by Web Editor | Nov 2, 2012 | Taking Stock
Story by Jennifer McCary,
Senior Associate Editor
Next spring will mark five years since Louisiana-Pacific started up what was to be its flagship OSB facility just a few miles from my home in Thomasville, Ala. It was a pretty big deal for the folks in our rural forestry-based economy. However, the anticipated prosperity that the company’s investment was to bring did not happen. A tragic accident within weeks of startup followed by the housing/economic meltdown that fall ushered in the “Great Recession.”
The mill has never re-opened, but it has also never been permanently mothballed. Word is the company plans to re-open when market conditions meet certain milestones indicative of a sustainable marketplace. Only then would it be feasible to make the multi-million dollar investment necessary to bring the plant online. Meanwhile, LP has announced several pre-startup job openings at Thomasville.
The folks in Clarendon, SC have also been waiting for a new OSB plant built around that same time period to go online. Grant Forest Products started the construction project there but ended up filing bankruptcy before it was finished. Georgia-Pacific bought it and two other Grant facilities. They completed plant construction in 2011 in anticipation of a December startup. But the bump up in OSB markets was short-lived so startup was pushed back. Recently, however, GP announced it was ready to ramp-up production.
Housing starts in 2012 have begun to show some life, and since housing generates nearly half of all OSB demand, manufacturers are hopeful this could be the start of a steady, ongoing recovery for the industry. APA-The Engineered Wood Assn. projects a 20% increase this year over 2011’s housing starts and another 18% increase in 2013, bringing the total up to 865,000 in 2013. Other associations are even more bullish in their estimates.
A number of other panel mills are also investing in new versatile systems and technologies that will allow them to diversify away from commodity products that are so dependent on housing. Diversifying allows added flexibility to be able to add or change specialty products as needed. That’s a trend that probably will continue as producers develop and capture market share by tailoring the product to a customer’s needs, similar to what we’ve seen in lumber markets in recent years.
A lot has changed while industry production has been curtailed which will present a number of challenges as we begin to ramp-up. For one thing, the industry is struggling to gain fair treatment by various building codes and standards such as the International Energy Conservation Code, some green building requirements and more stringent regulations on formaldehyde emissions and MACT rules.
Another issue that will probably blossom as the economy strengthens is an imbalance between labor demands and the availability of a qualified, willing workforce. Even with high unemployment, many people I visit in the forest products industry are finding it hard to hire qualified workers. They tell me it is not just a matter of skills. The real problem is a lack of motivated work ethics, especially among the younger generation, though not exclusively. However, there is nothing more motivating than an empty stomach.
by Web Editor | Aug 21, 2012 | Taking Stock
Story by Rich Donnell,
Editor-in-Chief
Like most businesses, we at Hatton-Brown Publishers, Inc. have had to diversify in order to strengthen ourselves. Life would be pretty simple if we merely had to produce magazines. Gone are the days when my only title was editor-in-chief. Now I’m also a Show Director. That’s “Show” as in Show Business. Our chief operating officer, Dianne Sullivan, is now also a Show Manager. Others here have enhanced their titles and responsibilities as well.
Many of you are familiar with our Panel & Engineered Lumber International Conference & Expo, immediately preceded by our Bioenergy Fuels & Products Conference & Expo, held every other year in Atlanta. These are primarily conferences, with dozens and dozens of speakers in lots of meeting rooms, supported by many small exhibits.
I hope by now you have heard of our newest event, the Timber Processing & Energy Expo, scheduled this October 17-19 at the Portland Exposition Center in Portland, Ore. This event is kind of the reverse of our Atlanta event. TP&EE is more of a traditional big machinery expo, with a small conference element to it.
In fact more than 150 exhibitors will be showcasing their technologies to primary producers—such as yourself—of veneer, plywood, engineered wood products, lumber and wood energy. Please read through pages 10-19 in this issue, and you’ll see who is exhibiting, who is speaking, where all this is happening, and how you can register.
Many of you, like us, for many years attended and exhibited at a previous machinery show in Portland. Like all shows, that one had its high points and low points. We decided to do our own event in Portland mainly because many of you had been asking us to do one. Even before our event in Atlanta, Hatton-Brown Publishers had entered show business by producing a timber harvesting show in the South. The idea of now doing a new show in Portland seemed to make a lot of sense.
I won’t bore you with details of how much work we’ve put into this event—we all work more than we should, right?—but I will say that I sincerely hope that the work we’ve done and continue to do has been the correct way to go about it, and that the new Timber Processing & Energy Expo will live up to your expectations and ours.
We feel the event is hitting at about the right time. The machinery manufacturers have been introducing new technologies and upgrading older ones. There seems to be some good news in the building sectors. And oh yes, isn’t there a presidential election happening the month after the show?
