stand harvested is simply taking out the annual growth of the other 98% of the forest that is still out there and growing.

Sewall Company’s 2018 Maine Wood Volume and Projection Study estimates that 1 million cords a year are used for fuelwood in Maine. Such surveys pose many difficulties, but it would be desirable to do a statistically sound up to date survey to have a better estimate of this volume. It won’t do anymore to say it’s not needed because the wood is all from “nongrowing stock” sources. A million cords is more than enough to fiber a sizable pulp mill.

Sewall’s report also shows that from 2008 to 2016, large owners in the north reduced their volumes of “dense hardwoods” (maple, beech, etc); Sewall expects that they will continue to do so. This is not affected one way or the other at present by residential firewood demand, and only slightly by the wood used in Maine’s pellet business. Elsewhere in the state, where fuelwood uses are more likely, growth exceeds cut for the dense hardwoods.

It matters a lot whether wood going into pellet mills is additional to other uses, or whether it replaces lost wood markets. Thus far it has been the latter. Since pellet plants rely on a variety of sources, such as mill residues and small, non-merchantable stems, it is important to know – and carefully monitor – fiber supply to this industry. As fuel oil prices rise – as they surely will one day – automatic feeding pellet stoves will gain in popularity, and volumes produced here will rise. To know more read Maura Adams and Rob Riley’s article Beyond the Rhetoric: Wood Heat and Climate Change for the Northern Forest Center (posted at www.mainewoodlandowners.org under Landowner Resources).

The US Forest Service 2016 Resource Update says that Maine’s total growth-to-cut balance was in deficit for 2011, but has improved to 1.01 to 1 for 2016. To fully understand this you need to read a lot of fine print, but clearly 1.01 is not a comfortable situation. Still, this suggests that at the moment, the overall forest’s balance is even, so that the entire forest approach to looking at CO2 impact is reasonable. As I write, it occurs to me to wonder, why should just the tonnage of wood used for fuel be the part of the total harvest that is blamed for CO2 emissions?

It is critical that firewood be properly dried. I’m amazed at how many woodpiles I see that seem designed to prevent thorough drying. For some savvy advice. Check out the Pete Lammert articles in the Dec 2010 and Jan 2011 issues of SWOAM News, the illustrious predecessor to Maine Woodlands.

Woodstoves should be of the most efficient, modern low emissions types; it will be interesting to see whether new EPA-certified and more costly versions will survive in the marketplace at current fuel oil prices. Undeniably, aged stoves, together with unlined and aging chimneys, are a source of many hazards. Unfortunately households still using such are usually not likely to be in the market for self feeding pellet stoves, solar systems, or heat pumps – they are struggling to pay monthly bills. There is, though, a good air pollution argument against the past generation of free standing outdoor furnaces.

When people repeat the argument that coal produces less carbon per Btu of heat than green wood – that’s a perfect example of picking a single number from a galaxy of figures without seeing the whole picture. I don’t buy it. If you ever visit Appalachia, you won’t either.

Many colleges and universities in the Northeast that have reduced fossil fuel use by installing modern heating systems burning wood chips or pellets. In Maine, University of Maine Farmington, College of the Atlantic, and Colby College are examples, and the University of Maine has been considering such a move. We may assume that on these campuses, robust debates have taken place and their trustees have felt comfortable with choosing wood fuel. This is always in the context of modernizing entire heating systems to optimize efficiency; they usually replace obsolete fossil-fired units. They usually expect to save money.

So far as public policy is concerned, multiple issues have to be considered in reaching wise policies, just as is true of individual household energy choices. Trying to boil all policy down to a single engineering calculation on efficiency or CO2 grounds seems unrealistic to me and it is not going to happen anyway. Burning wood for household heat can support timber stand improvement cuts in the forest, it keeps money in Maine instead of shipping it to Coal Country or Near East dictators, and it improves Maine’s energy self-sufficiency. At present I don’t see it as a burden on the global CO2 budget.

So, if you’re heating with wood, in these ways:

– Solid wood from your own land, properly dried.

– Purchased firewood, again properly dried, in a modern wood stove.

– Pellets in a modern self-feeding stove system.

And you’re doing other things to conserve heat - don’t let anyone shame you for burning wood.

Lloyd Irland is a semi-retired consultant in Wayne who regularly writes for Maine Woodlands. In a former life, he attended both the Copenhagen and Cancun climate summits (2009 and 2010) as a faculty resource for graduate students and speaker at side events.