 Policy-associated energy program. The PSI is a bipartisan caucus, a congressional caucus, 25 years ago. We were dedicated to developing innovative policy solutions to address economic energy and environmental challenges before our country. We're looking at that to unite energy efficiency with more and more of this briefing continues to the PSI's exploration of the ways that biomass can help with generations of environmental energy and economic challenges. And also, I'm looking at ways of policy mechanisms to which we can advance these opportunities. I'd like to thank a number of groups that have helped make this briefing possible, including the Wirewigs, the biomass thermal energy council, the Royal Voices Conservation Coalition, the biomass thermal working group, the biomass board naming council, the Royal Association. We have a wealth of experience, as I'm on here today. People are coming to a wide variety of different experiences, perspectives, and regions. We'll help begin our conversation, each with a ten to five minute presentation. After the presentations, conversation will underline with your help with the questions. The first speaker today is Steve Boehner. Steve is an owner of American Wood Fibers, son of Conrad Boehner. He's part of the fourth generation. He has been immersed in the wood fiber business his entire life. American Wood Fibers operates 10 plants across the U.S. processing over 500,000 tons of wood and that wood fiber is tenured. Mr. Boehner currently serves on the board of directors of the Conrad Fields Institute. Thank you, Ned. Trying to make sure that I've got the mic correct for everybody. Thank you to all those organizing and supporting groups to make this possible. As Ned mentioned, I have a little bit of experience in what is now biomass. I have to admit our company is about 45 years old. My family's been involved in SAWDA since 1919. It's just the last few years and it's actually been called biomass. We just called it sawdust, or we called it boiler fuel or wood chips. But yes, we're thrilled to be here and talk a little bit about opportunities for biomass to become a thermal solution to our energy future and a win-win for both the environment, for the economy and for energy down the road. So with that I'll try to make sure that I go forward and not backwards and we look forward to questions at the end from you and the audience. I probably have to point it towards it. Sorry, I got a little excited with the first click. Just a little bit of an outline of my presentation. I think most everybody has them in front of us. So I don't want to be too redundant, but these are the topics that I want to try and cover. We have, as Ned mentioned, several experts on this panel and there's other subjects that they will cover. But I just want to talk about biomass as renewable. It's one that's the number one and not that people don't know that. We're working to get recognition as biomass for fuels on a lot of policy here in Washington. Talk a little bit about wood energy growth, largely unsubsidized and unfunded, all independent in a lot of cases. Talk a little bit about residential and commercial appliances, biomass as an advanced biofuel and a little comparative information on efficiencies and emissions. I don't know that a lot of people realize it, but if you were to pick wind, solar, hydroelectric, geothermal or biomass, how many of you would have thought biomass was the number one renewable? Be honest, put those hands up high. Number one, it's not number one by a little bit, it's number one by a lot. Over 50% of our renewable energy comes from biomass, largely thermal, but also in other forms. Heating with biomass from a government DOE agency's perspective, we've gotten recognized, which is a big accomplishment. Three or four or five years ago on the Hill and agency work, you wouldn't, you kind of get that look from folks, biomass, what's biomass? Well, obviously now it's in the consciousness of American people, it's also in the consciousness of Washington, and you can see even the DOE's given a good bit of dedication to it on their websites. And there's a lot of information. You'll see the links below on these slides where you can go and get more information pertaining to that. But there's still a lacking void in policy in America in a federal sense, but on a state level, there are an awful lot of renewable portfolio standards. A lot of them, if you look into the details, this is updated as of just last month, so 29 states have these RPSs. Again, dsireusa.org is your link to going there. You can find a huge amount of information on the programs that exist. Many of them have carbouts. They have carbouts for a lot of things. Very few of them have carbouts for biomass, and even fewer have it for biomass thermal. We need to improve that, we need to change that. A lot of good things and renewables out there, biomass is certainly be part of that conversation. So wood, energy, number one growing fuel, if you look at the census data that just came out from 2010, wood heating by per capita, the number one growing fuel source in America, why do you think that might be? It's not because of funding, it's not because of support, it's not because of tax breaks, it's because of affordability. We've been through a very difficult time, you know, in our economy, in our country, and folks are trying to figure out ways to heat their homes efficiently and affordably. And they've made it, they've made a decision as these numbers would suggest to do it with wood. Newer technologies are out there that are very clean burning, low emissions. The EPA has been involved in that in certifying new appliances to improve that. I should probably qualify this, my talk, because I'm probably more focused on pellets than I am maybe chips or biomass. Wood pellets being the densified form, but in essence, this is not specific to that. This is 12 million homes in America using wood as energy. But some of these programs the EPA has worked on is to certify these stoves to make them clean. Focusing a little bit on this slide, I know it's very difficult to see on a four-page handout. It's even harder over there on the wall, but I'll just point out the key factors that I think are on here. This, again, is talking about heating with biomass in the form of wood pellets. Wood pellets are densified fibers that go through a milling process. They go through a densification process. They get cooled, and primarily they get packaged and then they get sold for residential home heating. There are about a million homes in America with that type of a system. There are lots of stoves. As I mentioned, 12 million are wood appliances that aren't wood pellets, so there's a lot of folks doing this with cord wood and so forth. But if you just look at the wood pellet industry itself, there are over 100 producers in this country. We displace about 8 million barrels of oil. The potential, if you go to some of the studies that have been done, I referred to USDOE earlier, they did a billion-ton study. If you get even somewhat conservative, which we typically are, in our industry, you can create a huge amount of energy from this source, and you can create renewable, sustainable energy and jobs. Today, we've got 1,450 direct jobs, countless other indirect jobs supporting our pelleting processing, but the potential is just enormous. Almost 820,000 jobs is the estimation, and I know there's some more talk about this later that others will have that's probably even more specific to this topic, but that's the picture that we have today. This is just a map showing you some of the different locations. They're spread all over this country. There is a certain bias towards the East Coast, east of the Mississippi in particular, but let's face it, that's where the people are. So that's where the production is. Again, over 100 producers. So if you go to a residential application