From the Director’s Desk: Austin Recap, Summertime Swoon, Next Stop Capitol Hill
From the Director’s Desk:
Austin Recap
First, a huge shout out of appreciation to everyone who made some time to catch up with the Pellet Fuels Institute at our annual conference two weeks ago in Austin, Texas. A special thank you to my partner in planning and hosting the Annual Conference since I took the PFI reins in 2018, Kenny Lisle (Lignetics). For a conference to come off well, a good number of people have to care about it and all of the little details that are involved. Kenny is exemplary in that category. Thanks, Kenny, for making this year’s event a success. We intentionally placed the 2023 Annual Conference in Austin to give our attendees an opportunity to take in the city's barbecue and live music scene. While I didn’t hear much about attendees taking in live music, I know for a fact that the local BBQ haunts drew our attendees and, on the conference’s final night, a good number of our attendees went out at sunset to see the city's famed urban bat population go out for their evening feed. More impressive than the bats was the human turnout for this spectacle. The ice cream vendors were doing a brisk business. If you were expecting a cloud of bats all at once (I know I was), you left disappointed.
Our industry is hopeful that the 2023-24 heating season will find key pellet using regions much colder this year. Additionally, there was a notable difference in excitement level around the opportunity in Europe for North American heating pellets. Last year, that opportunity dominated conference discussions. After largely fizzling, producers are taking more of a "wait and see" approach to a market opportunity that seemed so promising last year.
Summertime Swoon
While it isn’t entirely accurate to call June a "quiet" month in the wood pellet sector, the month typically finds producers starting to align their production throttle with forecasts for the fall. March and April find production output at their lowest ebb with averages of 122,000 and 114,000 tons respectively. June typically sees more output as the average creeps up to 132,000 tons, but the sector doesn’t find its full song until August (157,000 tons) when sales start to pick up and inventory starts to move out of storage.
Sales too are soft in June with total U.S. sales averaging around 133,000 tons. Each month from now through October, sales will pick up with the peak coming in October when sales average over 240,000 tons. We’ll have to keep our eye on October sales as they have become a bellwether for how the season may unfold. Last year’s 222,000 tons was a welcome return to the average after a disappointing 2021 with just 188,000 tons sold.
Next Stop – Capitol Hill
Please pencil in a Pellet Fuels Institute DC Fly-in for later this fall. We hope to have dates and a venue finalized by mid-July and would ask that all PFI members consider joining us for an important day of federal advocacy. Details will be forthcoming and shared here in future editions of the Pellet Wire. Please consider making an investment of your time to talk about your business. It is vital to our interests to help policymakers understand how we do what we do. DC in the fall is beautiful.
