Part A is the analytical part of the study on Wood Energy Today for Tomorrow: a study for Europe/OECD. The main aim of this report is to give a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the use of wood for energy purposes in this region. The whole European/OECD region has been split into three groups: the European Union, OECD-non-Europe and Europe-non-EU.

On the basis of five existing databases, which have been described in part B of this report, a best estimate has been made on the use of wood energy in the three country groups. The construction of the best estimate for the European Union has largely been based on the UNECE database in Geneva. Data for the sectoral consumption of wood energy have been based on the Eurostat database. The best estimate for Europe-non-EU has been done in the same way, but more aggregated because the amount and quality of the available data did not allow a more detailed assessment. For the OECD-non-European countries the best estimate has been constructed on the basis of data from both the International Energy Agency and the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory.

France appears to be the largest wood energy consumer in the European Union, with Sweden just behind it. Wood energy consumption accounts for about 3% of total primary energy supplies in the EU-15. In Sweden and Finland this is even higher than 16%. In the OECD-non-Europe group, the USA is by far the largest wood energy consumer, almost twice as high as the total consumption in the EU-15. Turkey is the largest wood energy consumer in the Europe-non-EU group, but this consumption is decreasing sharply.

In general in all regions, about 30-50% of the total wood removed from forests is ultimately used for energy purposes. The average for the EU-15 is 50%. Only a small amount of this is coming directly from the forest. The other streams are mainly residues from forest industries.

In most EU countries (except for Sweden and Finland) wood energy is still mainly consumed in households. Trends like this can also be found in the Europe-non-EU region. There are both positive and negative environmental impacts of the present wood energy consumption. The main positive benefit is the CO₂ neutral character of this energy source. Negative impacts can mainly be found in small scale inefficient conversion units (often present in households) where CO and PAC emissions can become serious problems. There is however a large scope to improve the use of wood energy towards a real sustainable energy source.

No detailed socio-economic analysis has been undertaken in this report. Literature data however points to a much higher number of jobs created by wood energy as compared to energy from coal. Dependent on the category of wood that has been used, job creation can be up to 14 times as high with wood energy.

Part A is the analytical part of this report. On the basis of a best estimate, for which the basic guidelines are set in the background part (Part B) of this report, an analysis will be given on the use of wood for energy in all countries which are part of the OECD, Europe or of both. To get country categories which do not overlap each other, the countries were divided into three groups: European Union (15), Europe-non-EU and OECD-non-Europe.¹

In this report an analysis is made of the quantity and quality of wood energy consumption in the three regions mentioned. Wood energy consumption is related to the total removals of roundwood and to the total primary energy supply in each country. Further, a disaggregation is made for most countries into the various categories of wood energy which are consumed. In addition to this for the EU we also show by which main economic sectors the wood energy is consumed. Especially in relation to the EU, we also focus on the impact of this wood energy consumption on the environment and socio-economic factors as employment.

Part A starts with a short methodological section. Here the way in which the best estimate has been constructed on the basis of the available databases is discussed. These databases have been described in the background section of this report. The rest of the report consists of an analysis of the use of wood energy in the three regions that have been distinguished: the European Union, OECD-non-Europe and Europe-non-EU. The analysis has the most detail for the EU, because the coverage and the quality of the available data are relatively high here. For this region, also a qualitative analysis has been given on environmental and economic aspects.

This section describes the way in which the best estimates for the three country groups have been constructed. Here, only the method of construction itself is described. For the reasons behind this, see section B.5.1. The various definitions of the categories of wood energy which are used for energy purpose can be found in Appendix 1.

The best estimates are limited to the years 1980, 1985 and 1990.

