The Argument in Favor of Wood Heating

The Ontario Woodlot Association, Limestone Chapter, spearheaded an initiative they called The Fuelwood Project, intended to "implement a public awareness program linking EPA approved woodstoves, sustainable forest management and good woodburning practices to the [reduction in greenhouse gas emissions], improved forest genetics, healthier rural economy and less reliance on fossil fuels." Other partners in the Project include the Frontenac Stewardship Council, the Lennox and Addington Stewardship Council, the Upper Canada Woods Co-operative, the Ontario Woodlot Association, Quinte Chapter, and The Wood Heat Organization Inc. This article was written by John Gulland to form the main reference document for the Fuelwood Project. Download in MS Word format here.
February 2007

Executive Summary

Almost 3.2 million Canadian households burn wood in fireplaces, stoves and furnaces. This number represents 26 percent of all households. In Ontario, the popularity of wood burning is well below the national average, with only 21 percent, or about 940,000 households burning wood. Still, millions of Ontarians and millions more people across Canada build wood fires for heat and enjoyment each winter. By any measure, wood is an important residential energy resource, especially in rural areas.

But judged by coverage in the mainstream media, wood heating is virtually nonexistent. Politicians don’t debate its merits or plan for its strategic use. In a world of touch-screen convenience, pocket-sized computers, and automatic climate-controlled environments, wood heating is in every way rough, basic and steadfastly hands-on. People who heat with wood seem out of step with the modern world swirling around them. Have wood burners and those who labour to supply them with fuel slipped through a crack in the cozy consensus of modernity? Or are they onto something meaningful that has been missed by the mainstream?

The producers and consumers of fuelwood are engaged in an activity that reduces net greenhouse gas emissions while others merely fret about global warming. The fuelwood fraternity use a renewable energy resource, taking pressure off dwindling supplies of ever-pricier and scarce fossil fuels. Buyers of fuelwood create jobs close to home and strengthen their local communities. They know more about the cause-and-effect relationships of energy production and consumption than the economists who promote tar sands development. The story of wood heating early in the twenty-first century is about average families making decisions based on how they see their future unfolding.

Heating with wood is about a lot more than home heating. It is a tangible expression of self-reliance, of the courage to buck the trends and to resist the appeal of sedentary, push-button convenience. Heating with wood reinforces links to the land and is a willing submission to the cycle of the seasons. It provides stability and security in a turbulent world.

To its owner, the woodlot is a living community in constant evolution, while to the urban observer it may be seen as a museum in which the removal of a tree exhibit renders it diminished. The woodlot owner watches its quality improve over the years, even as it yields products and creates employment. The owner’s household earns part of its income by being a fuel supplier to the neighbours. It is a gentle way to produce energy compared to open pit uranium mines and nuclear reactors.

Fuelwood is the ultimate populist energy resource, the most easily accessed and affordable of all renewable energies. The major environmental impact of wood heating is visible for all to see in the form of smoke emissions, making everyone who uses it instantly accountable for their actions. The families that heat with wood and those that supply them with fuel do so privately, without fanfare or acknowledgement. It seems they wouldn’t want it any other way. Heating with wood is its own reward.

Introduction

Energy is in the news these days as policy makers, industry leaders and news commentators talk of high oil and gas prices, the need to cut greenhouse gas emissions, the security of imported oil supplies and fears of electricity shortages. They also debate the future of nuclear power and the promise of renewable energy sources like solar and wind.

The one home heating fuel that is rarely mentioned is fuelwood, yet it is the fourth most popular heating fuel in Ontario after gas, oil and electricity. Not only is it a significant contributor to the residential energy mix, wood heating is an important aspect of rural life.

The low profile of wood heating in energy policy discussions and in the media reflects the fact that policy – even rural policy – is developed in big cites, and that the large media outlets are all urban in location and outlook. That and the fact that no large corporations are involved in wood heating and therefore no high-priced lobbyists or special interest groups prowl the halls of Toronto and Ottawa pleading the case of wood burning. So, despite the fact that more than a third of all rural residents in Ontario burn wood at home, its role as an energy source does not appear on government and media radar.

Rural people are not clamouring for government to intervene in their wood heating activities. This is a private activity in which virtually everyone involved is content to remain anonymous, quietly keeping their families warm through their own labour and ingenuity.

The one area in which wood burning does attract attention is the problem of air pollution. Although Ontario towns and cities do not tend to suffer from significant winter air pollution from wood smoke, there are places in Canada, particularly in valley communities in BC and the Yukon, where it is the primary winter air pollutant. In Ontario, the most common form of complaint about wood smoke arises when one household’s plume of smoke bothers their neighbours. This nuisance wood smoke has become an increasingly serious problem with the rising popularity of large outdoor boilers designed to heat a house and one or more other buildings.

In recent years governments at all levels have tended to give more attention to the pollution potential of residential wood heating than to its status as a renewable energy resource, one having strategic importance. As a result, wood burning has become most often identified as a problem to be solved rather than as an opportunity to be harvested. Heating with wood is viewed by some urban environmentalists as mildly deviant behaviour. Intervention by governments is usually designed to encourage better practices that will result in less wood smoke. The one thing that no government anywhere in Canada does is encourage householders to heat with wood. Fuelwood is the only renewable energy resource that governments don’t seem comfortable with.

