Lets hope he's right. I try and take people who predict the future like this with a grain of salt but here's hopin.....

And who was footing his bill to be in town?IPG? The same people who sold us white elephants in the form of Horizon Air and a longer very expensive runway that has seen...what...1 plane since it was built?

Do we even have any trees left?

how does one go about getting a job in these mills?

How does free trade effect all of this? Does the USA have any special access rights or can the mills sell to whomever places an order?

I would love to see ALL of our lumber exported to other buyers at top world prices rather than have to work within the framework of freetrade.

Loki, some sarcasm here:
best ask our American masters if the free trade agreement will govern any lumber sales to other nations, after all, they seem to have their own interpretation of the agreement in which the U.S. always wins. T.F.P.I.C.
(tongue firmly planted in cheek)
metalman.

Good to be a home owner here. House prices could go up.

Well for starters the price of lumber fell $10.00 per thousand fbm to-day. It presently sits at $247.00 US per 1000 FBM, so it need to rise 100% to reach the $500.00 per 1000 fbm mentioned in the article. Whats the chances??? I dont think it hit that level at the highest point of the US Housing bubble.

In addition other studies indicate that because of the shortage of trees approx 18 mills will be closed in BC in the next 15 years. So the reason for the price going up could very will be due to the shortage of available trees. This means higher prices with less mills. In other words less jobs. So not necessarily a **good news** story.

There probaby is not enough trees and mills to supply all our customers, and at the end of the day the lumber will be sold to the highest bidder. (which it always is) This means that China will look elsewhere for lumber, because they are not about to compete with the USA and Japan for prime lumber. They might still buy the cheap S..t they are buying now if the price stays low, however its not likely to stay low.

I suspect that China will be looking to Russia, etc; for cheap lumber.

Have a nice day.

Interesting article in the Vancouver Province on Sunday about Prince George.

http://www.theprovince.com/news/todays-paper/Prince+George+wants/4590782/story.html

So let me get this straight. It's pretty much conceded that the pine beetle wood will not be available to harvest in the next two decades, however, the price will be high enough that we can harvest the wood that isn't impacted by MPB.

Does anyone else get the sense that there will be virtually NO trees left in BC if the expected future demand is met by us logging the stuff that isn't impacted by MPB?

I guess we'll have to change our slogan from "Beautiful" British Columbia to something else. Whatever it takes to land jobs I suppose. Heck, while we're at it let's just approve every mine application that comes our way and let's dam the Fraser and Skeena as well. Who cares about the salmon and sturgeon if we can get energy out of it to sell to the US market.

Fortunately (I say that because I shudder to think about the environmental disaster of the scenario that Ben describes) I think Palopu's first post is more likely what will occur.

Hakan Ekstrom sounds like a recent graduate from The Pat Bell School of Optimism with a B.S. degree.

As several people have pointed out already, Ekstrom lost all credibility from the start by not dealing with supply. If we ain't got the wood, we can't produce nothin' no matter how high the price.

There will be wood products that can be produced, but roughly at 50 to 60% of the total historic volume in ther PG TSA and adjacent timber supply areas by no later than 2020 using an optimistic scenario of the chief forester.

There are some logistical problems to overcome even with that scenario - location of timber in relation to existing mill infrastructure. The supply lines become longer over time and traditional methods of trucking will be stretched to the limit. If lumber will actually go up in price, then the added cost can be borne, but not without that. If it goes high enough, small mills may even become viable built closer to the feedstock and on a shorter lifespan basis.

The forest industry is a large industry. Ekstrom might be an expert in part of it. He seems to have forgotten about the key starting component - timber availability.

"At five hundred, forest companies, he says, can go a lot further to pick up the product and so the beetle problem becomes less of an issue."

LOL ... just a little bit of a reminder. Doubling the distance, for instance, will double the number of trucks and drivers required to bring wood at a constant flow to a mill using logging trucks.

Unless we have not yet been logging in regions that have harvestable timber, and created access infrastructure and mills nearby, the mills that will receive the timber are unlikely to be the ones around the PG area.

If we have not yet created the access roads, then we will have to, and likely temporary mills at the same time. Places like Fort St. James will likely see some benefit over lets say a decade or so based on one of the chief forester's scenarios.

I would take that with a grain of salt. The US economy is still in the tank and they have 20 million empty homes on the market, and millions more with mortgages underwater (owe more than it's worth) and yet millions more teetering on the edge of forclosure. Most state governments are deep in debt and cannot borrow enough to continue spending, they're forced to cut. Government spending is a big chunk of GDP so cutting will further reduce economic activity. The federal government has a deficit of $1.65 trillion this year which is totally unsustainable for much longer. There's a huge crash in the not-to-distant future for the US.

The US economy is the biggest in the world by far, and the rest of the world depends on it, including China. There are 60 million empty homes in China so how much longer can they keep building just because the government orders it? Some pundits say China is headed for its own crash within 5 years, and even if it doesn't, when the US goes down, the world goes down including China.

I hope Ekstrom is right but the world is mired in unsustainable debt and I really can't see how we're going to get out of it.

I would second what Dirtman said, the US
is about to enter a debt crisis that will dwarf what we see now.Add to that a Chinese economy that will soon begin to
collapse on itself. Call me pessimistic
but our current societal style cannot sustain itself.
If Mr Eckstrom is correct, great, we win.
I would not bet the farm on it though.