From the Director's Desk:

Our Three-Legged Stool

Over the past two months your PFI has dramatically ramped up its efforts to see the tax credit for qualifying wood pellet appliances extended past 2023 (when they are set to expire) and expanded to include deployments into businesses. We’ve retained a team from O’Neill and Associates to help guide our efforts and for now we are focusing specifically on the Senate Finance Committee and the Senate Appropriations Committee. 

This week I authored and delivered a series of letters customized specifically for specific senators regarding our interest in seeing the BTU act extended and expanded. I’m a firm believer that the simplest arguments are the best arguments to make. With that in mind, my letters which you can find posted on the PFI website (under Industry data) attempted to connect three irrefutable and simple realities:

•  Wood product manufacturing is important to the Senator’s state. 
•  Wood pellet manufacturing was vital for wood product manufacturers. 
•  The BTU Act is vital for wood pellet manufacturers. 

That’s it. That’s the basis of my letter. In my letters I open by expressing the enormity of wood product manufacturing in each state. The numbers and facts speak for themselves. Pennsylvania has a forest products manufacturing site in all 67 of its counties. In Ohio, the forest products industry contributes $26 billion to the state’s economy every year. Next, I draw attention to the wood pellet manufacturers in the state and the demand they generate for the inevitable residues that come from these primary and secondary forest product manufacturing sites. For this I include some calculations based on installed capacity, residual prices as reported by the EIA and some assumptions about required residues per ton of finished pellets. Again, the numbers are compelling. In Pennsylvania, wood pellet manufacturers spent over $20 million on residues in 2021. 

Finally, I make the argument that the BTU Act, the most meaningful piece of federal policy support that wood heat sector has ever been given is yielding more pellet appliances in homes. 

The hope is that our elected representatives will readily connect those three dots and realize that a move to extend and expand the BTU Act has a direct, positive impact on their state’s forest products economy. 

Conference Talkers

Each year the topical discussion at the PFI Annual Conference ebbs and flows with the topics of the day. We are five weeks out from the event. Here are some items I suspect will be talked about formally, and informally during the event.

Inflation.Our producers panel last year indicated that managing inflation was going to be one of the bigger challenges of the 2021-22 heating season. It is hard to imagine this won’t be the biggest challenge of the 2022-23 heating season as well. 

Russia. A 2-million ton global pellet short is a big deal. The worldwide search to replace these lost volumes is underway and our members are fielding inquiries and considering the benefits and risks of the opportunity before them. 

BTU Act. Will this year’s event turn into an impromptu celebration of the inclusion of the full BTU Act in a Clean Energy Tax package we are working so diligently towards? I will be joined on stage by Jennifer Krowchun (O’Neill) and Ryan Carroll (HPBA) to discuss where things stand. 

Our fiber story. The conference will open with a discussion about how our industry should share its fiber story with a varied group of stakeholders, each with their own motivations, needs and wants.