where you want to heat your home with pellets or with biomass, you've got several different options. These are both, one is standalone, one is, excuse me, two of them are standalone units. One is insert. I think these are both, two of them are wood burning. One of them is pellet. Again, typical home can be space heated or could even be whole house heated with these appliances for about two tons of pellets a year, and right now the market price you might be at about $500 in fuel. Anybody fill an oil tank lately? You can't fill an oil tank for $500. Not anywhere in our country right now unless your tank is really small. Most aren't. So that's the residential market. This is a potential that's been identified and something that's been worked on through several universities and also commercially now to take biomass and use it as the fuel for confined animal feeding operations. Poultry is one great target where you have 500 foot long home houses where these birds get grown and essentially brought to maturity and then sent to be converted for food, let's just say. There are a lot of these out there. There's 90,000 homes in America, excuse me, 90,000 or so poultry houses. A huge opportunity within that industry and there's a map on the next slide that shows you where the potential lies. We eat a lot more chicken than we do turkey, although a lot of us I'm sure are planning our eating wisely so that we have room for turkey next week. But the chicken growers are down primarily in the southeast and through the Carolinas. You've got turkey growers throughout the Midwest and down through those areas as well. The bottom line is there's a lot of birds. There's a lot of energy and these kind of systems would be a great opportunity to again create energy with biomass. Talk a little bit about institutional opportunities and these are a couple of examples that are out there in the marketplace. I will give credit here to the Biomass Energy Resource Council, Burke acronym for that and they have a great website that has a ton of information and this is where I glean these two particular systems. They have lots on there. Institutional, something for colleges, universities, for correctional facilities, all kinds of opportunities in biomass here. And again, these folks in the first example that I'll highlight, they're able to save $2 million a year in expenses on fuel on a $4 million system. That's a pretty decent payback. I'd certainly invest in it. So I want to, without being argumentative, without being trying to throw anyone under the bus, we need a lot of solutions to our energy future. But I do want to compare this one as it relates to advanced biofuels, which wood pellets qualify as do lots of liquid biofuels that are essentially not corn converted, you know, converted ethanol's and so forth. This is a challenge that was put out by the biofuels digest for a victory plant and I'll go through it quickly. They want to produce a $1.50 per gallon fuel ASTM certified for a $4 per gallon capacity capital investment in 24 months or less. Sounds pretty interesting. Sounds pretty compelling. Reality is they're not close to this right now. That's okay. Maybe they'll get there. Maybe they won't. Let me just give you an example of what you can do with a pellet operation. This happens to be a picture of my plant in Virginia. It's on 40 acres. It's a pretty good size facility. One ton of pellets to give you an equivalent is about 2.8 barrels of oil. 2.8 barrels of oil equal 117 gallons. You do the conversions of pellets at a pretty good wholesale price of $177 a ton. That equals out to $1.50 per gallon. I know it's not liquid. I know you're not going to put it in your car, although people are actually powering cars with pellets. Probably not what you want to do, but this is an opportunity to do it in an equal fashion with densified fuels. The capacity of our plants, 8.5 million gallons of give or take. We did it for less than $2 a million gallon investment. So who's the victor? All right, so we've gotten even smaller with slides and I apologize again, but these will be available on the EESI website. So please feel free to go there and download them. This is just a simple comparison with today's heating prices for different fuels comparing number two oil, diesel, electricity, propane, and wood. And you can see that wood is about half the cost. It's pretty simple. It's not rocket science. The last thing I'll leave you with is just some efficiency numbers and emissions. Biomaster thermal has the highest energy conversion today. Ethanol, we can argue about what that conversion factor is, one to one, two to one. I won't argue that. Pellets are somewhere between 15 to one. 15 units of energy out for every unit of energy you put in. 15 to one. If you put it in a bag, it's a little bit less, but that's a great number. The other is the emissions and the cleanliness and others will probably address this or can probably speak to this better than I can. So I won't go into that too deeply, but the essential thing to leave you with is that the EPA is working with the industry to create clean emissions. Sometimes it's a little onerous with the boiler max and so forth, but the reality is we need clean technologies. We have to be aware of that, and these technologies can be and certainly are already today. So I thank you for your time. I hope you were able to glean some information you didn't have, and I look forward to questions later. Thank you. The next speaker is Will Strauss, the president and founder of future metrics and consultancy specializing in quantifying financial feasibility with the World Energy Projects. He's a year for VELT, he's been a senior speaker at two major international bioenergy conferences, one at the World Climate Conference in the World of Austria, one at the International Bioenergy Conference. He has an MPA in finance and a Ph.D. on economics and our system cycle. Thank you. I'll be very quick today. We have limited time, and I have a lot of information on this slide deck. It's about 25 or so slides. So we'll blast through it, but the slide deck will be available for download later, and you can take a very close look. So we'll go through it pretty quickly, and it's also going to be hard to see on the screen. But this first slide says essentially, why should we care about renewable energy? And I know you can't see it, but the time scale there is from the year zero to the year 3,000. We're about the year 2,000, and that big peak is oil production. And oil was basically production started in the mid-1800s. It's continuing now, and I'm not sure where that trough finally hits. Is it 2050? Is it 2100? But it's going to happen. So we need to pay attention. And this is my take on U.S. energy policy right now. I know I'm in the place where I shouldn't be throwing around rocks, but that's what we're up to. And I think we have some solutions for this. So the discussion I'm going to bring forth here is about, sort of follows exactly what we just heard about the use of wood fuels, particularly pellets, as a source of heating. And I'm going to concentrate on the Northeast states. That's where my company is expert. That's where we do most of our work. And that's where we're located, we're located in Maine. This chart shows you the petroleum dependency of the various Northeast states. The dark lines are the New England states, plus Pennsylvania and New York. Hawaii is off the chart there. But the other dark lines, the next two are New Hampshire and Vermont. And then we go down from there. Maine is the next bar. Heavily petroleum dependent. And the reason, basically, is because the dependence on heating oil. This slide shows you the percent of households using heating oil. Maine is the winner. The winner. We're excluding Alaska, by the way, here. At about 70, a little over 70 percent of Maine's homes are dependent. New Hampshire, Connecticut, Vermont, Rhode