By Monique Steele
New binwood biofuel truck for OneFortyOne NZ Forests at Wakefield near Nelson. Photo: Tim Cuff
A South Island forestry company that's successfully making biofuel from slash says growing the market was a challenge because of the large investment needed to transition away from fossil fuels.
Australian-owned FSC-certified company, One-Forty-One New Zealand Forests, had about 80,000 hectares of forests at the top of the South Island - harvesting around one million cubic metres each year.
The Richmond-based company with directors in the United States, Australia and New Zealand was two years into a project where harvesting crews collected as much leftover wood waste as possible from their forest sites.
The wood waste was dried for 12-14 months, processed into woodchip, then sent to a large growing operation in Nelson run by JS Ewers to fuel its boiler, instead of coal.
OneFortyOne NZ Forests general manager Shaun Truelock. Photo: SUPPLIED/OneFortyOneNZForests-TimCuff
General manager Shaun Truelock said One-Forty-One New Zealand Forests invested more than $1 million into the project over the past two years towards collecting wood waste from its operations - but he said it was not driven by financial gain.
"The benefits for us have not been financial, I'll put that upfront," Truelock said.
"It's basically the right thing to do. We've got wood waste that gets generated from our operations and for us it was utilising that wood waste and reducing the risk of having that wood on the hillside on our skid sites.
"So basically for us it was an opportunity to reduce risk, but also an opportunity to change a fuel source where we're able to assist users in converting from a coal energy source across to a wood fibre."
Truelock said its customer JS Ewers - with large indoor and outdoor fruit and vegetable growing operations - "took a punt" with the partnership after investing in decarbonisation - which he said resulted in an expected annual carbon emissions reduction of nearly 27,000 tonnes.
"That is the only one in Nelson at the moment that's utilising woodchip, so there's a lot more investment and growth opportunity in other people that are using old methodology of generating heat or power or whatever," he said.
And the enterprise was no easy feat - with at least 14 local business partnerships involved in the supply chain in getting woodchip from stump to boiler.
"It is a bit of a chicken-egg situation, because we can produce the fuel but there's no one to consume the fuel," Truelock said.
"So it's a collaboration between people that require fuel sources... between those companies and forestry companies to see what the future looks like, and if we can work together to create an opportunity where we can basically grow the fuel source but also then utilise it in the generation capacity, be it steam electricity or whatever the case may be."
Truelock said the project told the full circle story of forestry.
"We're not only able to store carbon in the trees that we grow through our operation and commercial businesses, but we've got opportunity to create alternatives to fossil fuel through the waste products of our forest, which is a fantastic story to tell."
The project was discussed in a conference paper by company representatives published the New Zealand Journal of Forestry published on Wednesday.
Authors Mark Coghill the company's operations manager and Mat Curry its research manager, said in the paper, the market for biofuel could be limited because transitioning away from fossil fuels required significant investment.
"It will likely take significant investment, like that undertaken by JS Ewers, before there are more markets available in the Top of the South and around the country.
"However, the scale of investment required by potential users, without financial assistance and at the current cost of offsetting emissions, is a barrier."
But authors said successfully finding a market for the fibre has benefited harvesting crews financially, reduced business risk and helped decarbonise the local economy.
Under the Labour government, companies were able to access funding which helped them transition their operations away from coal - taken up by large corporates like Fonterra and NZ Steel.
But the Government Decarbonising Industry or GIDI Fund was scrapped by the National government in December 2023 based off a National party pre-election promise.