This project aimed to provide forest managers with the tools to balance reduced transport costs through natural drying of roadside stocks of biofuel and of logs for chips and other wood products against quality specifications, and increased costs for storage time and processing machinery wear and tear. In order to extract the gains from infield drying, there are a number of changes that need to be made by the Australian forest industry to capitalise on the research. The key changes discussed are:
- Moving from payment on delivered green weight to payment on delivered volume or oven-dry weight.
- Increasing the use of high volumetric capacity trucks, particularly for the transport of dried and infield chipped forest biofuel
- Using the drying models and tools developed in the study to guide planning the storage of logs and forest biofuel, in particular as part of operational planning processes.
Project number: PNC400-1516