This paper explores how wood burning contributes to the prosperity of rural communities, the health and well-being of their inhabitants, and to the environmental sustainability of our society.

How Popular is Wood Burning?

The popularity of wood burning is low in Ontario compared to the Atlantic Provinces and Quebec. This may be because Ontario is more urbanized than other provinces and also because it has been served by pipelines carrying inexpensive natural gas for much longer than the provinces to its east.

Thirty-five percent or about 350,000 households in rural Ontario burn fuelwood. More than twice this many urban householders report burning wood. Over all, about one million Ontario families burn wood at home or cottage.

Note: All statistical information in this report, including tables, has been adapted from an Environment Canada sponsored national survey conducted in the spring of 2006[i]. The survey, conducted by TNS Canadian Facts, was a self-administered mail-out questionnaire sent to 19,740 households on March 31, 2006. Some 9588 questionnaires were returned and processed.

In the TNS-CF report, rural was defined as population centres of less than 10,000.

According to the Environment Canada/TNS-CF survey report, there has been a significant reduction in wood burning since the last such survey was conducted in 1997. Table 1 shows that nationally, the reported incidence of wood burning in urban areas fell by almost 18 percent in that nine year period, although there was a slight increase of 2.4 percent in rural areas. In Ontario, the move away from wood burning was the largest of all the provinces with a decline in urban areas of more than 29 percent and even in rural areas 12.5 percent of previous users stopped burning wood.

Table 1: Change in the Percentage of Households Reporting the Burning of Wood 1997 - 2006

The significant decline in the reported use of wood fuel contradicts anecdotal reports of an increase in its popularity. The use of wood was thought to have fallen during the 1990s in response to very low oil, gas and electricity prices, which bottomed out around 1998. Subsequent events such as the ice storm of January 1998, the summer electricity blackout of 2003 and a general rise in oil and gas prices through the current decade were thought to have triggered an increase in the use of wood. Certainly, the hearth industry reported strong sales of wood stoves after the ice storm, power outage and price spikes, especially in the fall of 2005. However, this survey presents evidence of the counterintuitive opposite. There is no obvious evidence of statistical problems with the 2006 survey, although no validation study has been done on the results.

Roughly two-thirds of rural users burn wood for home heating in stoves, fireplace inserts and furnaces. The remainder burn in fireplaces, which may or may not produce enough heat for serious home heating. In contrast, almost 80 percent of urban households that burn wood use fireplaces, mainly for enjoyment rather than serious heating.

The value of fuelwood burned in Ontario

In 2006, Ontarians burned about 1.8 million cords of wood. At today’s price of around $250 per cord, this is the equivalent of about $450 million in fuelwood each year, although the actual expenditures would be considerably less than this figure because many families self-process their wood supplies. In context of the total energy-related economy of Ontario, expenditures on fuelwood are small. However, it is in the location and quality of the expenditures or avoided cost that the significance lies, as is discussed in the section on fuelwood and the local economy.

“Most official estimates understate the residential consumption of wood fuel because a large proportion is harvested and used locally and does not appear in tax records or government statistics.” The Canadian Encyclopedia

The Place of Wood Heating in the Energy Mix

At a time when energy sources of all types are being scrutinized on grounds of price, availability, environmental impact and safety, fuelwood is mostly absent from the discussion. The probable cause of this oversight is the assumption that heating with wood is a marginal activity practiced by a relatively few rural folks; that if wood heating were somehow eliminated from the mix, its loss would scarcely be noticed. The invisibility of wood fuel as an energy resource and its apparent dispensability is one good reason to raise its profile among policy makers, energy analysts, the media and the public.

The production of fuelwood and the practice of wood heating should be viewed as an important and positive part of Ontario’s home energy strategy, especially in rural areas. To fully appreciate the value of residential wood energy in society, all its dimensions need to be considered, including forest management, environmental impact, rural economics and cultural significance.

Despite its considerable advantages, fuelwood is not a good solution for all households to the problems of global warming or high conventional energy prices. Fuelwood is not a suitable energy source in all locations. For example, wood is not a good fuel for heating houses in densely populated urban or suburban areas, or in less densely populated areas that suffer poor air quality. Successful heating with wood also requires a level of physical fitness and acquisition of a special set of skills.

Fuelwood and Sustainability

The Forest Carbon Cycle

Wood is considered to be a renewable fuel, which is obvious considering that new trees grow to replace those harvested. What may not be quite as obvious, however, is that use of fuelwood does not contribute to global warming/climate change the way fossil fuels do.

In heating our houses with wood, we are simply tapping into the natural carbon cycle in which CO₂ flows from the atmosphere to the forest and back. Therefore, when wood is burned as a substitute energy source for fossil fuels, a net reduction in GHG emissions results.

Using Wood Fuel to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions

The actual reduction in household CO₂emissions by using wood instead of fossil fuels cannot easily be estimated with precision. However, a rough estimate can be made in the case of wood substituting for the use of fuel oil. The CO₂ emission factor for fuel oil is 3kg/litre; i.e., for each litre of oil burned, 3 kilograms of CO₂