County mulls response to pine beetle epidemic

By Stephen Clearheart Johnson
Mountain Correspondent

Larimer County is getting into the renewable energy business, thanks to the pine bark beetle.

That was the thrust of a February work session held by the county commissioners to ramp up their response to the increasing damage from the beetle.

Their task will not be easy. No one can tell them just how hard--hit Larimer County will be, nor how fast the problem will grow. Because Larimer County has not been hit as hard as nearby counties, its staff is underfunded and understaffed.

At the work session, David Lentz, county forester, and Gary Buffington, director of the department of natural resources, reviewed the forester's normal budget for public education, forest management on county lands and coordination of fire mitigation efforts.

Then they discussed the county's recent involvement with biomass utilization. Staff presented alternatives for increasing funding for the new efforts by doubling allocations from the general fund or by an increase in fines and fees.

Larimer County recently became a participant in the five-county Northern Front Range MPB Working Group, one of the plethora of new consortiums formed by various governmental agencies and others working toward solutions in fire mitigation, fuels treatment (removing dead trees to reduce fire danger) and harvesting biomass as a renewable energy source.

This group stems from a U.S. Forest Service grant of $100,000 to fund collection, processing and marketing of biomass resources. Part of the grant will fund the Larimer County Biomass Collection Project, involving the establishment of collection and sorting yards where the biomass can be processed, then moved on to end-users.

Such a project may be a relief to property owners who face possible fines from the county forester of up to $5,000 per year for failure to remove infested trees, yet have no place to economically take the infested wood and slash. As a result, most material is burned at the site.

Beetle-kill has many uses as logs for homes, timbers for construction, posts and poles, firewood or pellets for heating or electrical generation, mulch, animal bedding, paper and pulp, feedstock for cellulosic ethanol production, or a new high-tech process called pyrolysis, which directly converts trees to liquid fuel suitable for replacing gasoline.

Obstacles to biomass use include prohibitive mountain transportation costs given the low value of much of the material. The quality of lodgepole pine for timber degrades rapidly, becoming almost useless after two years of standing dead. Most of the biomass is of a diameter too small for traditional uses.

Also, there exists a confusing overlay of ownership and land-use policies among the various federal, state, county and private or semi-public ownerships. Everyone is a stakeholder, it seems, but there is a confusion of responsibility and authority. As a result, much of the available biomass will be burned in place or chipped back onto the forest floor.

Craig Jones of the Colorado State Forest Service and director of the Colorado Biomass Working Group gives two examples of this problem. Pine chips make excellent mulch and animal bedding but, he pointed out, most of the bagged materials sold in local outlets are imported from Montana.

On the other hand, the five counties in the working group plan this year to thin some 9,700 acres of public land, but 80 percent of the material will be chipped and left in the forest. Only 20 percent will be harvested, despite the advice of Dan Binkley of the Colorado Forest Restoration Institute, who notes that such chipping severely hampers forest soil activity and regrowth.

Most national forest trees will be allowed to burn in wildfires or to fall to the forest floor, though some may be sold in routine logging operations.

Last year, Rocky Mountain National Park introduced a new technology. Called an "air-curtain burner," this incinerator produces virtually no smoke. This allows the park to burn thinned trees and slash around campgrounds without disturbing the tourists or the clear mountain air.

Buffington noted that Larimer County was considering partnering with the town of Estes Park, which is acquiring an air-curtain incinerator. The partners would operate a collection yard and burn site at the Larimer County Transfer Station in Estes. At such a site, it is likely that logs and larger-diameter materials would be debarked to kill remaining beetles, with the slash and chips being burned. Some chipped material might go to a biomass heating demonstration site at Colorado State University.

Boulder County has a demonstration site where biomass heats a county building. Jackson County heats a high school with biomass and operates a 50-kilowatt-hour electrical generating plant fueled by biomass.

Heating with biomass is being encouraged by the Governor's Energy Office, which has funneled $100,000 for grants to fund up to 10 community-scale bioheating projects in 2008.

Although Buffington stated that one debarking machine shared by the five counties would be sufficient, he is considering avoiding debarking by moving harvested material out to end-users on the plains where the beetles would find no host trees.

One such user might be a Fort Lupton producer of animal bedding products, Renewable Fiber Inc. This company supplies large poultry producers with bedding which, when soiled by turkeys, goes on to become compost material.

For the Red Feather Lakes transfer station and possible sites near Glendevey and Rustic, likely collection facilities would simply be drop-off points where trees and limbs could be deposited in large rollaway steel bunks that would be hauled off at the end-user's expense.

The new cellulosic ethanol plant planned for Denver could be an end-user. The plant will be bringing in railcars of material from Grand and Summit counties, but Larimer lacks rail transport in the mountains. Other local end-users might include Morgan Timber Products in LaPorte, producing posts and poles as well as other items.

One company wishing to be an end-user is Canyon Utilities, which provides trash collection services through the Poudre Canyon and Red Feather areas. Co-owner LeAn Davis hopes to obtain grants for an electrical generation plant similar to the Jackson County one. At a cost of $450,000 for plant and loading equipment, they could also burn cardboard, plastic and Styrofoam to produce as much as 50 kwh per day of electricity or up to 50 gallons per day of a biodiesel product. Since such electrical production would be worth only $3 per day in PVREA credits, Davis would use the biodiesel to fuel trash trucks.

The low rate of return on renewable energy products makes grant money necessary. The promising new technology called pyrolysis has been pioneered by Range Fuels of Golden. The company recently opened its first plant in Georgia with the aid of a large DOE grant. The plant produces a gasoline-quality fuel more efficiently and with less water than ethanol technology, at a cost of $20 per barrel. Yet, it has no plans for a Colorado plant as it cannot be assured of sufficient long-term supply. Provisions in the 2008 federal energy bill make trees on federal land off-limits to firms seeking to use renewable energy incentives or tax credits.

Where once the cry in the high-country was "Thar's gold in them thar hills," the new rallying cry is "There's biomass," but in the meantime residents may be hearing the refrain of "Burn, baby, burn."