To construct the best estimation of the role of wood energy in the EU the following steps have been undertaken:

• The overall wood energy consumption (for 1980 and 1990) and the disaggregation into the various categories of wood energy is based on the UNECE data [UNECE, 1996].
• The 1985 UNECE questionnaire data are added.
• For all categories of wood energy, the number of the preceding year is repeated, if for a certain country data are not available for all three years (but at least for one year). If there is no data in a preceding year or if only the 1980 figure is known , data of the following years are repeated.²

• If for the categories direct woodfuels, primary residues and black liquor for a certain country no data were available at all, they were estimated. The UNECE estimations in their final report [UNECE, 1996] are adapted so that they are in consistence with the estimations in the original UNECE background report made by Morin [Morin, 1995]. This implicates the following:

• The direct woodfuel figure is estimated by the FAO fuelwood figure [FAO, 1996].
• The primary residues figure is estimated on the basis of the relation that can be observed in look-alike replying countries.³  between their primary residue figure and their figure for veneer and sawnwood production from FAO [FAO, 1996].
• The black liquor figures have been estimated on the basis of the FAO chemical pulp figures [FAO, 1996], according to the formula used by Morin..⁴
• If other figures than direct woodfuel, primary residues and black liquor were not available for a certain country, it has been estimated as 0.

• The sectoral consumption (not in absolute values but in terms of percentages) is based on the Eurostat database..⁵

The total wood energy consumption figures for Japan and the USA were based on the LBL database. Those for Australia, New-Zealand and Canada, were based on the IEA database.

The shares of the various categories of wood energy is limited to a distinction between woodfuels and black liquor (being a wood derived fuel). These figures have all been based on the IEA statistics.

No estimations were made for sectoral consumption, for it is believed that the quality of the available data is too low for this. For the same reason, the resulting data on the various categories of wood energy which have been used, the shares of wood energy of total removals, and its share in the total primary energy supply are limited to the year 1990.

The method applied here was the same as for EU countries with the main exception that here (for the same reason as in the previous section) no estimations were made for sectoral consumption..⁶

As with OECD-non-Europe countries, the resulting data on the various categories of wood energy which have been used, the shares of wood energy of total removals, and its shares in total primary energy supply are limited to the year 1990.

The resulting best estimate has been presented in the table in Appendix 3. The next sections analyse the main results.

The total wood energy consumption according to the best estimate is presented in Figure 1. It can be seen that France is the largest wood energy consumer of all EU countries in absolute terms. The new member states Austria, Finland and Sweden are, together with Germany, other large wood energy consumers in absolute terms. The southern countries Spain, Portugal and Italy follow after these. In all other EU countries wood energy consumption in absolute terms is very modest still.

Given all uncertainties surrounding wood energy statistics, from these figures no concrete conclusions can be drawn on the growth of wood energy consumption in the 80's. The figures for the EU-12 countries showed an annual growth of 1.0% in wood energy consumption, while the new member states grew with 2.1%. Overall for the EU-15 this resulted in a growth of 1.5% per annum. It is questionable, however, to what extend this growth reflects the real growth in wood energy during this period, or the growth in the degree of coverage of the wood energy consumption by the UNECE replies in their questionnaires.

Figure 2 shows the wood energy use in these countries as a share of total wood removals (or: total roundwood production) and as share of their total primary energy supply.

For the EU-12 and EU-15 the share of total wood energy of the total removals does not differ a lot, 41% as compared to 48%. One has to realise that this does not only come from direct forest removals. For EU-15, almost 60% of wood energy came from indirect woodfuels and wood derived products such as black liquor (see Figure 3).

The share of wood energy in total energy supply in EU-15, however, is almost twice as high as in the EU-12 (2.7 and 1.5% respectively), resulting from the very high shares of wood energy in total primary energy supply in the new member states (between 12-18%).

The role of Denmark in terms of relative share is much higher than one may suspect of its low absolute amount of wood energy that is consumes. They ultimately consume about 70% of their forest removals as energy. Direct forest removals, however, only constituted about 25% to 50% of their total wood energy consumption (Figure 3). Wood energy in Denmark is just over 2% of their total energy supply, which is above average for the EU-12.

