Sweden’s per-capita consumption of wood pellets is more than 20 times that of the United States. If every American consumed as many wood pellets as every Swedish citizen does, pellet consumption in the U.S. would soar to over 60 million tons annually, instantaneously tripling the total global market. As recently as 2007, Sweden was the world’s largest producer and consumer of wood pellets, and tracing the growth of the wood pellet industry in Sweden is an object lesson in how a combination of public policy and natural resources can be leveraged to completely reimagine and reengineer a country’s energy strategy.

Prior to the oil crisis of 1973, Sweden relied almost exclusively on fossil fuel to meet its energy needs. Nearly 90 percent of the country’s heating needs were met almost entirely by using heating oil. The trend continued through the overnight oil-price hikes in 1979, when the country made a decision to turn dramatically away from oil-derived heating inputs. Coal and woody biomass played nearly equal roles throughout the 1980s. Then, in 1991, Sweden introduced a tax on carbon dioxide emissions becoming one of the first countries in the world to do so. Since then, the use of coal, natural gas and heating oil has fallen steadily, and today those three sources combined represent just over 10 percent of heat inputs, while woody biomass provides the vast majority of the remaining share.

Sweden is roughly the size of California, and nearly 60 percent of it is covered in dense stands of spruce and pine. Not surprisingly then, forestry and the forest products are a cornerstone of the Swedish economy generating over 10 percent of the country’s employment and GDP. The widely distributed forest products sector provided fertile ground for a wood-based bioenergy industry to take root, and upon the introduction of the carbon dioxide tax, it grew rapidly. Today, Sweden boasts nearly 100 pellet production facilities capable of producing over 2 million tons annually. Actual production has held closer to 1.5 million tons per year and Sweden continues to import pellet volumes to meet its annual consumption demand. Around half of the plants in Sweden are quite small, producers making a couple thousand tons per year. The remainder more closely resemble the pellet facilities commonly found in the northeastern United States, with production volumes below 100,000 tons per year often collocated with other forest products manufacturing sites.

Forssjö Pellets near Katrineholm is representative of many of pellet plants in Sweden that generate the bulk of the country’s annual volume. The facility is a wholly owned subsidiary of Group Sandasa Timber AB and is collocated with Forssjö sawmill, a mill with an annual output of nearly 80,000 cubic meters of sawn pine and spruce. The operation, overseen by the affable Per Stenegard, prides itself on the full utilization of all of the material that comes into the facility.

“About 50 percent of a harvested tree’s biomass never leaves the forest,” Stenegard says. “Our goal is to fully utilize the 50 percent that does come into our plant.” Drawing a cross section of a received log on a piece of paper, Stenegard explains how a round log is quickly and efficiently transformed into a more usable rectangular shape within the first four cuts. He explains that these off cuts become clean chips and are ultimately converted into pulp and paper. Each log is then measured and evaluated by a laser, and a computer identifies the combination of boards that will maximize the log and generate the least amount of waste. As Stenegard talks, logs whisk by and a schematic cartoon of each log and its soon-to-be-yielded boards flash on a nearby computer terminal.

Outside of the cutting room, open-sided sheds with conveyors running over their roofs slowly fill with perfect white wood chips. The waste streams are aggregated by type and Stenegard points out the clean chip bunker, a bunker for bark and at least two different bunkers for sawdust. The sawdust, generated when the log blanks are sawn into the dimensional products, is the raw material the pellet facility converts into pellets. “About 70 percent of the raw material we use in the pellet facility comes from our own sawmilling operation,” Stenegard says. “We do bring in some additional material and we work with our colleagues in nearby sawmills for the other 30 percent.”

As the bunkers fill, the material is moved to a storage yard, a vast paved surface at the facility’s northernmost end. The sawdust is segregated by species and aged before it is converted into wood pellets. “We’ve learned that aging the sawdust is an important step in our process,” Stenegard reports. Once inside, a proprietary blend of spruce and pine is introduced into one of Forssjö’s two Andritz pellet presses. Finished product is stored in a large A-frame building in slowly growing, mammoth piles. The pellets that are not sold in bulk are bagged in 35 pound bags. The bags are longer and thinner than the bags traditionally used in North America and Forssjö’s bags proudly carry the national colors of Sweden (blue and yellow) and read simply, “Svensk Trapellets” or “Swedish Wood Pellets.”

While the science of pellet production has changed little since Forssjö began operations in 1995, the business surrounding servicing pellet customers has changed. “Customers are showing increasing interest in understanding the story of how our pellets are made, and how far the material that makes up our pellets has to travel,” he says.

Lately, Stenegard and his team concern themselves with driving efficiency into the storage and delivery side of their operation. To maximize the available trucking assets during the plant’s busiest months, Forssjö is increasingly managing their customer’s pellet inventory levels by utilizing automatic storage bin level detectors. These detectors alert the plant when the customer is able to receive a full truck load of pellets and reduces the number of partial loads, or multi-stop deliveries, both of which are critical in December, January and February when deliveries are at their annual peak.

Stenegard’s pride in the sawmill and pellet operation is immediately apparent. In this way, he is representative of Sweden’s broader wood bioenergy industry. The country is rich in forest resources and continues to leverage those resources to drive down the carbon intensity of their economy, working toward an ambitious goal of a 40 percent reduction in emissions from 1990 levels by 2020 and no net greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Goals like this are ambitious even by European standards. Still, considering Sweden’s size, its relatively low population, its rich forest resource and commitment to the total utilization of the materials it harvests from them, a bet against Sweden achieving these targets seems ill-advised.

Author: Tim Portz
Executive Editor, Pellet Mill Magazine
701-738-4969
tportz@bbiinternational.com