Big tech is now responsible for swallowing more than 10 per cent of all mass timber produced across the United States, with Microsoft, Amazon and Meta the main drivers in a trade in timber which, according to a recent USDA-led study, could grow 25-to-40-fold to 2070, climbing from 0.362 million cubic metres in 2020 to potentially up to 15 million cubic metres every year by 2070.
That is according to The potential use of mass timber in mid-to high-rise construction and the associated carbon benefits in the United States, a seven-author PLOS ONE paper led by Dr Prakash Nepal, research economist at the US Forest Service’s Forest Products Laboratory.
Nepal’s framework combines five shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs) adopted from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change with four mass timber adoption trajectories and three building-height bands, and models them across four US regions from 2020 to 2070.
And to calibrate each trajectory, researchers used oriented strand board’s 1990s diffusion curve as their starting parameter set, scaled it with existing cross-laminated timber adoption data, and then passed the outputs through a life-cycle assessment that captured both biogenic carbon storage in buildings and avoided embodied carbon from substituting steel and concrete.
Under the central SSP2 “middle-of-the-road” case, the United States adds 1,872 million square metres of cumulative new multifamily residential and nonresidential floor area across the 2020-2070 window, or 37.45 million square metres a year. Under the high-growth SSP5 pathway, that figure climbs to 2,514 million square metres cumulative and 50.28 million square metres a year, with nonresidential construction accounting for roughly five-sixths of the total across all SSPs tested.
The mass timber share of that new construction is where the paper’s drama lies, with the Nepal team tracing adoption trajectories from near-zero in 2010 to 17 per cent, 62 per cent, and 95 per cent of new mid-to-high-rise construction, respectively, by 2070 under high adoption. The most aggressive share is in the seven-storey-and-higher category, where the researchers model mass timber essentially displacing steel and concrete in new construction entirely.
Translated to timber volumes via the paper’s use factors of 0.24 to 0.33 cubic metres of mass timber per square metre of floor area, low-adoption annual US demand reaches 2.6 to 4.7 million cubic metres by 2070, the medium and high-adoption scenarios deliver 4.1 to 9.3 million cubic metres, and the 100 per cent or ceiling scenario pushes cumulative consumption to between 452 million and 750 million cubic metres with annual volumes as high as 15 million cubic metres. The range represents a 25-to-40-fold lift on the 0.362 million cubic metre starting baseline.
The American South accounts for 43 per cent of ceiling-scenario demand, followed by the West at 23 per cent, the Midwest at 21 per cent, and the Northeast at 13 per cent. The concentration tracks with existing Southern supply-chain capacity and the region’s projected share of new commercial floor area, with the seven-storey-and-higher band expected to carry the majority of high-volume demand in the form of data centres, warehouses and mixed-use towers.
Across every adoption scenario, four-storey-and-higher multifamily residential and nonresidential buildings could add between 4 and 20 per cent to current US harvested wood products carbon sequestration, equivalent to between 9.9 and 16.5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide stored or avoided a year at the top of the range. More than 78 per cent of that benefit comes from biogenic carbon locked into long-lived mass timber components, with the balance delivered through avoided embodied carbon by substituting for steel and concrete.
The authors conclude that removing current market and policy constraints could multiply those carbon gains well beyond the ceiling scenario, with the projection holding US building code settings constant from the 2021 International Building Code revision that permitted mass timber up to 18 storeys. “It would be possible to increase carbon benefits fivefold,” the Nepal team writes.
The Nepal trajectory has been overtaken on the demand side by corporate procurement, with Big Tech alone absorbing more than 10 per cent of current US mass timber output, as Wood Central reported from the Portland conference floor through TimberBLDR USA Mass Timber Director Vittorio Salvadori at the 10th International Mass Timber Conference. Meta told the keynote the company is “completing million-plus-square-foot facilities” on timelines typically reserved for custom single-family homes, with Microsoft’s CLT-sandwich data centre in Northern Virginia establishing the commercial template Amazon and Meta have now scaled across their respective portfolios.
Meta’s 14-node Project Tropical network uses 1.5 million board feet of glulam and cross-laminated timber, with the company rolling out mass timber across campuses in Aiken, South Carolina, Cheyenne, Wyoming and Montgomery, Alabama and citing a 41 per cent embodied carbon cut for its administrative buildings. Amazon’s 1.7-million-square-foot Project Maverick logistics hub in Texas runs the same playbook, with the company’s DII5 delivery station in Elkhart, Indiana, now the first large-scale owner-occupied mass timber logistics facility in the United States.
On the supply side, Portland-based Timberlab, one of the country’s largest mass timber fabricators, is operating CNC fabrication plants in Portland, Oregon, and Greenville, South Carolina, alongside a new 250,000-square-foot cross-laminated timber facility, designed, according to President Chris Evans, “to remove pinch points in the mass timber industry.”
- For more information: Nepal, P., Prestemon, J. P., Ganguly, I., Kumar, V., Bergman, R. D., Poudyal, N. C., & Carswell, A. T. (2024). The potential use of mass timber in mid-to high-rise construction and the associated carbon benefits in the United States. PLOS ONE, 19(3), e0298379. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0298379