Although in absolute terms France consumes about the same amount of wood energy as Sweden, their consumption is much lower when expressed as share of total energy supplies (4% compared to about 16% for Sweden). Wood energy consumption as a share of total removals is extremely high in France: over 80%. The questionnaire results from France show, however, that the direct woodfuels come for over 60% of non-inventoried growing stock, which may be part of the explanation for this high figure. For Austria this share is 48%, for Denmark 36%, and for Sweden only 16%.

Figure 3 shows that in Sweden and Finland black liquor constitutes about 50% of the total wood energy consumption. This is quite a different picture than we see in France, where about 70% of the total wood energy consumption comes from direct forest residues. This coincides with the large shares of households in total wood energy consumption in France which can be seen in Figure 4 (over 80%). In Sweden, however, the industry and transformation sector constitute almost 70% of total wood energy consumption.⁷

The case of Portugal has to be treated with care. Because no UNECE questionnaire results were available on this country, everything was estimated. This may be the explanation for the remarkable high share of black liquor in total wood energy consumption (see Figure 3).

In general, it can be concluded from Figure 4 that wood energy consumption in the EU is still mainly a household matter. The household component varies between over 60% for EU-15 to over 70% for the EU-12.

Use of wood for energy can have both positive and negative environmental impacts, dependent on the way in which the wood is grown and how it is converted. The main environmental positive impact is the fact that it is basically CO2 neutral,⁸ as long as the rate of harvest equals the rate of regrowth. Since the latter is the case for wood in Europe,⁹ this positive environmental impact can be considered a fact.

Other emissions of wood energy systems depend a lot on the type and the scale of the system and the way in which it is operated. Although, in general small scale systems do have the advantage that they require less transport of wood and therefore less transport related emissions, conversion related emissions become lower when the scale of the conversion unit (and thus the efficiency) increases.

The most important emission that can occur are CO, polycyclo-aromatic-carbonhydrogens (PACs), NOx and particles.

PACs and carbon monoxide occur as a result of incomplete combustion of wood and will therefore improve with the efficiency of the conversion unit. Thermal efficiencies in small scale household wood heaters can be around 50% (at lower heating value), but are much lower in less efficient designs [Okken, 1992]. Modern district heating stations in Denmark have efficiencies near 99% (at lower heating value) [Hayden, 1996], which leads to much lower CO and PAC emissions. The situation in the Netherlands can illustrate the CO emission problem of household wood heating systems. Although residential wood heating accounts only about 0.5 % to the national primary energy consumption, it is responsible for 10% of the Dutch CO emissions [Okken, 1992].

NOx and particle emissions also depend on the type of combustion process. It is out of the scope of this report to discuss this in detail. An advantage of large scale wood heat or power plants here is that they often have flue gas cleaning systems to reduce those emissions.

It can be concluded that the present consumption of wood for energy is near to CO2 neutral, but considering the large share of households in wood energy consumption one can pose doubts on the behaviour of these systems in the field of CO and PAC emissions. This problem may be overcome by improvement of wood heating systems or centralisation of the conversion, which will in general raise conversion efficiencies.

In the Eurostat household survey [Eurostat, 1993] for 5 EU countries (France, UK, Portugal, Greece and Italy) both amount of wood consumed per household and the corresponding expenditures are mentioned. From this we can estimate costs per unit of wood energy consumed. To get a rough indication of the amount of money that is involved with wood energy in the EU, a weighed average cost level has been calculated according to the relative share of the mentioned countries in total EU household wood energy consumption. This leads to a price for wood energy of 2,86 million ECU per PJ¹⁰. With a total wood energy consumption of 1460 PJ per year this leads to an estimated expenditure of about 4 billion ECU per year in the EU-15. Of course, this figure can only be considered as a very rough estimation of the order of magnitude of the real turnover that is associated with wood energy. It is quite imaginable that the figure represents an overestimation, because many households collect their fuelwood themselves and thus get it for free. From a macro-economic point of view, this still means savings in oil imports.

