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The interest in biomass energy has increased steadily in the past decade.  Several resources have been identified as raw material for energy production, including forest biomass.  At present, energy entirely generated from forest biomass is cost prohibitive and must be supplemented at bio-energy facilities with other sources of wood, either mill residues or urban wood wastes.  A vast resource for forest biomass exists, particularly in central and eastern Oregon, where many overstocked ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa) forests are categorized into an extreme level for potential catastrophic wildfire.  Reduction of biomass from these forests may be essential to return these ecosystems to their historic fire regimes. 

The knowledge gap between forest fuels reduction and biomass energy must be addressed with an integrated approach, including fire and forest management, ecosystem effects, and the sourcing of raw material.  The Department of Forest Engineering at Oregon State University is beginning efforts to bridge this gap.  Our research group, the Forest Operations Research Group, is currently involved in projects in central Oregon.  The overall research focuses on creating fire resilient landscapes while minimizing site and ecosystem impacts.  We will explore different equipment configurations to accomplish objectives and investigate the biomass harvesting capability, productivity, and costs for each.  Citing a biomass energy facility requires substantial knowledge of source material availability.  By establishing costs for extraction and transportation for forest biomass, we can provide an economic boundary of resource supply for a given facility. 

Our expertise is rooted in seeking methods to increase equipment productivity and, in turn, to minimize the delivery cost of raw material to facilities.  We also have extensive experience in commercially harvesting small diameter trees with unconventional equipment configurations.  One particular study in this vein had the specific objective to reduce fuel loading in an eastern Oregon mixed conifer forest. 

Forest harvesting operations research can have a direct influence on the future of energy production from forested biomass in Oregon and we look forward to collaborating with scientists that can assist in other facets of integrated fuels reduction and biomass energy projects.

Here are a few publications of past work and some other references for fuels reduction projects that have involved a commercial component:

1.) Brown, C.G. and L.D. Kellogg. 1996. Harvesting Economics and Wood Fiber Utilization in a Fuels Reduction Project: A Case Study in Eastern Oregon. Forest Products Journal. 46(9):45-52.
2.)Drews, E.S., B.R. Hartsough, J.A. Doyal, and L.D. Kellogg. 2001. Cut-to-length harvesting for reducing fuels loadings in the Blue Mountains of Oregon. Journal of Forest Engineering. 12(1):81-91.
3.)Fiedler, C. E., C.E. Keegan, D.P. Wichman, S.F. Arno. 1999. Product and economic implications of ecological restoration. Forest Products Journal. 49(2):19-23.
4.)Larson D.S., Mirth R. 2004. A Case Study on the Economics of Thinning in the Wildland Urban Interface. Western Journal of Applied Forestry. 19(1):60-65.