Fight over biomass - Law making it difficult for businesses to expand

After generations of disrespect, wood refuse is the material of the moment. It took two days to run through all the ways it can be thermochemically converted into gasoline, mixed with coal dust for clean-burning pellet fuel or cooked into charcoal to capture carbon emissions at the Montana Bioenergy Workshop in Missoula. And that's assuming it hasn't been assigned to more traditional uses like paper and particleboard. “It's one of the biggest fears we have - that everybody else will take our fuel and burn it,” Roseburg Forest Products Co. plant manager Ken Cole told a group of bioenergy pioneers during a tour of his Missoula factory Tuesday. “The market for pellets and biomass is putting massive pressure on us.” “We could run two shifts a day, seven days a week if we could get the supply,” Christine Johnson said of her Eureka Pellet Mills business. “It's not that it's not there. It's that we don't have the access to it.” Johnson said despite their smaller populations, Germany, Sweden and Canada all produce more wood pellets for heating fuel than the United States. Her facility would love to get hold of otherwise unmarketable beetle-killed trees, but hasn't been able to negotiate contracts on the forests...Missoulian