Bushfires: backburn ‘not so vital if forest floor waste dealt with’

Australia could avoid intensive bushfires by harvesting the waste on forest floors for bio-energy and related products.

Australia could avoid intensive bushfires and create new industries by harvesting the waste on forest floors for bio-energy and related products, says the head of a global bio-energy company.

Mike Bartlett, president of Global NRG, which specialises in turning waste products into energy and other products, told The Australian he pitched the concept to state governments in 2011 but got very little interest.

“We do this day in, day out in the giant Tongass forest in Alaska, in Washington and Oregon states, in the Yukon in Canada, in Norway and Finland, in Ukraine and in Portugal,” said the Alaska-based businessman. “What Australia doesn’t seem to grasp is you don’t need to backburn to the extent you are proposing.

“We have machines that reduce this fuel and to do selective tree thinning.

“We recover the biowaste and turn it into product and energy.”

The organic material between trees — scrubs, grasses, fallen branches, twigs and other litter — was chipped behind specially designed harvesting equipment and blowers used to load it into high-sided trucks.

It was then turned into syngas for use in renewable energy, which in turn could produce hydrogen. It was also used in a variety of products in demand globally, including kitty litter, barbecue briquettes or biochar, which improved soil quality and moisture retention.

“I calculate that based on the acreage of forest destroyed by fire (in Australia already this bushfire season), given … the density and calorific value (of) the burned-out fuel load … if it had been gasified into syngas and the syngas used to generate baseload renewable energy it could have supplied 32 per cent of Australia’s total electricity supply,” Mr Bartlett said.

“This would have reduced the intensity of the fires by 68 per cent and would have made it more easy to control. This is why we do this all the time in Alaska, Norway and Finland, where we haven’t had an out-of-control fire for over eight years now.

“What a lot of people don’t realise is that when vegetation is rotting, as it does on the forest floor, it naturally creates methane, which when on fire adds to the intensity of the heat.”

Global NRG was recently in discussion with NSW forest companies about value-adding to forest waste in the Bombala region, but none of its earlier approaches to state governments about harvesting forest floor vegetation had led to an outcome.

The comments by Mr Bartlett, who is in Australia to progress several projects, follow calls by the timber industry and forestry union for aggressive management of fuel loads in national parks through burning and selective logging.