And when you come, bring a lot of your mill production personnel with you. Tell them to wear their company jackets proudly.
by Web Editor | Aug 8, 2012 | Taking Stock
Arizona Moves Forward Without New OSB Plant
Article by Dan Shell, Managing Editor, Panel World (2012)
At first glance, the scene sounds like the beginning of a good ol’ Western movie: The black-hatted outsider moves in at the last minute and snakes out the local boys who had built up years of goodwill hoping to be awarded a long-awaited business opportunity.
Yet in the story of Arizona Forest Restoration Products (AZFRP) losing out on a major northern Arizona forest stewardship contract to Montana-based Pioneer Forest Products after years of painstaking groundwork with a variety of groups and interests (page 16), there are no real black hats. And despite the lost opportunity to build the westernmost OSB plant in the U.S. and close to key Southwest markets, the good news is badly-needed forest health restoration work in the region will go forward on a scale never seen before on public lands in the U.S.
But it is an interesting story, covering coalition building, dueling economic visions, federal bureaucracy, community development and a ponderosa pine ecosystem in desperate need of restoration work from thinning to riparian zone protection and much more.
That’s the reason we decided to devote the space to a story about an OSB plant that apparently will never exist. That and because of our ongoing communication line with former AZFRP CEO Pascal Berlioux, who contacted Panel World years ago to inform us about what they were doing, then sent periodic updates on AZFRP’s progress in building support for its proposal among Four Forest Restoration Initiative (4FRI) stakeholder members.
The 4FRI project came about after Arizona federal lands officials, seeing vast acreages hammered by wildfires during the past decade, had to come up with a new way of addressing forest health conditions in the state. But the traditional timber sale-by-sale process wouldn’t make much of a dent in the 2.4 million acres across four national forests that need thinning and restoration work.
That’s why AZFRP’s OSB proposal was important: By focusing on small timber, the operation sought to avoid another traditional timber sale problem with sawmills in the inherent pressure to cut larger logs that, right or wrong, inevitably leads to court and nothing getting done in the woods. Also, AZFRP had gained unprecedented agreements (for what they’re worth) and support from major environmental groups for its OSB plant proposal that would in turn pay for the forest health restoration work that organizations on all sides of the issue agree need to be done.
Instead of an OSB plant to utilize the small-diameter raw material coming off an unprecedented 300,000 acres over 10 years in the first of several large-scale stewardship contracts, the Forest Service chose a sawmill operation producing edge-glued panels for door and window stock, plus an associated biofuel plant. Some of the reasons why make for quite interesting reading.
Yet while some have questioned federal actions in awarding the contract, the good news is that in this story, the forest products industry guys—sawmillers and OSB producers alike—are the ones wearing the white hats as they ride to the rescue and provide the investment that’s making the 4FRI restoration work possible.
RELATED ARTICLES
NEWLIFE GAINS FULL PRODUCTION
The monthly Panel World Industry Newsletter reaches over 3,000 who represent primary panel production operations.
Panel World is delivered six times per year to North American and international professionals, who represent primary panel production operations. Subscriptions are FREE to qualified individuals.
Complete the online form so we can direct you to the appropriate Sales Representative. Contact us today!
by Site Manager | Apr 27, 2012 | Taking Stock
DICK BALDWIN KNOWS PLYWOOD
Article by Rich Donnell, Editor-in-Chief, Panel World 2021
Shown here is Dr. Richard F. Baldwin, better known as Dick, during the recent Panel & Engineered Lumber International Conference & Expo (PELICE) held in Atlanta. PELICE organizers presented Dick with a Lifetime Service Award. Not that he’s going anywhere. He’s currently executive vice president/general manager for the Southeastern U.S. division of Wood Resources LLC, and has overseen a couple of success stories at the company’s plywood plants in Moncure, NC and Chester, SC.
As the award indicates, Dick has devoted his life to the wood products industry, and more specifically to the plywood industry. He followed his dad into the Cascade Plywood mill in 1957 in Lebanon, Oregon as a tape machine off-bearer. Through the years he laid core, rustled stock, supervised production personnel, was a general superintendent, an operations manager and I first met him when he was vice president for Champion International’s southern pine operations. Later on he became (and still is) managing partner of Oak Creek Investments and at one time had operating authority over wood products plants in Latin America and Southeast Asia, and started up several mill ventures around the world, and I could go. As recently as 2010 he gained his Ph.D. in Public Affairs from the University of Texas at Dallas, with a dissertation on Timber Industry-Based Communities in Crisis: Leadership Collaboration and Response—Research Findings from Seven Western Oregon Counties. He is also a certified forester.
Dick has authored six books on manufacturing practices, management and forestry issues, with three of the books specifically about plywood manufacturing. He is in the middle of writing number seven, due out later this year.
Dick didn’t just stand around receiving awards at PELICE. During one of the breakout sessions he spoke on The Changing World of the Plywood Producer: Products, People, and Processes. His bottom line message was that plywood companies must more closely align their business model with the emerging realities of the industry.
What I found most interesting was when he addressed solutions for survival and growth. One of his five focal points was to “trace back to the roots of the plywood industry and seek understanding. Consider the rich history of men, machines and markets,” he said, mentioning several names of “industry giants gone from the scene.”
