Abstract

In the United States, a rising number of biomass facilities have created new market opportunities for landowners, loggers, and timber buyers which could discourage the traditional approach of selling pulpwood to a pulp mill and may affect the price and availability of traditional pulpwood products. Private forest landowners, consulting foresters, loggers, and mills are thus interested to compare the profits from traditional roundwood only harvesting and harvest entailing mostly biomass production. The goal of this study was to develop a decision support tool to predict the final stumpage value from roundwood only and biomass harvests based on the distance to a pulp mill or biomass market, delivered prices of the products, and cut and load rates. We grew (simulated) loblolly pine plantations to six different thinning ages (12, 14, 16, 18, 20, and 22 years) at five different site indices (55, 65, 75, 85, and 95 feet at a base age of 25 years) using a PTAEDA4.0 software. We considered two different harvesting systems: conventional system and biomass system. For each system, we developed decision-supporting models to inform forest landowners, consulting foresters, loggers, and mill about options to further maximize their economic return from timber harvesting operations. For example, In a forest having a site index of 75, cut and load rate of $13/ton, and wood chipping rate of $3/ton the application of models resulted that when the mill-delivered price for biomass ($22/ton) was less than the mill-delivered price for pulpwood ($26/ton), given the distance to the pulp mill was greater than 73 km at age 22 years and 75 km at age 12 years, and the nearest biomass market was within 64 km, we found that the highest economic return was achieved by chipping all pulpwood roundwood. As the distance to the nearest biomass market increased from 64 to 97 km, the conventional system was a better option for a distance to a pulp mill of up to 93 km at thinning age 22 years and 95 km at thinning age 12 years.