Want Fewer Wildfires? Burn More Wood.

The recent wildfires in Texas have returned forest management to the headlines. In Texas and elsewhere, wildfires have destroyed property, endangered firefighters and polluted the local environment.

While fires are a natural phenomenon, humans can increase their severity or frequency through their own actions. Counterintuitively, one way humans could manage this risk would be to increase the role of wood in our energy supply.

Wood has a long history as an energy source. According to the Energy Information Administration, wood was the largest source of energy in the United States until the 1880s, when coal surpassed it. The role of wood in the nation's energy supply generally declined until the late 1960s. Today, about 2% of the U.S. energy supply comes from wood.

Wood energy has a broad number of applications in the economy. Wood can be used to heat residential and commercial buildings. Wood, especially wood waste and wood by-products, can generate electricity and power industrial processes. In 2009, wood-fired power plants generated 36 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity. This compares to 39 billion kilowatt hours from petroleum power plants, 15 billion kilowatt-hours from geothermal power plants and 891 million kilowatt-hours from solar power plants.

The fastest way to increase the role of wood energy is to expand the role of wood heat in buildings. This is especially true of large buildings like schools, hospitals and prisons in wooded, rural areas. Large, modern boilers can burn wood with far fewer emission than older wood heating systems.

In many parts of the country, wildfires are a major source of air pollution. Wood that is burned in boilers will not be available for uncontrolled combustion during wildfires. In rural areas, where many buildings are heated with propane, fuel oil or electricity, the economics of wood energy are very favorable. Wood is also generally regarded as a carbon neutral energy source, as long as trees grow back in the place of those that are harvested.

The sale of wood as energy will also help fund forestry operations. Thinning forests for fire prevention produces a large volume of wood that is diseased, fire-damaged or too small for use as lumber. Logging operations also produce a large volume of wood that is non-marketable and usually discarded. The sale of currently non-marketable wood will help governments and private foresters fund the labor-intensive process of thinning forests and gathering wood.

(Unlike clear-cutting, thinning operations leave a significant amount of live and dead wood in the forest for animal habitat and ecosystem health.)

The up-front cost of new wood boilers is one of the primary obstacles to expanding the role of wood in the U.S. energy supply. Once wood boilers are constructed, buildings will have lower energy costs, local forests will have additional revenue for operations and the nation will have reduced consumption of fossil fuels. By displacing fossil fuels from the economy, wood energy reduces the risk of catastrophic climate change. Novel ways to fund the construction of wood boilers will be the topic of the next posting.