Fuel oil is normally a viscous, slow-moving material, more syrup than quicksilver, but the price of it sure has a way of defying gravity. In the past year, its budget-busting ascents into the atmosphere have sent hundreds of households in Interior Alaska scrambling for other, cheaper ways to heat their homes and businesses.
Electricity's out -- it's inefficient and expensive, and those little portable heaters can be fire hazards. Wood stoves are popular, but getting the wood can be costly if you don't cut it yourself, and labor-intensive if you do. (Though there is that old, ahem, saw about cutting your own wood and heating yourself twice.) Wood stoves have widely varying degrees of efficiency, and can contribute to dangerously poor air quality.
Which brings us to pellets. Fairbanks-area merchants are doing a roaring business with pellet stoves and pellet boilers, which heat water for baseboard pipes as well as household use. Pellet stoves are the most popular, and can be found at smaller Fairbanks businesses like Ferguson Enterprises and The Woodway, and at box stores like Home Depot and Lowe's. North Pole Pipe and Supply sells barley-fueled boilers as quickly as they come in (the barley comes from Delta Junction farms), and they're considering adding a wood-pellet stove to their line-up.
Common among retailers is their forecast for continued demand for pellet stoves and boilers, and a corresponding need for a steady, plentiful and reliable supply of wood pellets.
Wood pellets are ground-up material compressed into uniform lumps that resemble beefed-up bran cereal; sometimes the wood is mixed with an adhesive material. Pellets' efficiency and heating value vary depending on the kind and quality of material used, and how it's made and burned, but in general, pellets can and should be considered a legitimate alternative to heating oil, especially in cold climates like Alaska where staying warm is tantamount to staying alive, and where the cost of fuel is creating ever-greater economic hardships.
Forests abound in most of Alaska. The entrepreneurial spirit abounds as well. Dry Creek, a small community south of Delta Junction, is already producing pellets for its residents. NPI, a timber and port systems operator based in Wasilla, is exploring the possibility of opening a pellet plant in the Fairbanks area, taking advantage of the waste byproduct of local sawmills and land-clearing projects. According to NPI's Chad Schumacher, virtually any of the Interior's tree species -- aspen, spruce, cottonwood, birch and willow -- are candidates for pelletizing. The trick is to identify what mix of materials produces the best, most consistent product.
Finding local solutions is crucial, notes Ron Brown, a wood-energy expert with the Alaska Energy Authority. Rural villages are desperate for relief from high fuel-oil costs. Freighting in pellets is a problem in the Bush because of a lack of adequate storage, which should be warm and dry. Even small homes need a few tons of pellets for a year, and large buildings like schools and community centers need much more. Finding space for all that isn't easy, but local production would mitigate some of the problem -- and add to the local economy at the same time.
Steve Sparrow's work on local pellet production is still putting down roots, literally, in willow research plots around Alaska. Sparrow, of UAF's School of Natural Resources and Agricultural Sciences, and the Alaska Plant Materials Center are growing and testing six different willow species to see if they'd make a viable industry for growing and pelletizing in rural Alaska. The first harvest isn't until 2011 -- a long time for financially strapped villages -- but it's progress.
Tori Tragis, '94, '99, is a writer and editor for UAF Marketing and Communications.