Island, all the New England states. So that's why when we talk about changing people, or people's heating oil addictions, we're really heavily concentrated on the Northeast. Northeast states use about 80, a little more than 80 percent of the heating oil used in the United States. That's where the problem is. And I know this slide is hard to read, both on the handout and up on the screen. But essentially what I'm quantifying here for you is what I'm calling, well, this is the amount of money that's exported every year. That's a big number down in the bottom right corner that's $20 billion every year exported out of these states, sent away. And along with that money, and you guys can take a close look at the data there later on. I'm not going to go through that table of numbers. But along with all that money is jobs, that $20 billion takes about a million jobs with it. And off they go away from the New England states. Our dependence on home heating oil in the Northeast is destroying about a million jobs. That's a very dramatic number. In fact, this little cartoon, which an associate of mine wrote, I think sums it up. There's a truck filling somebody's home with foreign oil, if you will. Somebody's taking some money to the Middle East Treasury and up in smoke coming out the stack is jobs. So there you have it. One of the reasons that we think that this business of making pellets is so important is because very few homes in some of the states in the Northeast have natural gas. Infrastructure is non-existent in Maine. Only 4% of Maine's homes have natural gas and have the ability to connect. It's a very rural, low-density state. So there's no money to be made by utilities in bringing natural gas infrastructure to homes. The only natural gas in Maine goes to paper mills, and that's about it. Hawaii's the lowest, by the way, they have none. And then Vermont and New Hampshire are next after Maine. And even a big state like New York is only 55%. That means 45% of the homes in New York do not have natural gas infrastructure, do not have access to cheap natural gas. They are dependent on expensive foreign oil. So what's the opportunity? This slide actually shows you the percent Timberland in the Northeast states, the very same states that we're just talking about that are dependent on heating oil and don't have much natural gas infrastructure. Maine leads the pack. It's close to 90% of Maine is forest land. And most of that forest land has been managed for decades, in fact, centuries. It's kind of like if you think of a farmer managing their farm and growing corn every year and then harvesting that at the end of the year. Not much different than what's done in Maine, except it takes about 30 to 40 years to grow the crop. It's grown, then harvested, then regrown. That's the way forests are managed and Maine had been for generations, actually. There's plenty of wood. We'll talk a little bit about sustainability very quickly here as I get towards the end of this discussion. I know I'm going quickly, I apologize. So our thesis here is what if we could convert some of these homes that are on heating oil over to regionally produced wood pellet fuel? Job destruction would become job creation. And there's really simply three effects here. The money spent on the fuel stays in the economy instead of going to treasuries in Venezuela or the Middle East or wherever. The fuel is a lower cost. As we just heard, pellet fuel is actually quite cheap. It's about half the cost of heating oil. In the equivalent of heating oil, it's about a dollar and 80 cents a gallon right now. And heating oil in Maine is about 365. And, of course, the supply chain for producing the fuel creates jobs as well. From the forest to the production mills to the homeowners there's a whole infrastructure for supply chain. So how much of the Northeast can be converted? It really depends on sustainable, right? We have to talk about the sustainable quantities. If we're not managing our forest sustainably, we're just like every other depleting resource. We're no better. We're killing off the future. But forest lands in Maine and many of the other Northeast States have been sustainably managed for decades. The forests in Maine are actually growing more than they're being harvested. They're actually getting bigger every year rather than smaller. We also could take a look at idle crop lands that could be converted to dedicated energy crops. That's an important component that we have to investigate as well. And we also have to pay attention to other uses of biomass products that already have value like pulp and paper and lumber making. That has to be in the equation. So here's a picture of Maine's annual harvest for the last, well, since 1980. And it's essentially been sustainable. It's somewhere around 17 million tons a year. The rule of thumb up in that neck of the woods is about one ton per year per acre is the growth rate. So if you have 20 million acres of forest land, you're gonna grow 20 million tons a year of forest. If you harvest 20 million tons, the next year that 20 million tons will reappear as new growth. So as long as it's sustainably harvested, and as you can see, it has been in Maine pretty consistently, you're good for the long term. You're not depleting the stock. Very quickly, these are a few slides on wood pellets. This is one of my company's main energy systems. That boiler in the bottom left is one of our systems that lives in people's homes. It replaces oil boilers. It's fully automatic, clean, reliable. Doesn't take any attention from the homeowner. They don't even know it's there. It's bulk fuel fed. So the homeowner doesn't even have to put pellets in it. It's all automatic. The truck on the right is one of our fuel delivery trucks. It looks just like an oil delivery truck, except it delivers wood pellets through a hose. It's pneumatically injected into the storage tank. That home, in fact, is one of my partner's homes. It's a ski home in Western Maine. It's about a million dollar home heated with that boiler that you see on the right. That's a wood pellet boiler Austrian technology. It works just fine. You can leave the home for a month, and the home still isn't frozen when you go back to it. It stays warm. Quickly on emissions, a lot of people say, well, aren't they dirty? Aren't they a mess? We do have a laser on this, I think. Oh, it's hard to see. You can't really see it. Down at the bottom, we have a handout. You can see that the modern European pellet fuel boiler is about the same particular emissions as a modern oil, heating oil boiler. They're almost identical. Then if you move up the scale there, you can see older boilers. Oil boilers are a little dirtier. Pellet stoves, somewhat more particulate, and then you go up to fireplaces, which are really nasty. As a matter of fact, I love this slide. This shows you that if you burn a quart of wood in your fireplace, you're going to put out 375 pounds of particulate. If you burn the equivalent amount of pellets in your boiler, you're going to put out about 0.28 pounds of particulate. Everybody likes to sit around around their fireplace. Maybe you should stop. Get a pellet boiler. They're really clean. You don't even know they're running. This one I know you can't read. This goes to What's the Future? This shows that in Europe biomass is about 65 to 70% of renewables, and that sort of follows in what you said. The next biggest is hydro at 18 or 19, and then we have wind power at 7, geothermal at 6, and solar about 1.5. Biomass is the workhorse of renewable in Europe, and it is in the U.S. as well. It should get on the radar, and I know it's not sexy, but it matters. Very quickly, I know I'm running out of time, and I just have a few more slides. Quick case study, I was in Sweden a few weeks ago very impressed by the economy. The upper right slide, you can't quite see the top of it shows you