Table 1 gives an illustration of the amount of employment that is generated by different types of biomass energy in Sweden.

It can be seen there that for the wood energy types which are used in Europe at present, the number of man-years created per PJ of primary energy varies between 8 and 73. For energy crops this varies between 25 and 113 man-years/PJ. The amount of employment needed for coal is estimated at about 8 man-years/PJ. It has to be noted that the figures only include direct employment generation and that indirect multipliers effects are not included.

Because the quality of the available data is quite low here (as described in the background section), the analysis will be more general than the analysis of the EU figures.

Figure 5. Total wood energy use in OECD-non-Europe.

As Figure 5 shows, the absolute amount of wood energy consumption in the USA is enormous in comparison with other OECD/European countries¹¹. It is almost twice as large as the complete EU-15 consumption and it constitutes about 50% of the wood energy consumption in the whole OECD/Europe region. The amount of wood energy consumed in Canada is in the same order of magnitude as the French and Swedish one. The roughly 10 million m³ which are annually consumed in Japan and Australia are in the range of the Austrian consumption, but still considerably lower than the Finish and German ones. The limited data available on New-Zealand show a quite moderate absolute amount of wood energy consumed.

Most notable from Figure 6 is that the share of wood energy in total energy supply is, except for Japan, much higher than the average in the European Union. Although it is not as high as in the new EU member states, the 4% for Canada equals the French figure and the 3% for the USA is also higher than the EU-15 average. An interesting difference between Canada and the USA shows up when the previous figures are compared with the share of wood energy in total removals. Here, the share in the USA is about 2.5 times as large as that of Canada. Explanations for this difference could be the high energy intensity in the USA in combination with the strong forestry tradition in Canada.

The low absolute amount for New-Zealand appears to be still significant, if expressed as share of their total primary energy supply.

Because of the fact that forestry in Japan is relatively weak, we can see that the modest share in total energy supply still goes with a significant share of wood energy in total removals (almost 40%).

Because no IEA data were available on Japan, Figure 7 is limited to 4 countries and only distinguishes between woodfuels and black liquor (being a wood derived fuel).

The share of black liquor is very large. Where the average share of black liquor in wood energy was less than 20% for EU-12 and less than 30% for EU-15, the USA and Canada get almost 40% of their wood energy from black liquor. For Canada this is even almost 60%. Note that this share for Finland and Sweden is about 50%.

It is believed that data quality is also relatively poor for this region. Therefore only part of the countries are discussed.

The available data on total wood energy consumption (Figure 8) are quite low in absolute terms as compared with the other regions, except for Turkey. The amount of wood energy consumed in Turkey in 1980 was in the range of the amount of Germany, but it declined sharply to near 11 million m³ in 1990, which is close to the Austrian consumption. The most probably explanation of the decline is the relative traditional way in which the wood is used in Turkey and the reduction of this use which goes along with the economic development in Turkey and the introduction of other energy sources in rural areas.

Beside Turkey, in absolute terms, the Czech republic, Poland, Romania and Norway are the larger consumers in this region (which is more a rest category than a geographical or political coherent region). Their consumption, however, is in the order of magnitude of consumption in Italy and Spain, which are relatively modest wood energy consumers in the EU.

Figure 9 shows a very high share of wood energy in the total primary energy supply in Albania.. The Albania wood energy figure is an estimated figure which almost completely consists of the FAO fuelwood figures (see Figure 10). An explanation for the fact that wood energy constitutes about 18% of the total primary energy supply could be the relatively low development level of Albania, which often goes along with a large traditional woodfuel use in rural areas.

The share of wood energy in Norway is quite high, but still much lower than that in Sweden and Finland.

Like in all other regions, it can be seen here that there are quite some countries with a share of wood energy in total removals which is in the order of magnitude of 50%.

Figure 10 should especially be interpreted with care. Only the figures for Norway, Switzerland, Czech republic, Poland and Romania and the direct woodfuel figures for Turkey come straight from the UNECE questionnaires. All other data are estimated as described in the Section A.2.

