From the Director’s Desk: July Pellet Data, Heating Degree Days Well Ahead of Last Year in Most Geographies, Small Batch Fiber Producers, A Salute to Veterans
July Pellet Data
Two weeks ago, the EIA published two months’ worth of data in its Monthly Densified Biomass Fuel Report, giving us a look at early- and mid-summer production and sales numbers.
July is notable because producer inventory typically reaches its peak in July. At 292,425 tons, the July five-year average for inventory levels is 20,000 tons higher than the next closest months (May and June, both around 274,000 tons).
Perusing the July data, I was struck by how differently the industry arrived at essentially the same accumulated sales number in 2025 and 2024. Year to date in 2025, sales are at 742,702 tons, just shy of 2024’s 748,850 tons, but on a month-to-month basis, there was high variability between the two years. This July was well off last year’s (93,523 vs. 111,457 tons), but the sector enters the heating season more or less on pace with last year.
So, with 2024 and 2025 almost a dead heat through July, the year hinges, as it so often does, on the last five months of the calendar year as consumers lay in their fuel needs for the season and temperatures start to drop.
July Pellet Data (5-year average) in tons
East
Sales – 65,961 (87,923)
Production – 78,859 (92,404)
Inventory – 184,497 (159,101)
West
Sales – 15,151 (26,229)
Production – 24,909 (36,378)
Inventory – 128,922 (77,011)
South
Sales – 12,411 (25,193)
Production – 18,265 (17,495)
Inventory – 23,370 (56,313)
All U.S.
Sales – 93,523 (140,126)
Production – 122,033 (146,637)
Inventory – 336,789 (292,425)
Heating Degree Days Well Ahead of Last Year in Most Geographies
As of this week, accumulated Heating Degree Days are ahead of last year’s pace in almost all pellet-burning geographies—some significantly so (I’m looking at you, Harrisburg, PA—53% ahead of last year).
If you aren’t yet familiar with the PFI’s Heating Degree Day Index, it is available on our website and is refreshed each Monday from October through April.
This Monday’s report found all twelve locations on the index ahead of last year’s HDD pace and five of them ahead of the ten-year average. As winter trudges on, those numbers will move up and down, but for now, the heating season is off to a better start than last year almost everywhere. We’ll take it.
Small Batch Fiber Producers
One of the perks of my job is the random emails of inquiry that land in my inbox from time to time. Admittedly, some surprise me in their simplicity: “I can’t find [insert brand name here] at my normal spot. Do you know what’s happened?” Others bring to light something in the forest products value chain I hadn’t known about or considered.
This week, I received an inquiry from a waste management professional asking if I knew of a pellet producer—or someone in his area of operation—who might be interested in some wood packaging and dunnage waste that his client had tired of landfilling. Wood pellet producers are always interested in hearing about wood fiber streams, but not all wood waste opportunities are a fit.
In the case of this inquiry, the author of the email indicated that the annual volume of this particular opportunity was between 60–100 tons per year. While I’m sure that seems like a mountain of material for the company trying to figure out what to do with what amounts to less than a semi-trailer full of wood waste each month, it is barely worth looking into for producers that require thousands of tons each week. I’ve visited fiber sources for members that were delivering three and four truckloads every single day. There’s efficiency in scale for both the fiber producer and the fiber off-taker. Fiber producers are looking to move their produced fiber with the smallest number of transactions, and fiber buyers are looking to fill their needs with the fewest number of transactions. Fueling a pellet plant that requires 50,000 tons of wood waste with fiber suppliers that can provide 100 tons a year would require 500 unique suppliers.
This brings me to a research effort in which I'm hoping to enlist the readers of the Pellet Wire. One of the foundational values wood pellet manufacturers bring to the broader wood product manufacturing sector is the incredible volume of wood residues that we purchase from upstream manufacturers. This figure is closely tracked in the Monthly Densified Biomass Fuel Report, and in 2024, the sawmill residual purchases alone topped 7 million tons, with an average price of $35.91 per ton. This is the economic and environmental case we make whenever we ask policymakers to understand just how vital wood pellet manufacturing is.
What remains a mystery to me is just how much wood fiber is out there circulating through our economy—and how many instances of 60–100 tons of wood waste streams exist. A solid understanding of that total number would allow our sector to not only articulate how much we use (we already know this) but also what percentage of the total residue stream we consume. Candidly, I can offer only a slightly educated guess. Between all sources tracked by the EIA (roundwood, sawmill residues, wood product manufacturing residuals, and other residuals), pellet producers (residential and industrial) purchased 19.5 million tons of wood fiber in 2024. Could there be 100 million tons of residual wood fiber available each year? 200 million tons?
I’ve got feelers out with other wood industry enthusiasts and thinkers, but if you’ve got a bead on a solid number, I’m all ears. ChatGPT puts the figure at 200 million tons, including 20 million tons that end up in landfills—which brings me back to the inquiry that came in this week.
Wood pellet manufacturing does an incredible job of sopping up a good share of those residues—10%, if you give ChatGPT’s number any credence. What is remarkable is that for every ton our industry consumes, a ton falls through the cracks for one reason or another: too small of a volume, contaminated with foreign materials, chemically treated, or too far to move to an end user economically.
While wood bioenergy generally—and pellet manufacturers specifically—cannot capture every ton of wood residue out there, it does underscore the absolutely vital nature of maintaining industries that can add value and make use of this river of wood fiber our economy throws off each and every year.
—Tim Portz
Executive Director