fossil fuel energy consumption as a percent of total energy. The U.S. is the dark line that doesn't really go any lower than where it starts back in 1960. Sweden's gone from about 80% down to a little over 30%. And the bottom right slide shows you the percent of that that's biomass. The U.S. is basically a flat line at about 4%. Sweden's up over 20 now. And you'd think, wouldn't this mess up their gross domestic product per capita? Well, there's U.S. and Sweden superimposed. They're almost identical. In fact, Sweden's actually a little higher than the U.S. today. Their economy's doing just fine. And finally, as an added benefit, one day when we start caring about carbon emissions, U.S. carbon emissions are actually increasing. Sweden's are actually decreasing and quite a bit lower. And that's a chart shows you CO2 per year if you burn 1,000 gallons of heating oil. In this case, we're not calling pellet fuel carbon neutral because we're considering the diesel fuel necessary to transport the stuff from the woods to your home and et cetera. So it takes a little bit of carbon fuel. But the combustion is carbon neutral. So finally to sum it up, the Northeast does have all the right stuff. In fact, much of the United States, I don't want to be totally Northeast centric. Much of the northern tier where heating is very, very important has the right stuff. As long as you have forests sufficient enough to maintain stable harvests and sustainable harvests, you're in good shape. And this one is way busy. I'm violating all the slide rules with too many words. But essentially it says that we have pellet fuel refineries. We call them pellet factories. We have bulk delivery systems and boilers. There's a link to my company, Main Energy Systems. Lots of schools, municipal buildings, government buildings of all kinds have already converted throughout the Northeast and in many other parts of the country. And the forest product sector has a long history of being a key part of the economies in the north. And it needs to be maintained because pulp and paper is on the wane. Pulp mills are shutting down everywhere. And what's going to replace that demand and what's going to keep those people working? What's going to keep the working forests working? We think it's energy. And finally, the penalty for failure is dire. This shows you that if oil goes from current, heating oil goes from the current price of $365 to $4.50 a gallon, it's going to evaporate 237, 238,000 jobs. Just a $1.50, approximately $1.50 increase in heating oil prices. That's that much more money exported and that many more jobs gone. And that's the end, AAAE solution. Economic growth, energy independence, and environmental stewardship. Thank you. Next speaker is David Atkins. He's the great biomass program manager at the U.S. Forest Service Station's private forestry branch. He's been 33 years with the Forest Service. 20 years in land management. He's had 11 years where he got small-waste utilization. In 2001, he started implementing fuels for schools and beyond initiatives, demonstrating and developing small-scale working systems in the internal west. Since then, he has worked with a lot in his community, states, and private sector across the country and with that he has a PS in forestry and a master's degree in forest development. Thank you. It's great to be able to have the opportunity to come and share the experiences that I've had relating sustainable forest management to wood energy opportunities and how they can complement each other. So I want to start off with a little flight of fancy or imagination. So imagine an organic solar collector with organic batteries that store that energy that gets collected. And further, imagine that the array of these solar collectors provides a complex habitat structure for a wide range of plants and animals. And also imagine that this organic battery from these solar collectors can be converted to structures that can provide human habitation. And finally, no, not finally. There's two more. These solar collectors with organic batteries can filter carbon from the atmosphere. It also provides a water storage and filtration system and can help mitigate intense water storm events and flooding. And oh, by the way, it also produces oxygen that we breathe. So obviously this doesn't have to be invented. It's something that's already here. But forests tend to be something that we just take for granted. It's there and it provides this whole range of things. And I think it's important for us to step back and put that into perspective. So sustainable forest management, for what and for whom? We've got 750 million acres, roughly, of these solar collector and organic batteries spread across this country. And they're owned by a wide range of family forest owners, public, some of its federal, some state, some county and local, and a portion, a relatively small portion by corporate interests. And so these landowners have a whole variety of reasons why they own that land and what they manage it for. And I've listed out a number of those, whether it's aesthetics and recreation, wildlife habitat, dealing with wildfire risk management. And that's a big issue out west, dealing with insects and diseases that can affect those forests. Climate change, mitigation, adaptation of those forests as climate change is occurring, and wood production. And often people are producing and managing their forests for a whole mixture of these purposes. It's fairly uncommon to have it just focused on one of those. So out west, wildfire is a major consideration and has been for a number of years. And so that's that upper picture is from the Wallow Fire in Arizona just this past June. The pile of forest debris burning there on the lower left is from some forest management activities. And in the west, in most of the states, you're required to dispose of that residue, that slash we call to reduce the wildfire hazard. And so the most common way that that is done is by burning that flash. The other option is to utilize that for energy. And the, oh, I hit the wrong button. That white there is water condensation. When you're burning wood chips, there's moisture in that wood and as it gets driven off and hits the cold atmosphere, then it condenses and you'll see that water vapor. So here's that wallow fire in Arizona and some management that was done. And so you can see from that arrow, the red arrow, that the fire was coming in the direction of the photo point and the black in the background is where you had that running crown fire that had a picture of previously. In that middle zone, that's where there had been some harvesting and treatment of the forest to reduce the density and reduce that fire hazard. And because of that, they were able to have the crews and the equipment in place to protect the homes that were down in the area that is green there. So this is just another location associated with that fire. But the same sort of thing. You have this thinned area, some homes down here. You can see the fire ran through there. You know, it didn't stop the fire but it radically changed the fire behavior from a raging 150-foot wall of flames to something that was on the ground that made it manageable. I think it's really important to keep in mind that woody biomass rides the coattails of other management purposes. Whether it's higher value wood products then you're milling that wood into lumber, window trim, paper, whatever. Energy is typically pretty low on the food chain of wood values. We also ride the coattails of a lot of other objectives whether that is thinning to reduce the wildfire hazard as we just saw or modify and improve wildlife habitat or do watershed protection kinds of things. And so all of these things generate some woody biomass and we have the opportunity to utilize that material. We also have forest health issues and I suspect many of you have heard about the mountain