Except for Romania, all other 4 countries which were totally covered in the UNECE questionnaires, show relatively low shares of direct woodfuels, ranging from 50% in Poland down to only 25% in the Czech republic. This means that a considerable part of the wood used for energy is not used in the traditional (household related) way in these countries.

There is still a lot of uncertainty with respect to the use of wood energy in Europe/OECD. The data quality of the databases that have been investigated in this research is still considerably low. This is discussed in detail in part B of this study. This means, however, that the conclusions presented here should be interpreted as not more than indicative for the present reality.

Wood energy consumption constitutes about 3% of the total primary energy consumption in the EU-15. The highest shares can be found amongst the new member states, where this share varies between 12 and 18%. France and Sweden are the largest EU consumers in absolute terms. In OECD-non-European countries, the USA dominates in quantitative terms. They consume about twice as much as the whole EU-15, which is about 3% of their total primary energy supply. In the Europe-non-EU group, Turkey is the largest consumer, although wood energy consumption is sharply decreasing in this country.

In the EU-15, about 50% of the total removals are, either directly or indirectly, used as an energy source. In the OECD-non-European countries this figure is slightly lower, with Canada having only 20% of their removals used for energy. Most countries in the Europe-non-EU group fall within the 30-50% range. There are some exceptions (e.g. France, Austria, Denmark, Albania and Turkey) in which the statistics say that over 70% of the total removals is used for energy. In some of these countries (e.g. France and Austria), this figure is upwardly distorted because the direct woodfuel figure does also include non-inventoried sources, while these are not included in the figure for total removals.

The share of the different type of fuels that are used for energy varies quite a lot amongst different countries. Two extremes can be observed. On the one hand there are the countries where wood energy is mainly consumed in the form of direct forest residues. Often this is traditional use in households. Examples of this are Turkey, France, Greece and Albania. On the other hand there are the countries that have a well developed forest industry including a large pulp and paper sector, e.g. Sweden, Finland and Canada. In these countries the share from indirect woodfuels and black liquor dominates.

Beside Sweden and Finland, where the industrial and transformation sector consumes most wood energy, in the EU in general, still the largest share of wood energy is consumed in households. Although there are hardly data on the shares of the different sectors in other regions, it can be expected that this trend is the same or even stronger in most countries in the non-EU part of Europe. This does have implications for the present environmental impact for wood as an energy source.

Wood energy is a potentially sustainable energy source with its CO₂ neutral character as its main advantage. In Europe at present the rate of harvest of wood is lower than the rate of regrowth, so this potential advantage appears to be reality in Europe at present.

In spite of this, there is still a lot to improve, especially on the field of CO and PAC emissions of small scale household heating systems. Conversion efficiencies in household consumption is generally very low and emissions are relatively high. Scope for improvement is present, looking at the enormous development in modern clean biomass technologies (both small and large scale) that have been developed the last decade.

An illustration for the employment impacts is given by the situation in Sweden, where wood energy has already become a commercial market. Here, the number of direct jobs created per unit of primary energy supply from woody residues is a factor 1 to 10 higher than is the case with coal as a primary fuel. For willow as an energy crop this is even a factor 3 to 14 higher than with coal.

Eurostat, 1993: Energy consumption in households,, Luxembourg.

FAO, 1996: FAO forest product yearbook,, Rome.

Hayden, S., 1996: Personal communication, CANMET Energy Technology Centre, Ottawa, 1996.

Hektor, B., 1992, 1996 revised: Employment effects of biofuels (in Swedish), SIMS, Uppsala.

Morin, 1995: Energetic use of wood (in French), UNECE, Paris.

Okken, P.A., et al., 1992: Wood stoves in the Netherlands: the contribution to the energy supply and emissions (in Dutch), Report no. 9209, ECN.

UNECE and FAO, 1996: European timber trends and prospects: into the 21st century, Report no. Geneva timber and forest study papers, Geneva.