At the very least the emissions were going to be released anyway, some in the form of methane, if the materials organically decomposed. Burning it and exploiting the useful heat makes a lot of sense. The major opportunity is to utilise wood wastes where they are concentrated at sawmills. In the production of sawn timber as much as 65 per cent of a log ends up as sawdust, shavings, dockings, slabs and edging, the disposal of which involves a considerable cost to the producer although in some cases, some of the waste is being used to generate process heat for kiln drying. In one rare case, a brick kiln at Kempsey has been operating on wood waste for 15 years, saving millions of litres of distillate in the process.
Wood is used extensively in other countries for electricity and heat production.
In Austria, for instance, wood and wood wastes are supplying an estimated 13 per cent of that country's total energy production. Wood biomass electrical generation capacity in the US has tripled since 1979 to more than 6GWe. The US Department of Energy's National Energy Strategy estimates they will see a further 110 per cent increase in the use of wood energy to 5.8EJ per annum by 2030. In Australia, the rural locations of the forest biomass resource provides opportunities for decentralised power generation to provide the less energy intensive regional sectors such as diary, food processing and abattoir industries with electricity, process heat and chilling. These are not resources left out on the floor of forests, although there are huge quantities left out there, these are wastes already neatly collected at sawmills, all of which are on the grid and, as well as being large electricity users themselves, are often close to other substantial industrial power users.