pine beetle epidemics that have been affecting Colorado, Wyoming, Montana and other parts of the West in very large ways and killing extensive amounts of trees. We have other pests like the spruce bud worm and many others and we often want to do treatments that can reduce the risk of those being severely impacted either by the fire or the insects and the diseases. And here's an example of a project that we worked on on developing some new ways to gather and collect and process that biomass and utilize it rather than just piling it and burning it. So we have existing systems and we've had some descriptions of that and within the wood products industry for many decades, wood's been used for energy. There are a few university and college campuses and I got a couple up there that converted in the 80s and 90s and more of them have been converting in the recent years to that. And the fuels for schools, this Darby was our first one that became operational. And so I'll just go over a little bit of the results from Darby. It replaced fuel oil with wood chips, became operational in fall of 03. In that first year, oil was only about a dollar a gallon and they saved about $30,000 that year. In year five, it was up around 350 a gallon and they saved about $140,000. So far in this eight years, they've saved about $800,000. The cost to convert this system, there were actually three schools that had separate fuel oil boilers and went to one wood-fired boiler. It cost about $850,000. So they've almost got that paid back. The useful life should be 30 years or more. A teacher salary at Darby is about $30,000 a year. So you can see the significance to that school in terms of its capacity for teaching and what they have to request from their community in terms of taxes to support that school. Okay, so here's just a picture of some of the equipment inside and just trying to illustrate that this is high-tech stuff. It's computerized. It's automated. You're not having to have somebody shoveling wood chips out back. This is a new construction. And it's something I want to touch on just briefly. This was a high school in Kalispell, Montana that wood was incorporated into that design from the beginning. The really significant piece there is if you incorporate that design into the construction from the beginning, the cost is about half of what a retrofit would be. And so we need to be thinking about getting connected with architects and engineers and incorporating that at the beginning stages because then that makes the return on investment even better. The jobs piece of it that Bill was talking about. We're talking about production, transportation, manufacturing, just some images that reinforce that occurring in a local area. This is a different way of displaying the cost differences. So the bar on the left is fuel oil. And these are all converted to dollars per megajoule so that it's consistent. But you can just see that just visually there's a real dramatic difference. Here's pellets and there's wood chips. Natural gas is currently quite low compared to what it was just a few years ago. And we've seen those cycles and I expect we will see them again in the future. But that fuel oil and propane provides a great opportunity for economic savings. So the take home message here is that we can utilize a renewable domestically produced energy form that has a whole bunch of co-benefits. That wildfire, hazard mitigation, watershed protection, wildlife habitat, air emissions, all of those kinds of things that you don't have those co-benefits with other forms of energy. It can save money and create jobs and at the same time reducing our dependence on foreign oil. So on my email sign off I have that little line there. If you don't grow it, you mine it. You know, we get into all kinds of debates about things and whether we should be doing this or whatever. And often it gets presented as a choice of doing nothing or doing something. But the reality is it's doing something or doing something and what's that other something? Wood and forest that are managed sustainably provide us an opportunity to maintain that something in perpetuity. Thank you. Forest Restoration Program of Sustainable Northwest, Sustainable Northwest brings people, ideas, and innovation together so that data can be taken so that nature and local economies and communities can thrive. CAD works with Forest Restoration Program, whether it's a great selection of opportunities based on market channels, black products, and eco-friendly forest stewardship, CAD's interest in market-based conservation strategies, and create opportunities for rural communities who are in sustainable Northwest. CAD is the co-chair of the biomass energy working group of the rural voices, the conservation coalition, and also co-chairs of the forest biomass working group. I'm wondering what I said cause everybody to leave. I know. Sorry. We were just getting to the fun part too. So those of you that know me know that I will be fast and sometimes will go on so I'm going to try not to go on but I guarantee you I will be fast. So RVCC, the Rural Voices for Conservation Coalition is a policy coalition that Sustainable Northwest runs that has mainly made up of Western rural community folks and the policy solutions that we try to advance are those that simultaneously address the ecological and the economic challenges that faces the rural communities of the West. And as an example of that in terms of biomass, what that means is using the byproducts of the forest restoration activities that are happening on our national forest lands as a source of local fuel. And so that's how I tie in with this great setup of folks here. I'm going to talk about three kind of concepts that are probably not going to show up there because of the graphics. The first one though you have them in front of you is parity. And I think if I was to summarize real quickly in one word what we're after on this thermal kind of platform is recognition, recognition, recognition. At some level we need to recognize that thermal energy exists and that it's important to our energy portfolio and that we can't have a comprehensive energy strategy without it. So what that normally means when folks come to you and probably talk about biomass parity means the section 45 production tax credit because of the open looped and the closed loop differences of rates. But that won't do it. We cannot achieve parity in our energy portfolios without some inclusion of the thermal sector. These gentlemen have talked about the various benefits for it and without it we won't get there. And where it truly starts to strike a balance is that biomass is extremely efficient at producing heat energy. And this parity in energy policy actually creates parity in our four-hour communities in terms of equitable access to producing their own energy. If you live in a very rural, very displaced community across the West there's not a transmission line within 30 miles of you or even farther. So how are you going to recruit any kind of energy into your community? You also import everything that you buy. You import the gas that goes in your tank for your pickup. You import the heating oil that goes into your boiler at home and you import the energy off the grid that comes to you. So how can our communities without this parity start to establish their own local sources of fuel? Markets is the second piece. Market development in particular. To date, most of our focus has been on, particularly as it relates to biomass, has been on using more biomass. We've got to use more biomass for energy. We've got to use more biomass for energy. Particularly that's the policy that we've been doing. I've got the Oregon Outline here in the halo of course because it's the greatest state in the union. But other than that horrible graphic, what this has mean is that policies have resulted have attempted to get the