There are two facts to get your head around when it comes to British Columbia's mountain pine beetle infestation:
It's killed stands of lodgepole pine covering an area of north-central B.C. forest the size of New Brunswick with no end in sight.
And government and the forest industry are in a race against time to log the dead and dying timber before it rots.
No one can do anything about the first fact except Mother Nature.
Years of warm winters have allowed the naturally occurring pest to flourish, making this the worst pine beetle outbreak in at least a century. Scientists say the bugs will keep expanding their range until they run out of food.
But the second fact poses an equally daunting challenge.
The B.C. government and the region's forest companies must find a way to harvest and sell the wood quickly in a way that preserves maximum economic value without unduly distorting the market with an avalanche of beetle-killed timber.
Both have started pouring money into research and analysis to decide which timber stands should be logged first and the best techniques for processing and marketing beetlewood.
"We're trying to stay ahead of the curve and provide the technical knowledge to be able to maintain as much as possible and as effectively as we can the competitiveness of our different products," says Michael Loseth, vice-president of international marketing and product development at Forestry Innovation Investment Ltd.
The B.C. Crown corporation has become a clearing house for more than a dozen beetlewood research projects.
The industry will have to adapt its economic model to deal with beetlewood, says Doug Routledge, vice president of northern operations for the B.C. Council of Forest Industries, because there's a limited window to process beetle-killed timber for lumber.
"What the beetle presents us with going forward is the need to move whole logs to plants that traditionally have just used residue products," says Routledge.
"So the costs of harvesting and moving those logs and doing the reforestation now has to be borne by that plant. And that's an economic barrier."
Pine beetles kill trees by burrowing into the layer between the bark and the wood. Lumber from a newly bug-killed tree with its distinctive orange-red needles is no different from a healthy green try when it comes to strength.
The beetles do leave a blue stain on the surface of the wood that makes it hard to sell in some markets.
The main concern is around so-called grey wood -- dead trees that rot if let uncut. Depending on climactic conditions, they could be nearly worthless in as little as three years.
One of Forestry Innovation's projects involves developing improved scanning technology to pick up imperfections in bug-killed wood in the milling process, ensuring the log doesn't break up under the automated saw.
"If that crack spirals down the tree or bends down the tree the computer is telling the sawing machine how to get the maximum recovery out of it," says Routledge.
But even expanded logging plants won't keep up with the death rate of beetle-infested stands, leaving vast swaths of deteriorating trees.
"You're going to end up with more and more of this what they call grey attack, drier wood," says Loseth.
So other research projects are focusing on how well beetle-killed pine will work for things such as laminated decking and flooring, panel and particleboard and laminated structural beams.
"It's a matter of finding the right solutions that may already exist or that may just require some fine tuning or modification versus having to completely redevelop a whole new plant to build widgets," says Loseth.
Then there's that blue stain.
"There are already companies in British Columbia that are putting beetle-stained products and pine into an OSB (oriented-strand board) mixture and doing so quite successfully," says Loseth.
One B.C. entrepreneur says you may as well flaunt it.
Lynn Pond of Kelowna has trademarked the name Denim Pine and wants to license it for products made of beetle-killed wood, everything from furniture to log homes.
"It is the novelty of the colour, that's the attraction," she says. "It's very unique to this century now, especially among log-home buyers.
"People want to buy denim pine wood. They don't want to buy bug-kill wood, bug-kill products."
Pond, who hopes to have a plan by early next year for acquiring and marketing beetlewood, shopped a sample of blue-stained flooring around the home-reno show circuit this year.
"I've had ladies dancing around on my Denim Pine floor, saying I want it, I want it, I want it, because it's different,'' she says.
Perhaps the most ambitious proposal involves what to do with bug-killed timber after it's decayed beyond use for conventional wood products.
The BIOCAP Canada Foundation, a federally funded research group, released a study last month that suggested beetlewood could fuel a clean-energy electrical plant big enough to power 300,000 homes.
The 330-megawatt plant would be located near Quesnel, in the heart of the beetle epidemic, and cost about $600 million to build.
BIOCAP's proposal would require no processing beyond chipping the logs, which would be harvested within a fixed radius and trucked to the plant, ground up and burned to produce electricity. A similar plant, somewhat smaller, already produces power in Finland.
"The technology's there," says Peter Flynn of the University of Alberta, one of the study's co-authors. "You could start on this kind of a project right now.''
The cost of the power would be higher than conventional sources but comparable to other green sources, the study concludes.
Additional plants could be built in other areas of the beetle outbreak. Once the supply of wood is exhausted, which could take decades, the plants can be easily converted to run on other biomass fuel sources, says Flynn.
Routledge says the forest industry is interested in the proposal, but companies would have to take a hard look at the economics of chipping whole logs for bioenergy.
"It may hold some significant promise to extending the shelf life of some of these stands," he says.The Vancouver Sun
