From the Director’s Desk: 400 Tons: 1 Million, Happy Thanksgiving from the Pellet Fuels Institute, Hitting Pause on New York's All-Electric Buildings Act
400 Tons: 1 Million Board Feet
One of the cornerstones of the PFI’s federal advocacy message in recent years has been the economic impact of the wood residual purchases made by wood pellet manufacturers—and why not? The numbers speak for themselves. In 2024, wood pellet manufacturers spent over $250 million to purchase more than 7 million tons of sawmill residuals. When speaking to policymakers, their primary interest, rightly, is the positive impact on their constituents of whatever it is you bring to their attention. Jobs. Economic activity. Enhanced quality of life. These are the currencies in federal advocacy.
Our residual re-use story is eye-popping. The volume of material is staggering. Annually, the residuals purchased by wood pellet manufacturers would fill a convoy of semi-trailers that would stretch from Anchorage to Orlando. This and other visuals are the kinds of illustrations our members share when we talk about our sector in D.C. These residual purchase numbers can be distilled down to the state and even plant level to put into context the economic impact of wood pellet manufacturing in a highly localized area.
Recently, I’ve been consumed with the question of just how much wood residual is out there. With a bead on that, we could fully round out the story of residual use. Prior to digging around, I couldn’t even offer an educated guess as to what percentage of the available wood residues were purchased by wood pellet manufacturers. Ten percent? Thirty percent? Could it be half? I imagined myself being asked that very question by a policymaker and didn’t like that I had no idea.
Consumed by this gap in my understanding of our sector, I reached out to an old professional friend, Bill Perritt at Fastmarkets RISI, who produces a lumber pricing report, to see what he might know. Like me, he turned to ChatGPT to see what the “supercomputer in the sky” might have to say. The results were interesting and, in their own way, accurate, but it was a number offered by a contact of Bill’s that I found most useful, and it was offered almost as a postscript.
“As a rule of thumb: About 400 green tons of residuals come from production of 1 million board feet of lumber.”
There was a number I could sink my teeth into, and with a series of back-of-the-envelope calculations—with some help from ChatGPT—I could arrive at a total residuals-available number that I could feel good about. At the very least, I could build a formula and share my assumptions, tweaking it based on reactions from people who would know. Yesterday, I shared this number with PFI Board Chairman Scott Cummings (Barefoot Pellet). His initial reaction was that 400 tons per million board feet felt a little low. Scott offered to consult his own plant data and get back to me, so for now, let’s run the numbers assuming that 400 tons per million board feet is close.
Mining ChatGPT, I came up with this information to get me close to a total board-feet calculation for U.S. lumber output.
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According to the Western Wood Products Institute, the state of Oregon produced about 5.1 billion board feet of softwood lumber in 2024, which the institute says “accounted for about 14 percent of total U.S. production.”
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From that, you can estimate total U.S. output ≈ 5.1 billion ÷ 0.14 ≈ 36.4 billion board feet (BBF).
With this in hand, the numbers are easy enough to crunch.
36,400,000,000 ÷ 1,000,000 × 400 tons = 14,560,000 tons of wood residuals.
Assuming 14.5 million tons of sawmill residuals is in the ballpark, then wood pellet manufacturers consume about half of the residuals purchased each year. To me, this puts a triple underscore underneath the value proposition of our residuals utilization. Our sector takes half of the sawmill residuals in this country and makes a usable, clean, renewable heating fuel from it.
I look forward to sharing this simple fact with policymakers next spring.
*If you’ve got insights on my assumptions and can confirm or offer a modification, I’m all ears.
Happy Thanksgiving from the Pellet Fuels Institute
From all of us here at the Pellet Fuels Institute, we wish you the happiest of Thanksgivings. Please enjoy your time with family and friends, travel safely, cheer for your favorite sports teams, and breathe in that fresh, COLD fall air.
Hitting Pause on New York's All-Electric Buildings Act
Included in this week’s Industry News section are two stories about the decision in the state of New York to delay the implementation of the “All-Electric Buildings Act,” a piece of legislation that would have prohibited the installation of natural gas lines into any new building less than seven stories, including residential properties.
The implementation of the law has been delayed until an appellate court can rule on appeals filed by industry groups including the Northeast Hearth, Patio and Barbecue Association.
The “All-Electric Buildings Act” has become a lightning-rod piece of legislation and has inspired new federal legislation that would serve as a countermeasure for state actions to limit consumer choice. Rep. Nick Langworthy (NY-23) has introduced the Energy Choice Act, for which the Pellet Fuels Institute and its members have advocated. Also included in the Industry News section of this Pellet Wire is a story about that legislation being voted out of subcommittee into the full House Energy and Commerce Committee for passage onto the full House. The PFI continues to monitor both of these pieces of legislation closely. Read a letter of support from the PFI to Subcommittee Chair Bob Latta for the Energy Choice Act online.
—Tim Portz
Executive Director
