Wood energy: predicting costs.

1389 C R E D IT : B E R N D T H IS S E N /D P A /C O R B IS Wood Energy: Predicting Costs THE POLICY FORUM “WOOD ENERGY IN America” (D. deB. Richter Jr. et al., 13 March, p. 1432) was a much-needed and long-overdue contribution to energy discussions. However, fossil fuels are not four times more expensive than wood per unit energy. Rather, most fossil fuels are still less expensive than wood in most places, though the price of wood shows more local variation and is more volatile even than that of fossil fuels. Global mean wholesale price for sawlogs in the first quarter of 2008 was about $170 per metric ton (MT), or about $10/GJ (1). The mean wholesale price for pellets then was about $200/MT, or about $11/GJ (2). Since then (because of the housing crash), the price of sawlogs has dropped dramatically in the United States (3), but the global wholesale price of wood pellets has remained stable (2). At $60/barrel, oil is $10/GJ; natural gas currently is about $4/GJ (4). The latest Energy Information Administration projections place the mean cost of coal to U.S. utilities in 2009 at $2/GJ, though high-grade coals can be three times as expensive ($180/MT) (4). The cost of wood seems likely to soar again within a few years. A severe pine-beetle blight began in North America in 1999, and today vast expanses (several gigatons, over 500,000 km) of the forests in North America are dead (5). These forests (containing over four times as much dead wood as current global wood annual usage) will be largely destroyed by wildfires over the next 6 years. Even in the United States, wood pellets have recently sold for over $320/MT in some areas (6), and some projections indicate global wood-pellet usage will continue to grow at over 20% annually for the next decade (7). It’s hard to image wood pellets being under $400/MT ($22/GJ) by 2013. F. DAVID DOTY