FAQ
Status: 15.10.2022 06:00 a.m
Firewood prices are rising – demand is huge this year. Where does the refill come from? Where is the wood burned? And how is the climate balance? Answers to some questions.
How is the demand developing?
“Demand is extremely high,” says Jörg Sellig, a timber dealer in Frankfurt am Main. A homeowner from southern Hesse reports that his timber dealer is refusing new customers. Existing customers would only be allocated the amount they would have bought in previous years.
More and more wood-burning stoves have been installed over the years. On the one hand, these are stoves that burn real wood and are mostly used as additional heating. On the other hand, central heating: In the first half of 2022, almost every tenth new central heating system worked with wood. With pellet heating, drops pressed from sawdust are burned, with woodchip heating directly leftovers from wood processing.
Waste from sawmills is primarily used for wood central heating. While 4.8 million tons of pellets and wood chips were produced in Germany 10 years ago, last year it was 9.2 million tons. The proportion of wood chips decreases; Pellets are trumps. The bottom line is that almost a tenth of the goods are exported.
How is the offer coming?
Real logs have to be burned in living room stoves. This can be wood that is otherwise useless. Forests are weakened by drought, heat and beetle infestation. This “damaged wood” is useless for the construction and furniture industry, but makes good firewood.
For a long time, felling of firewood has varied between 9.5 and eleven million cubic meters over the past decade. In recent years, the numbers have been rising steadily: in 2021 it was almost twelve million cubic meters. Roughly calculated, this corresponds to 6.5 million tons of firewood.
Foreign trade is practically irrelevant for firewood. A few tens of thousands of tons were imported from Ukraine, Belarus and Poland in 2021; significantly fewer German dealers sold in neighboring countries. Even if there were no imports from the Ukraine and Belarus this year, this should be offset by production in Germany.
But overall, demand has risen much faster than production. Firewood and wood pellets have become 86 percent more expensive in the German market within a year.
Are wood heating systems climate-neutral?
It is debatable whether wood can be counted among the renewable energies. Producers assure that wood is climate-neutral. Burning only releases as much CO2 as the tree previously stored. The storage capacity is preserved through reforestation.
Wolfgang Lucht from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research calls this a “milkmaid’s calculation”. The processing of the firewood generates additional CO2, so that wood heating systems are far more harmful than coal, oil or gas. Logging goes much faster than the growth of new forest. Firewood was “living material in the landscape,” says Lucht.
Is there more wood stealing?
Some state forest agencies are complaining of dramatically increased thefts. The spokeswoman for Hesse-Forst reported that “even on a larger scale” there had been theft in the past few weeks. When asked, it was said that the authority currently had no overview of the current quantities. Any lost inventory would be recorded as theft. “Shortages can also arise if, for example, a mover accidentally does not take all the wood from the stock”. The transport of felled trees in the forest to the forest roads is referred to as backing.
Forest authorities in several federal states are trying to deter potential thieves. Wood lying ready is provided with camouflaged GPS trackers. Their use has led to significantly more criminal charges, reports Hessen-Forst. Although stolen wood is to be tracked, hardly any perpetrators are identified. Hessen-Forst has filed 81 criminal charges since 2018. Only four acts could be cleared up.
Hessen-Forst only filed one theft report this year. According to press reports, it was probably a lorry near Hanau worth 4,000 euros. We hear from the industry that although wood is disappearing again and again, it is mostly in small quantities. The official crime statistics do not list wood theft separately.