Too much beetle wood ain't enough: wood from beetle-killed trees can be used as fuel, yet biomass heating systems require more wood than even Colorado's 1.5 million acres of infected lodgepole pines could provide for long-term use.

• Author: Best, Allen
• Position: PLANET-PROFIT REPORT - Survey

In Vail, the specter of dead and dying lodgepole pine trees presents both adversity and opportunity. Mountain bark beetles, always present in forests but in epidemic proportions since 1996, have turned adjacent slopes the color of cheaply dyed hair, the needles of dying trees a dull red verging on orange.

Worried about public reaction, town officials several years ago even considered using Photoshop to remove the dying trees from marketing materials.

But even before the full trauma of forest change was evident, a small delegation had returned from the Alps convinced that the fading forest provided a means to achieve greater self-sufficiency. In a small Austrian ski town called Lech, Vail's representatives studied the village's use of wood in a centralized biomass steam-heating system. Why, they wondered, couldn't the beetle-killed trees be used to heat Vail's downtown streets and buildings?

Many others in Colorado have had similar thoughts after seeing some of the 2 million affected acres. Foresters predict 95 percent of Colorado's lodgepole pines will be dead or dying within four years. The epicenter is on the Western Slope, just north of the Eisenhower Tunnel. However, beetles have now flown across the Continental Divide. Entomologists expect beetles to begin spreading within several years through the ponderosa pine forests in the foothills west of Denver, Boulder and Fort Collins.

The beetle epidemic arrived in full force just as businesses and communities began to rethink the energy infrastructure in a new, increasingly carbon-constrained world. Beetle-killed forests merely served as the visual cue. Several places--including a school in Oak Creek, a recreation center in Fairplay and a giant research laboratory in Golden--have begun burning woody biomass for heat. One utility, in Canon City, already uses wood to produce electricity, and others in Colorado Springs and Granby are taking a hard look. State officials report dozens of projects, from Fort Collins to the Four Corners, that propose to burn wood to produce heat, electricity or both.

These projects testify to a welling enthusiasm to create more local, sustainable heating operations. But government officials, entrepreneurs and analysts also caution that despite all the beetle-infested trees, not enough wood may be available for long-term, sustained operations. Rangeview, a biomass producer based in Westminster, abandoned plans for a plant near Denver and instead sited it in Georgia.

"Colorado biomass is more suited for smaller-scale production, just because of the availability of wood and how much we generate per acre," says Ravi Malhotra, founder and chairman of Lakewood-based iCAST, which stands for International Center for AP-Appropriate and Sustainable Technology.

Stacey Simms, biofuels and local fuels program manager for the Governor's Energy Office, concurs. "Projects are really defined by what is available in the local community, in terms of feedstock," she says.

"People will look over a hillside and see a lot of red trees, but they don't understand the cost of getting the wood out or the issue of who manages the forest," she adds.

Not all that wood is available, she says. "It could be protected under U. S. Forest Service administration. Or it could just be impossible to get out. I am not a forest expert, and don't pretend to be one, but it seems that where biomass really fits in well is in long-term sustainability, beyond the bark beetle epidemic, by working with local communities in terms of delivering wood from the local urban-wildland interface."

Low-priced fossil fuels pose a major second barrier to biomass projects. Colorado has vast quantities of both...