A Roma biofuel plant requiring 100,000 to 200,000 tonnes of feedstock could finally pay for the silviculture reset across western Queensland’s overstocked cypress and hardwood regrowth, with significant areas of grazing country in the Maranoa and Western Downs the most likely candidates. That is according to Bill Schulke from Private Forestry Service Queensland (PFSQ), who last week told a BeefUp forum at Morven that thinning regrowing native stands could restore the tree-grass balance on grazing land overrun with regrowth.
Silviculture thins regrowing native stands to accelerate growth in the trees retained for timber production, Schulke said, with selective harvest leaving habitat trees and environmental corridors in place.
Wood Central understands Schulke pitched silviculture as the answer to regrowth pressure on pasture, with cattle stations carrying significant areas of grazing country the most likely candidates and a prolonged payback period, the historical reason private landholders have stayed out of farm forestry.
Most native stands are overstocked with too many trees and remain prone to catastrophic wildfires of the 2019-20 Black Summer scale, Schulke told the forum, with public perception of trees having shifted under the recently updated Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act and the EU Deforestation Regulation.
The basal area threshold, the point at which a stand locks up, is what active silviculture is designed to head off, Schulke said, and grass production averaged across treatment years runs higher than the do-nothing baseline despite the canopy cost.
“What the local industry is chasing is cypress,” Schulke said, pointing to NSW research showing 120-year-old cypress stands still in whipstick form because cypress regenerates in heavy densities and self-thins only partially, with a mature hardwood market already running on private land closer to the east coast and the western industry now chasing cypress in particular.
The historical work on cypress silviculture is 40 to 50 years old and is straightforward forestry practice, Schulke said, with the practice halted only after DPI Forestry stopped treating forests half a century ago and the question of where the next cohort of timber products will come from is now overdue.
Schulke’s biofuel demand signal mirrors the model already taking shape in Victoria’s Green Triangle, where Wood Central reported HAMR Energy’s $800 million Portland Renewable Fuels facility, now backed by Qantas, Airbus and the Albanese government’s $1.1 billion Cleaner Fuels Program, is converting plantation residues into 300,000 tonnes of low-carbon methanol every year.
“But the big response comes in the next four to five years when you get that better growth in harvestable timber,” Schulke said, with the parallel grazing benefit running through the short-to-medium term as the silviculture reset takes effect.
Australia’s timber import dependence has climbed to 50 per cent, double the share of three decades ago, Schulke told the forum. Last week, Wood Central revealed that Australia now imports more than $3 billion worth of timber from overseas, with China alone supplying $1.318 billion or 43.8 per cent of the total, and the gap is driven by state government decisions to cease or limit native forest logging rather than by any decline in the underlying resource.
Today, Wood Central spoke to Professor Mark Brown, Director of the Australian Forest and Wood Innovations Centre for Sustainable Forestry (AFWICSF) at the University of the Sunshine Coast, who said researchers are now testing the economic models that could finally make silvicultural farm forestry stack up across Queensland cattle country.
The pine plantation estate has plateaued whilst population and demand have climbed, Schulke said. The silviculture argument picked up by University of Queensland economist Dr Tyron Venn — that thinning 16 per cent of Queensland’s remnant native forests, around 300,000 hectares, could double state hardwood log supply from 260,000 to 520,000 cubic metres a year — is now reinforced by the biofuel demand signal that PFSQ says could finally make western country economics stack up.
- To learn more about the opportunities for farm forestry in Queensland’s cattle country, click here to learn more about an AFWI-funded project announced earlier this month.