Certainly Dick Baldwin is one of those giants, and he is certainly not “gone from the scene.” In a sense he was the younger brother during that era of giants, and thus today, at age 73, is in the unique position of being able to speak for them as he speaks to us about the past and the future of the industry.
RELATED ARTICLES
PELICE DRAWS POWERFUL SPEAKERS IN ATLANTA
The monthly Panel World Industry Newsletter reaches over 3,000 who represent primary panel production operations.
Panel World is delivered six times per year to North American and international professionals, who represent primary panel production operations. Subscriptions are FREE to qualified individuals.
Complete the online form so we can direct you to the appropriate Sales Representative. Contact us today!
by Web Editor | Mar 26, 2012 | Taking Stock
Story by Rich Donnell,
Editor-in-Chief
And I do mean “live.” That is, the upcoming Panel & Engineered Lumber International Conference & Expo (PEL-ICE) will be video-broadcasting live at certain times during each day of the March 1-2 event— “coming at you” from the Grand Ballroom North of the Omni Hotel at CNN Center in downtown Atlanta, Georgia, USA.
Yours truly and Panel World veteran scribe Dan Shell will be behind the microphone discussing developments at the conference and interviewing various industry personnel, including some of the speakers before and following their presentations. (No, we won’t be showing the actual presentations—you have to be present to see those.)
The video broadcasts will be launched four times on March 1 and twice on March 2. Each broadcast will run five to 10 minutes in length. Several exhibitor companies are buying a sponsorship for an individual broadcast (if you’re interested in a broadcast sponsorship, e-mail Susan Windham: [email protected] or call her at 334-834-1170 and she’ll give you the details).
If you’re interested in tuning in (for free) to the broadcasts, you’ll simply need to go to the conference web site, www.panel-expo.com and you’ll see the link enabling you to watch. And of course you can watch from anywhere in the world if you have on-line capabilities.
Broadcast times (Eastern Standard Time, USA) are:
March 1 (Thursday): 8 a.m., 10:30 a.m., 1 p.m., 3:10 p.m.
March 2 (Friday): 10:30 a.m., 1 p.m.
Hey, it’s not like we don’t have enough to do, so why not pile on some more.
We would prefer of course that you’re there with us in Atlanta, but if you can’t make it, at least you’ll be able to get a taste of PELICE as it happens.
by Web Editor | Jan 26, 2012 | Taking Stock
Story by Dan Shell,
Managing Editor
With its recent proposed revisions to the Boiler Maximum Achievable Control Technology rules that were released in early December, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has taken a step forward in addressing major operational concerns across a variety of industries, including all facets of the wood processing industry.
Those concerns about potential new and highly expensive boiler compliance costs stemmed from initial MACT proposals EPA had released a year or so earlier. The potentially costly requirements had spread a large level of uncertainty across the industry, which is already struggling with historically soft markets due to the housing downturn and sluggish economy.
The biggest positive development for the forest products industry is that wood-burning boilers in almost all cases will not be subject to the much more stringent requirements of “solid waste” fired boilers—in effect industrial incinerators—which include a large list of hazardous pollutants that must be monitored, along with expensive control requirements.
Most pertinent to the forest products industry is that instead of lumping its boiler operations in with other industries in a “one size fits all” burdensome regulatory structure, EPA will seek to establish new emissions limits for particulate matter that are different for each solid fuel subcategory (such as biomass and coal, for example) that better reflect “real-world operating conditions.”
Along those same lines, EPA is proposing increased flexibility in compliance that may remove continuous monitoring requirements for biomass boiler units, plus carbon monoxide limits based on stack testing or continuous monitoring data instead of continuous monitoring systems.
The much-needed flexibility inherent in the revised proposals reflect a positive EPA response to industry concerns that boiler rule regulations proposed in 2010 were unachievable and unreasonable to the extent of causing large scale industrial plant closures and a quick halt to many new projects or planned expansions at existing facilities. According to the Biomass Thermal Energy Council (BTEC), the revised proposals are estimated to be 50% less costly than before.
Yet many obstacles remain: According to the American Forest & Paper Assn., the boiler MACT rules are among the “most complex MACT standards developed.” And while EPA’s revised proposals are an important step in writing a more reasonable set of regulations, concerns remain that the rules are still open to challenge in the courts, adding another level of uncertainty.
Another bit of good news is there’s still time to comment on the revised proposals, at least through February 2, by both email and fax. Panel World readers can easily find contact and comment information through major trade groups such as APA—The Engineered Wood Assn., Composite Panel Assn. or AF&PA. Do-it-yourself commenters can submit comments online by going to www.regulations.gov.
Needless to say, it’s exceedingly difficult to hit a home run with the EPA when grappling with any regulatory issue, but our industry helping to make noise about the original unreasonable proposals has helped remove at least one layer of uncertainty in the process. With industry’s input, there’s still time to contribute to another positive result.
