Dots worth connecting: beetle kill to motor fuel

The Rocky

Saturday, February 2, 2008

A flurry of announcements in recent weeks about combating the pine beetle has to make you wonder. Why now? It's already infested 1.5 million acres of Colorado lodgepole pine forest, laying waste to a goodly chunk of the state's scenic beauty. Mostly we've heard that nature was allowed to take its course. It's tempting to say the devastation finally got people's attention when it began showing up along the populous Front Range. But that's only partly true.

"It's about time," said Gary Severson, executive director of the Northwest Colorado Council of Governments. "We've been hitting this problem real hard for the past three years."

In 2007, the affected areas grew by half a million acres in one year's beetle flight, he said.

"The wind currents blew the beetles up over the Continental Divide. Now it's in Larimer, Boulder, Gilpin and Clear Creek counties. It's a lot more visible on the Front Range to a lot more people."

I first talked to Severson about pine beetles a year ago after several people told me he was the point man. He said then, "There's no market for the wood . . . there's simply not enough public money to thin the forests. The only way to do this is to find some way to add value to the material."

Since then, three wood-pellet operations have started up, two in Kremm- ling and one in Walden. But none is operational yet, and each has targets of 100,000 tons of pellets a year.

A blockbuster announcement came Tuesday - a plant that would use 100 tons of beetle kill each day to produce 2 million gallons of ethanol a year. The Department of Energy said it would pay $30 million of an $88 million cellulosic ethanol plant, Colorado's first. Two Canadian firms, Suncor and Lignol, will build the plant, which will covert beetle kill into ethanol.

Suncor operates the Commerce City refineries that produce our gasoline and ethanol. Lignol successfully has tested its cellulosic technology in British Columbia, which has its own beetle-kill problems. A site for the plant has not been chosen. Suncor owns a large plot of land south of its refineries, but fears have been expressed about trucking the beetles to Denver and risking further exposure. Suncor bought a Conoco Phillips distribution terminal in Grand Junction on Dec. 6, and that's under consideration.

Cellulosic ethanol is the so-called holy grail of ethanol, since it comes from waste products that aren't part of the food chain, like corn. The growing use of corn for ethanol is blamed for higher meat prices since it drives up the cost of cattle feed. It's blamed for higher food prices because farmers are devoting so much acreage to corn rather than other crops. President Bush set a goal of making cellulosic ethanol cost-competitive by 2012.

"We see great possibilities with Lig- nor's technology," said Lisha Burnett, senior communications adviser for Suncor. "This is significant stuff, and we want to be part of it."

On Jan. 17, U.S. Sen. Wayne Allard, R-Colo., said he'd secured $8 million to reduce beetle-kill on federal land and $4 million to clear state and local land. Allard's announcement came a day after state and federal forestry officials said new aerial surveys showed that pine beetles have consumed 1.5 million acres of lodgepole forest. The state's remaining adult lodgepole forests likely will be dead within five years, they said.

The day after Suncor's announcement, U.S. Rep. Mark Udall, D-Eldorado Springs, said he would urge Congress to pledge $90 million to fight Colorado's pine-beetle infestation.

When I spoke to Severson on Friday, he was driving to Denver for lunch with the Wilderness Society to enlist its aid. Next week, he's part of a delegation of Colorado mayors and county commissioners who'll meet with U.S. Forest Service officials and our congressional delegation to up the stakes.

When you consider the notion, however far-fetched, that companies in Colorado could start producing motor fuel as a result of the plague that is ravaging our mountain majesty, those are some dots worth connecting.

Business editor Rob Reuteman can be reached at 303-954-5177 or reutemanr@RockyMountainNews.com. Add your comments to this column at RockyMountainNews.com

• February 2, 2008

  2:22 p.m.

  Suggest removal

  chendricks writes:

  Business Editor Reuteman:
  Your February 2, 2008 column "Dots worth connecting: beetle kill to motor fuel" is very interesting to me, as I am a US Forest Service retiree who has been following the bug epidemic for several years with the idea of attempting to find useful and economic solutions to this pending social and economic disaster for the rural economies of Colorado and Wyoming. With its spread to the front range, it will now become a major economic and social issue for Colorado.
  Common sense tells most of us that the dead wood will either be removed by mechanical means or future large-scale wildfire will do the job for us. Unfortunately, we have powerful political forces working to make sure that removal by mechanical means will not occur on any sizeable scale. Time is of the essence because the value of the dead trees for dimension lumber only lasts about 2 years, and we do not know how long the fiber may be valuable for biofuels. But once the trees fall to the forest floor, most if not all the value is lost.
  Elected officials and special interest groups continue to talk in circles on how to address this issue. Examples of this are:

   Congressman Udall held meetings last week with local officials and then introduced legislation that he says will mitigate the damage. Part of what he introduced was a proposal for a 90 million-dollar appropriation to be used to mitigate the potential damage. Unfortunately, he pandered to the special interests of the environmental community (who want no logging or roads) by proposing to spend the entire 90 million on lands other than the federal lands. The major acreage of bug killed timber, by far, is on the federal lands, mainly National Forests. This proposal may help the congressman politically, but it does little to address the real source of the problem.
   Recent announcements concerning a biofuels refinery in or near Commerce City is puzzling to me, as at the present the major supply of bug killed trees is on the west slope several hundred miles distant from Commerce City. My cursory study of the economics of utilizing biomass for biofuels has estimated that raw material should be located within 50 miles of the processing unit. And field collection and transportation costs plus some profit must provide a raw material cost of $30 to $35 dollar maximum per bone dry ton of wood at the plant gate. Costs and prices in excess of the above at current markets for biofuels will not allow for an economic return. If my analysis is anywhere near correct, I do not understand the highly subsidized proposal by Suncor for Commerce City.

  The whole issue is pleading for a common sense solution, otherwise the future is going to be determined by very destructive wildfires. Can you imagine what that means for the Colorado and Platte River watersheds, say nothing of damage to wildlife habitat, the recreation industry and other important resource values?
  Thank you,
  CHendricks