High Oil Prices Spark Firewood Demand

The firewood industry ranges from the most basic practice of axe-meets-log to the sophisticated processing of prepackaged wood pellets. Right now, pellets are a booming industry with shipments in the Northeast up twenty percent from last year and pellet stove shipments up sixty percent. The stoves resemble traditional woodburners, but with automatic feeds, computerized temperature controls, and electric blowers.

Each day the New England Wood Pellet factory in southwest New Hampshire takes about two hundred tons of sawdust and presses it into the little rabbit-food like nuggets.

The factory recently expanded its production by over thirty percent. But operations manager Norwood Keeney says it’s still not enough to meet demand.

Keeney: We’re standing in our warehouse, which at this time of year really ought to have a whole lot more product in it. But as one looks around and listens to the echo in the building you realize that it is quite empty.

Stocks of pellets are being sold out at retail stores in what owners have called a panic and a hoarding frenzy. One store put customers on a three week waiting list. Heating oil prices average two dollars fifty five cents a gallon in New Hampshire as of this week. The Maine State Planning Office calculates that at that price homes heated with wood will save over forty percent in heating costs compared with those heated with oil. But only between three and ten percent of homes in New Hampshire are fueled primarily from wood. Most wood burners use it as a supplemental source of heat.

Olimpio: We probably burn less than a cord a year, but I think that’s about to change.

Joe Olimpio stands outside the Abundant Life Wood and Gas Stove shop near Concord. The store has a large sign urging passing drivers to beat the oil prices. Olimpio’s shopping for a new stove.

Olimpio: Because of the oil prices I’m looking at splitting and cutting a lot more wood than I have in the last five years.

Olimpio hopes he can cut his oil use by about twenty percent. And luckily for him, he already has his wood ready to go. Prices of firewood have gone up by about a third in the last year and the supply is short. Jasen Stock, the executive director of the New Hampshire Timberland Association says the problem is that this year’s wood burners are relying on last year’s harvest.

Stock: You have to allow almost a year’s time for the wood to dry out. So one of the pickles that people are finding themselves in is that they’re able to buy wood but it’s not seasoned. It’s what they call green wood, that’s a tree that’s been freshly cut.

Stock predicts that demand will continue to rise. He says the resource will not be a limiting factor—that there are definitely enough trees to heat houses—it’s just that production needs to expand. And even now, he says, seasoned wood is available, it’s all a matter of how much people are willing to pay for it.