Don't waste forest jobs, resources

There’s nothing new or untested about co-generation plants powered by biomass, but it’s a proposition that has taken on more weight in Northwest Montana than ever before.

A group of Flathead Valley leaders traveled to Europe in the late 1990s to tour biomass-burning power plants and get a firsthand look at methods and machinery used in gathering forest waste products and turning them into power.

Even then, it was extremely high-tech, and it’s likely that it’s only improved since then.

What also has transpired since then is this year’s closure of the Smurfit-Stone container plant in Frenchtown, which has for decades been the primary destination of chips, hog fuel and low-quality roundwood from across Western Montana.

And that has ramped up interest and urgency in developing a biomass co-generation plant that would serve as a replacement destination for the region’s wood waste. Managers at Stoltze Land and Lumber have admirably — and passionately — been pushing for a 15-megawatt plant at their sawmill facilities west of Columbia Falls.

Stoltze Vice President Chuck Roady maintains that there is a more than adequate supply of wood waste within 75 miles of the plant, even with historic rather than potential logging activity.

More importantly, he rightly points out that Western Montana still has an experienced, well-equipped logging and trucking work force that is at risk of disappearing. Hundreds of logging and trucking contracting jobs across the region directly depended on the Frenchtown mill and they are not going to survive for long without alternative work.

The need for forest management will not go away, whether it be on private, state, federal or tribal lands. So there will be logging, but with no destination for what is often a huge amount of wood waste, particularly on forest thinning projects that involve small-diameter trees.

That material will be left to rot or to burn in slash piles, spewing air pollution rather than being burned in a high-tech, low-emission co-generation plant that produces electricity.

Roady openly acknowledges that adding a 15-megawatt plant to the Flathead Valley’s power grid would require slightly higher electricity rates because of the higher costs of continuously having to gather and transport biomass material.

It is a proposition that likely would require the support and cooperation of the Flathead Electric Cooperative’s board of directors and ratepayers.

But Roady has it right: Local leaders, along with the state’s congressional delegation, should give this proposition a serious look and explore whatever measures are available to make it feasible.

This region cannot afford to ignore the jobs and usable forest products that otherwise would go to waste.