additional resource to the existing facilities. And so those are just a snapshot of what Oregon might or might not look like in terms of our biomass energy sector currently today. But rather, we need demand drivers for market development that will effectively densify these market opportunities for this material and reduce the transportation of this material all over the state and all over our nation. And so I've kind of populated here and actually these are somewhat ground truth in some kind of institutional school heat projects that these gentlemen have been referring to that have popped up across the state of Oregon in the last three years. And if you think a little bit bigger than that about the process heat opportunities, which Steve mentioned in terms of the poultry production in the south, we have a lot of food and seafood manufacturing facilities, very similar type of sector in Oregon. And those would be a little bit bigger facilities. But the map looks very different if we densify it rather than trying to get it all over the place. I think the take home there is whatever we put the incentive towards, we end up getting more. So if we put this incentive, if we need more markets, if that's what we really need and want to put the incentives towards developing more markets. I'm going to tie this just to jobs just for a second since that's that's a primary important piece of this. We in the forest sector talk about biomass as a creating forest sector jobs, loggers, foresters, those kind of folks. We have boiler manufacturers in this country. We have energy service providers in this company, country who are ready to get into this business. And we started to see that some in Oregon and some of these projects in particular three little biomass heat projects at schools. I just talked to both the boiler manufacturer that's located right at 30 miles from my house and the energy developer who lives in Portland. Three school projects created 7,000 man hours of jobs. That's three full time jobs. Three full time jobs is not crazy significant, but for every project we basically got a full time job. That is pretty significant. The facility you see up here is the newest pellet plant in Oregon. It's out in John Day, Oregon. It's 17,000 miles from nowhere. I promise you you can't get there from here. It created 15 new jobs in a community with 17% unemployment. 15 jobs doesn't sound like a lot. That's 6% of the non-farm workforce in that county. 6%, so we could potentially go from 17 to 11 with one little facility. That is pretty significant. And it was pretty awesome to have the woman in the top left is CEQ chair Nancy Sutley, which we were fortunate to host her out there and gave her a new perspective and thinking about how this administration could think about a comprehensive energy strategy and also thinking about biomass energy in particular. Dave mentioned forest restoration opportunities and I want to tie this back into it just a little bit. We have an opportunity with our energy policy to think even more than just about what the energy outcomes are going to be with it, particularly if you think about it in terms of biomass. The market value for biomass towards a thermal end is much higher than towards cellulosic ethanol or towards electricity these days. And so if you just, if we say we have options on the table in terms of that's what this chart is trying to get at. If we have three options or a couple of different options, the top line would be electricity option, 25 megawatt power plants dispersed across the state. The middle line is meant to represent kind of smaller scale combined heat and power facilities and district energy projects, which are very common throughout Europe. And the bottom line is the schools, hospitals kind of path if you think about them. This is merely a numbers exercise, but just to illustrate a point right quickly. The Oregon Forest Resource Institute says that we have a million and a half bone dry tons of material available from these restoration projects on an annual basis. Take that number and run with it. If we slice that a million and a half tons up and one of these three platforms just go across and you see what happens in terms of number of facilities. The important point is this column right in the middle where it's priced per ton. You don't need to necessarily be a forester to understand that 80 is better than 30 when you're getting paid for it. Although some foresters might not understand that. So, and how that translates though is really in these two last columns. The value put back into our local economy by paying more for a product to pay those loggers to get it out of the woods is drastically significant. And if you tie that back to our forest restoration goals and assume a $350 per acre number to treat those acres that additional revenue turns into a lot more acres treated. And what that does because us as taxpayers and everybody in this room pays to get those acres treated. We have a fire issue and we're taking care of it and we're moving forward on that. The issue is is how do we pay for it? And from our perspective prioritizing biomass for thermal uses is one way to help to start to fix that stop gap. It's not the only solution out there that needs to be pursued in that avenue but it is one that could be used a lot more than it is. And oh, by the way, we've all talked about reducing energy costs. If we offset all of that energy production in one state, if we offset heating oil and propane, we're talking in the neighborhood of $140 million. That's across the residential sector, the public sector and across the private sector as well in terms of those process heat users. So we have a significant opportunity to do a lot of different things. So in summary, a recapitulation, my southern tongue doesn't like that word, a recapitulation of biomass energy policy would result in significant increases in economic value of biomass, help fund more acres of restoration across the West and more broadly and drastically reduce energy costs in our rural communities that are dependent on heating oil and propane right now. And that's all I have. Please stand up and speak loud so everybody can hear you. I'm just having a college process. I'm sure you have a question on the water and actress here who's going to be in the talk. Can you tell me a little bit about how even if we're talking about co-regulation, we're not affecting your businesses and what's the impact that we want the workers to have? Can everybody hear the questions? The question is how far do the regulations concern the point of maximum achievable control technology before the fact that it's affecting business now? The big challenge really comes down to investment in the technology because of the uncertainty that promulgates from either the actions or the inactions of a certain environmental protection agency in Washington, you have folks deciding or not deciding about projects. So if you are a boiler manufacturer and you're trying to scale up your technologies to bring them to market and the EPA is out there not sure what they're going to do, basing some of their analysis on the very top level technology that's really a very suspicious select way to average out the best available control technologies or the most achievable and so forth. I mean, the uncertainty is the biggest issue because it just brings the investments to a halt. You can't pin it, you can't pencil it, you can't finance it. And some of the analysis and I'm not the expert on that, I guess I mentioned it so you addressed the question to me but again, you know, I think the numbers were something about like, you know, the top 12% of the technologies became the basis for 88% of the boilers. I mean, it's crippling and I think you saw the actions by Congress by I think it was HR 2250 which was the EPA relax yourself bill. I can't remember the exact name but I think it was 