Thinning the forest to make electricity

One way to reduce smoke pollution in the Sisters Country from forest thinning projects is to haul the slash piles someplace else and burn them there.

Over 250 loads of chipped wood products have left the USFS lands near Camp Sherman in the form of "hog fuel," at about 30 tons a load; a total of over 7,500 tons. It wasn't done in an effort to reduce smoke pollution, but to make money selling electricity - and there are a lot more loads slated to go.

Keith Moll, owner of one of the over 15 chip trucks that have been rolling through Sisters over the last few weeks, left the USFS's Heritage stewardship project near Camp Sherman heading for Prairie City.

"Yeah, I make two trips a day hauling hog fuel to the DR Johnson mill over in Prairie City," Moll said. "One long haul from here (the Sisters area), and then a short haul from Seneca."

Moll, who hails from Sublimity, climbs into his big rig Monday morning, and spends a week hauling hog fuel from a variety of sites on both sides of the Cascades to sawmills that have set up their steam generators to send electricity into the public grid. (Most sawmills burn waste woody material to create electricity that is used in the mill to power the wood processing equipment).

"It's a long week," Moll said with a chuckle, "and it's sure good to be back home on Friday."

"DR Johnson has mills in Riddle, Prairie City, Willamette Valley, and other locations around the state," Steve Lawrence Field Operations Manager for T-2 said, "but the only one that's operating as a saw mill is in Prairie City. Lumber production is so small the only way they can make money is generating electricity and selling it on the grid."

The chipper that grinds up the woody material that otherwise would be burned and generate smoke is completely automatic. It is operated from more than 20 feet away by Frank Sayers, who also operates the jammer feeding the chipper. When Frank has everything in the slash piles ground up and loaded in the chip truck, the chipper moves off the site with orders from Frank, via a little black box with toggles, somewhat like a radio-controlled airplane. He even uses the black box to operate a blade on the chipper to repair soils disturbed by logging process.

"Thing are always changing in the forest products industry," Brian Tandy, Sisters District Silviculture Team Leader said, "like the price of hog fuel. When a stewardship project was first talked about in the '80s, hog fuel wasn't even in the picture."

He then went on to explain that after the big ice and snow storms of the late '90s, Friends of the Metolius wanted to have something done to remove all the slash from the storms. That got the USFS and several partners interested in doing some thinning in the forest around Camp Sherman which the USFS named the "Metolious Basin Project" a demonstration area of their Heritage educational projects.

The aim of the project was to eliminate the risk of catastrophic wildfire, while at the same time, reintroduce fire as a management tool, begin thinning and make it pay. It is the biomass from many of those thinning projects that is now being ground up into hog fuel and hauled away to make electricity.

The USFS found that Scott Melcher Logging of Sweet Home had rubber-tired machinery that would do the stewardship project efficiently. The equipment moved around the forest with the smallest impact on soils and vegetation, and is fast enough to make it pay

As long as the price for hog fuel holds up, the air around the Sisters Country may be better for breathing, and at the same time, money will flow into the bank for the USFS and wood products industry.