By Sharon Kiley Mack, Bangor Daily News, Maine
Jul. 24--EAST CORINTH, Maine -- There are 300 tons of waste wood in enormous piles outside the entrance to the Corinth Wood Pellets LLC, leftovers from construction sites and sawmills.
In a new storage facility nearby, 1,000 tons of sawdust air-dries before going through a series of electric dryers.
Drums turn, augers drill, and while the smell of Christmas hangs heavy in the air, wood pellets are formed -- tiny bits of compressed sawdust that will burn 20 times cleaner than firewood and cost less than oil.
George Soffren, general manager, said that stove manufacturers may have greatly underestimated their sales of pellet stoves this year, but pellet manufacturers are handling the demand for the fuel quite easily.
"In the short term, the demand for pellets is like a gold rush," Soffren said recently. "But we could sell more pellets than we are making. The demand is there. The problem is that people are panicking and hoarding both stoves and pellets. We're getting calls from Connecticut, New York, New Jersey."
Matt Bell of Northeast Pellets LLC in Ashland said people are unnecessarily buying enough pellets for two to three years.
Soffren said that retailers are also hoarding. "The retailers are panicked and are overbuying. I think they are unnecessarily stocking up, and I expect them to call in October and cut back their winter orders."
There are three wood pellet manufacturers in Maine -- Maine Wood Pellets Co. in Athens is the third -- and at each location, business is booming.
At Athens, co-owner Bruce Linkletter told consumers at a recent Pittsfield energy forum that his company just began production in May and it's already looking at expansion.
"Not in our wildest dreams did we think this would be as big as it is," Linkletter said. Maine Wood Pellets is working three shifts, hand-bagging pellets. "We can't even begin to scratch the surface of the demand," he said, but agreed with Soffren that hoarding is definitely going on. "We're producing 200 to 350 tons a day."
The demand isn't just coming from U.S. consumers. Firms in the United Kingdom are already sourcing wood pellets in Maine, Linkletter said.
"I see the demand continuing throughout the winter, and then in the spring, when stove manufacturers begin to catch up on their orders, it will increase again," he said.
There's a big difference right now between the cost of heating with wood and heating with pellets, Soffren noted. "It costs two and a half times more to heat a house with oil rather than pellets," he said.
But Soffren cautions that homeowners are unable to obtain pellet stoves because manufacturers did not increase production fast enough, and Corinth Wood Pellets, which began production in April 2007, cannot sell all of its pellets in Maine.