2250. Relief, thank you EPA relief regulatory relief act was a big one. That sort of, you know, that was a big statement by Congress from the house at least. So that would be the biggest issue is just moving technologies forward and getting adoptions in a very uncertain climate when you don't really know which way EPA has gone. EPA has worked very closely with some of us on like the Pellet Fuels Institute for example has gone through an exhaustive and I don't say that lightly. It's been about a five year process to get standards established for pellet fuels. I always liken it to you go to your pump and put gas in your car and you've got 87 octane, 89 and 91. It's not exactly how you do it with pellets but you've got different grades of pellets that the EPA has now given us their endorsement and we're actually waiting for them with the new source performance standards to come out which has been a again a process that has delayed over time. It was supposed to be I'll probably get these all wrong but two years ago, so two year and a half ago it was a year ago supposed to be this fall now it's going to be next June. I don't know what it's going to be but the standards have been established at least in that sector. So we've had a lot of cooperation in some areas but the boiler map is a huge issue and I don't know the boiler folks maybe Bill or you maybe better. No, I'm not better because the the home the Austrian style technology that we're using actually meets those those proposed standards. So we're not threatened by it but we we understand particularly on the larger size systems the issues that have been raised that are very important. I think they were quite well articulated. My name is Raj Williams and my company is Green Sensitive Designs. Dave I think you and I should be talking you were talking about architects and design people getting involved in the beginning of process and I think that's an excellent point. I loved all of your presentations. I think this is an excellent topic and I wanted to mention Steve you were the product that you're talking about. I really think it's very critically important and being in the one of the services that we provide is energy efficiency of buildings and it's really tied with the national security issue of not being dependent on foreign oil and it's not enough if you are efficient with your facilities but in addition you need renewables and I think I believe biomass is as carbon neutral as it gets because if you leave it in the forest to biodegrade by itself it's going to release carbon but if you're going to be using it to generate energy I really think it's a win-win situation and I just thought you know I just wanted to make that point that it's really a positive to the environment than being a negative and I really appreciate all of the presentations. Thank you. Actually so some questions here. This is for anybody. Could you touch on the value in the system and its payback? If you're able to run it 12 months and include cooling, the impact on heat production in the summer time to basically stabilize the economics. That people got okay. One of the colleges I had a picture of up there was Shadrin State College in Northwest Nebraska and they actually do heating with their biomass in the winter time and cooling with the summer time with their biomass. So it definitely improves the economics because they're getting better utilization of their investment in the boiler system throughout that and so there are opportunities to do that and one of the things that we learned with a K-12 school you know it's only occupied you know a certain period of time during the day you know typically not on weekends and you know not during the summer. If you compare that to say a hospital or a prison where you've got people in there 24 7365 the heat usage and the cooling usage is greater throughout and so then that improves the economics of the installation of these kinds of systems. Does that get it what you were asking John? This focus has been principal for these cooling to it. Yeah and that in this you know Shadrin State College is a good example of that where you make the investment in that in that biomass boiler and you can use that boiler to drive the cooling system and I know that's kind of an odd thing to think about for a lot of people but think about a propane cooler in people's RV you know you're burning propane to cool it and so that yeah the opportunities exist throughout the country to have the biomass serve as an energy offset of current fossil fuels. If I could add real quickly you know I mentioned about the CAFOs the confined animal feeding operations and you have to keep in mind that even though there may be some areas of the country where you think well it doesn't really get that cool or it doesn't get you know really cold and they don't need the thermal. They have to get some of those those heating those houses up to like 115 degrees when they bring these young tiny birds and to get them you know the right environment for them to grow it still takes I mean you got an 80 degree day you're not there so there's a lot of load and some of those cases that aren't you know it's it's not a northeast centric sort of challenge that we face it's it is around the country and there's an awful lot of examples I mean throughout the Mid-Atlantic I mean there's a correctional facility on the eastern shore in Maryland that uses it for both power and thermal and then they also use it for their hot water and then you can imagine you know I don't know if there's a lot of inmates in that particular one they got dirty laundry you got to clean that stuff that's a lot of water so there's a lot of different applications I think that broaden that demand and it's also when you keep in mind the different renewables that are out there wind and solar are dependent upon certain environmental factors to give them efficiencies winds got to blow suns got to shine biomass thermal is constant runs when you want it runs when you need it. The other key region or the south for that matter to present additional perspectives in terms of biobass utilization in different regions but when you look at the map of the United States in terms of propane dependence versus any wild dependence it's a very different map and so you're looking at the Midwest rural Midwest and rural south is being much more propane and electric power dependent for their heating sources and both of those are very expensive electricity is a very expensive way to eat your house and so when you look at the competitiveness of biomass it's really as a nationalist folks as well as in 12 months. Amanda Turka from Environmental Energy Publishing you had mentioned that your goal here is looking for recognition but as you're here in DC are you asking for any specific federal policies from Congress I mean is there anything the federal government can do to help you? Yeah I think so so I mean we've obviously visited with some offices today and thinking about you know the current state of Congress I mean there there are some if you look across the existing tax codes and things there are some gaps that don't necessarily address biomass thermal is it is a tax incentive politically viable right now is a different question. There's no doubt that part of the issue with building out a market is addressing capital upfront capital there's a variety of ways to think about how to do that and I think that's one of the particular policies that could get at it. The other thing with that I've been talking to some folks about in particular is is how do we give recognition without some kind of you know particular piece of tax piece of legislation or a renewable thermal standard just to throw that concept on the table. And we've been talking to folks about simple things like is there a need for some kind of thermal resolution just to say that the sense of Congress is that it's a priority