Logging roads are not chip truck friendly, but you would not haul hog wood for pellet production with chip trucks. Rather you would use some kind of hog fuel truck.

The Lomak side dump hog fuel truck is the most likely type of unit that would be used to transport the fiber and this is not like a chip trailer even though they look similar.

A chip truck is low to the ground and is dumped by the dumper at the pulp mill. A hog trailer dumps itself and therefor is designed differently and has the same clearance as any other logging trailer on the road. The hog trailer dumper box carries a smaller volume at the same weight with a lot of clearance and can easily go where most pick-up trucks can not. The current hog trucks go through a lot of bad roads already and travel all around the hog pile at the pulp mill.

The problem with hog trailers has been their reliability. Lomak has a very reliable and efficient side dump design, but hold the patent to it, and will not share it. Excel on the other hand uses an end dump design that is hugely flawed and not reliable. That said the Excel live floors work great and can handle off road wear and tear, but are very slow at unloading.

The biggest issue preventing use of bio-fuel today is the lack of a reliable transportation system for the hog fuel.

I would suggest PG needs desperately a trailer manufacture that can build reliable side dump hog fuel trailers that can be sold to all operators and serviced in town locally. The market for such a company would be massive over the next few years, and would enable huge growth in the Northern economy. I would do it if I had the money and not look back.

Its a gold mine for the man with the deep wallet to build the prototypes and invest in the shop needed to build these units. I would suggest the market could absorb nearly 50 units at $250,000 a piece within the next 3-5 years.

Time Will Tell

Chadermando. You have much more knowledge in this area than I do, so I am wondering what your reactions are to these questions I have.

1. Why manufacture a new trailer unit when we alredy have systems to take logs out of the woods. It would mean a high percentage of those rigs would stand idle and people will loose money as a result?

2. Why would it be cheaper to process trees in the field when one would presumably have to purchase many such units rather than processing trees in a few central plants which also produce the end product?

3. As you process logs, the residue takes up more volume than the orignal log. The amount of increase depends on the size and shape of the residue. This means more trips to take out the same amount of product.

In each case, it seems to me that the proposed method will add cost rather than reduce cost.

Where am I going wrong?

Owl, good questions.

I am not saying we need to chip the wood in the bush and haul it to town. Today as I write we have beehive burners burning simply because we can not haul with reliability from the saw mills to the co-gen plant.

For example Isle Pierre started up their beehive burner a few months ago because they could not get their hog fuel hauled off site reliably. The reliability factor was due to defects in the trailer hauling technology that are simple to correct, but we rely on engineers with no real world experience to solve the problem. In the meantime the burner is going night and day.

The problem with eliminating beehive burners for most mills is that it cost the mill in excess of $10,000 an hour to shut down production when the hog bins are full and they have no overflow area. Isle Pierre has a large overflow area, but that does not help when the shipper raises costs to ship due to flaws in the technology. An overflow like theirs, which is substantial, still only lasts a few days at full production of a B-train of hog every hour. A place like Bear Lake Polar division is a little different in that they have no overflow area because of the rail tracks and only have capacity for 1.5 B-train loads at a B-train every 45min-1hour. Mills with no overflow capacity take the priority to ensure mills do not experience down time.

Plateau and Houston super mills out west produce a B-train of hog every 20 minutes that currently goes to the burner. Both Vanderhoof and Houston have plans for this resource in their communities and will require hog trailers to haul the material. Those two mills alone will require 20 hog truck B-trains employing 50+ people if they were to haul their product within a half hour distance. That is two mills that will stay open regardless of the pine beetle impact and how many more stay open is a factor to add to that.

When I say we need another 50 possible hog trucks on the road in the next five years I am only talking about existing plans to shut down burners for the existing hog fuel anticipated market.

#1) That said you are right in that we have a lot of slash in the bush that could be hauled to market. Either way a B-train is at its max legal limit, no different than a logging truck when it comes to the load they haul. If the trailers were built locally and sold to anyone who wished to get into the business I see no reason why a logging contractor could not switch to hauling hog from hauling logs.

#2) I can not see the economics of hauling slash to a central point when we have the technology today to process it effectively on site and handle it only once.

#3) Its not an issue of volume, but rather of weight and both units are limited in what they can haul buy weight rather than volume. They each have the same weight restrictions.

My thinking is if we are leaders in the technology on our home turf due to our opportunities that are out there, then we have just created another export ready business that adds diversification to the economy in manufacturing, energy sustainability, as well as environmental stewardship.

Time Will Tell

I would hope that Canfor one of the largest Forest Companys in the World would be able to solve a simple problem of moving Hog Fuel from Isle Pierre, or any other mill to their mill sites. If they have started the Burner at Isle Pierre, then there is more to it than meets the eye. They are obvioulsly getting the **Wink Wink** from the Government and Forestry department. If they were told in no uncertain terms that they cannot use the Burner, then the Hog Fuel situation would be solved immediately. Quite often it is Canfor who is grinding the Truckers so that they can continue to make millions in profits. If they cannot solve this simple problem, then they should get out of the business, as obviously they are not capable of running a good operation.

A closer inspection might reveal that their is a surplus of Hog Fuel and burning it is the best way to solve the problem. Who knows??

This has been a most informative and considerate conversation over a large issue for our area. Keep up the good work guys !