to help start to give some direction to some of the agencies out there that have existing programs of work some programs are under prescribed some are way over prescribed but and that would give our colleagues an opportunity to start to talk to folks in the agencies about ways that they could implement that vision of Congress. And so it's not necessarily always about money, money, money. I think there are some money things that we could look at but there are existing pots of money in the agencies that I think could be reprioritized reprogrammed, repackaged. You can think about the farm bill in particular and the energy title on the farm bill as some of those particular pieces that might support that going forward. And I'm not the only one that has any perspective on that. I'm sure these other gentlemen do too. Just briefly we are not there's a lot of things that would be helpful but I think primarily it's just recognition and understanding of what we're offering. That is it's a solution that's here now and half the price of heating oil for example and actually much less than that of propane. Propane in the Northeast is very, very expensive. It's a technology that exists. It's deployed. It's in literally almost a million homes in Europe. The home heating boilers that I'm talking about. But for some reason when you get to the policy level the perception is that it's primitive, dirty, and takes a lot of attention. It's sort of like the caveman sitting around a campfire or something is what you do with wood. What we do is we take a refined fuel pellets and burn it very cleanly, very efficiently and automatically. But that knowledge is just not here. It's an unknown technology in the US pretty much. And just getting recognition and hearing reference to this solution in people's discussions would be a lot. We're not asking for money. We're asking for recognition. I had a meeting a couple of weeks ago with the governor of Maine. Talked about the economic benefits. And in the last two weeks every time he's had a press conference or spoken public he's talking about how we need to include pellet fuel and pellet boilers as part of the portfolio of solutions for Maine's dependence on heating oil. It just takes a little work and a little education. And amazingly enough the phones are ringing at the business. The sales guys can't keep up with it because we now have the bully pulpit if you will providing some support. That's a big ask. And it's actually a pretty easy one because there's no risk. It's a proven technology. It's here now ready to go. We're not waiting for some breakthrough on biofuels or liquid fuel from wood or anything exotic or expensive. We're talking half the price of the current fuel in a system that's perfectly proven and works now. Easy. I'll just I'll add to it maybe some specifics that we have been talking about in the 111th Congress. Shaheen had several cosponsors on a bill that was for American renewable biomass heating. And I'm sorry. I know it was introduced in the 111th and they're looking for additional cosponsors in 112th. That's S13188 specifically. Senator Bingaman is also working on one that has to do with a little bit of a different structure and a two tier section for investment tax credits. I think that may tie into the section 45. We do have traction that we've gained through the Farm Bill and you know not only is it rural energy for America program the REAP through section I'll probably get this wrong 9,000 3 7 something. One of those two you can pick it. I'm not sure. But that's a great program not just for grants or handouts but also for loans to make these realities you know these potentials of reality. And then I'd also just mentioned that wood pellets along with other non-corn based biofuels have been recognized as an advanced biofuel and there's actually section 9005 an advanced biofuel production payment. We certainly would like to hold on to the traction that we've gained there but at the end of the day I think most of us would all agree that recognizing it as a solution getting more support trying to drive the message home that this is a great affordable technology for more people in America than most of the existing renewables that can be chosen not just for residential but for you know for businesses commercial and institutional. I think it's driving that home helping to advance that is a big part of why we're all here. I'll start. The yeah most of the existing biomass market is not pellets. Currently you know the pellets provide a great opportunity. It's refined fuel flow ability it helps with the scalability. But I guess to your question of you know what do you what do I see the the biomass traditionally was primarily used and it's called hog fuel ground up wood and it was really low value and kind of the dregs and so the producing of that ended up often with a fair amount of dirt and contamination in that and so I think one of the things that where the biomass energy picture needs to go is the development of different grades of fuel and Steven kind of mentioned that from the pellet standpoint but I think within chips and ground up the moisture content is a significant factor the amount of contaminants dirt soil that might be mixed in there how much bark how much of the needles you know there there are a number of factors and I think those are also going to be really important when you start talking about the biofuels the liquid fuels as well and so the development of standards so that you know we've been talking about number two fuel oil or number six fuel oil that people burn in their in their boilers you know so those are standards that were developed many decades ago we need to be developing that same sort of standards so that somebody that designs a boiler system they know that okay you have to burn you know the x y z grade of fuel in this to meet the warranty on that boiler and you know so right now we don't have that level of development I was going to say in this country the American Society of Agricultural Biological some of the ISO standards principally chips and pellets of because that's where you can have just to follow up on them and the Europeans have standards for chips pellet fuel is to started six years ago developing and revising their pellet fuel standards down the road towards a standardized management method not good for all the parameters a year ago last spring EPA came to the PFI conference and for PFI Board and for PFI membership that they supported what PFI was doing but it was a voluntary program EPA said we want you to make it involuntary and we want you to have third party verification and an extremely repetitive verification of what you're going to factory which brings in a bag a bag list of contents with a certain immaculacy and excuse me and it was kind of like a sledgehammer and had to be applied to producers EPA said because we're reviewing and we're writing the new source performance standard permissions for pellet burning and appliances we are going to mandate that all of them are tested for emissions and meet the EPA requirements for their emissions from these appliances and because we're regulating the appliances we should now regulate what fuel those appliances can burn not unlike gasoline and put it on a mixture so we have had some felt from Big Brother and putting together the very strict pellet fuel quality and standard and gradient specification that is now rolling across our industry at a pretty rapid rate EPA said as many plus percent of the fuel manufacturers sign up for this program then we'll leave you alone but if they don't then we will write the specification and we will enforce the gradient and the fuel quality so that's where we are today Any other questions? I think our speakers would be happy to hand around for a few minutes so we'll have to come up and chat with you today but thank you for coming and thank you to our secret