CAN HARVESTING SUBMERGED FORESTS IN GHANA EVER BE A COMMERCIAL SUCCESS?

Implications: Harvesting tropical hardwoods which have been submerged for 40 years may be environmentally beneficial but is this overshadowing the commercial considerations? Three Main Points: 1. Was nothing learned from the abandoned Camaroons pulp mill project that cost investors $250 million dollars? 2. To be commercially successful, logs must be processed - debarked and either sawn, chipped or made into veneer paneling. How will water logged wood respond? 3. Logistics & transportation pose a huge hurdle....how do you haul 100,000#, 6 foot wide logs? 3. Logistics & transportation pose a huge hurdle....how do you haul 100,000#, 6 foot wide logs? 3. Logistics & transportation pose a huge hurdle....how do you haul 100,000#, 6 foot wide logs?

Analysis: Western Africa's forests are filled with a broadly mixed variety of hardwood trees - estimates range from 65 to 80 different species of trees. The density of the wood varies from the "soft"hardwoods like poplar, aspen and cottonwood all the way to the very dense hardwoods like Sugar Maple and Locust. The number and proximity of each species varies considerably with the very real possibility that there may be far fewer desirable species like mahogany, teak and ebony than there are the lower density species (often known as "weed trees"). To be commercially viable,there must be enough of any of the desirable trees to accumulate and offer for sale. To think of offering thousands of trees of mixed species to a sawmill or chip mill (where these chips are bulk loaded and shipped to a pulp mill) would be similar to hosting a dinner party for 15-18 people where the menu consisted of a hundred small one-portion offerings. Sawmills and chip mills are always anxious to process trees of a single species since this allows them to specifically set up all the processing variables and then to offer a uniform product to their customers. So....the first question would be: how many of each species is there and how broadly scattered are they?

The second question would be ease of processing. Sawing waterlogged wood presents a variety of problems never encountered by conventional (drywood) mills. How easy a time will these existing saw/veneer/chip mills find it is to move into position 6 foot in diameter logs weighing as much as 100,000#? Or,will entirely new saw mills have to be built? And, how easy is it to saw through water logged wood? Will the saws wear prematurely or constantly bind unless higher horsepower motors are used?

If these logs go to a "chip mill" huge teeth reduce the whole log to small, beveled-edged chips 3/4" by 1/4" by 1/2". These chips are designed to be cooked in a modern pulp mill that must process as much as 12,000 mt/day of chips in order to produce the pulp mill's expected 3000mt/day production quota of pulp? Will waterlogged chips cook at the same rate as normal chips? Can the pulp mill mix regular chips with the waterlogged chips from these harvested trees, or,must they be kept separate? What a headache this will give any wood yard superintendent or pulp mill manager!

Let's suppose the company (Clark Sustainable Resources) decides to send all the logs to a saw mill for processing into dimension lumber (i.e. 2 x 4s, 2 x 10s) or for peeling into 4 x 8 foot panels? After the wood is cut it must be kiln dried to bring it to the proper residual moisture content. The biggest problem faced today in the kiln drying process is in producing warp-free lumber that will retain its dimensional stability over time. Warped lumber has little or no commercial value and the same goes for 4 x 8 panels. By the time sawmill cut lumber or panels get to kiln drying there is a considerable cost built into the material. Can you imagine the claims that could result when it was found that the cut pieces warped and had to be discarded? That is a risk no legitimate lumber company is willing to take.

Moving on, lets suppose CSR decides to sell the harvested, waterlogged trees to a chip mill that has been located near a deep water port. Of course, this chip mill would have to be designed and built to handle these huge, very heavy logs. Once the logs have been chipped they will be loaded on board dedicated vessels. How much heavier will these chips be than normal (dry) chips? Will the shipping company have to impose a surcharge? Once the chips have been cooked and delignified, what will the fibers be like? Will having been submerged for 40 years do anything to the fiber's strength properties? It has already been found that hardwood fibers with low viscosities (low degree of polymerization) tend to be very slippery and impossible to process across the wet end of a paper machine. Downtime on these huge, high-speed paper machines is figured at tens of thousands of dollars per hour. As with warped dimension lumber, the claims from a paper mill could be enormous.

Finally, there are the lessons learned from the failed Camaroon's project of 25-30 years ago when investors thought it would be hugely profitable to build a market pulp mill and utilize the extensive hardwood forests.

The overriding reason given for the abandonment of this project was logistics. To get from the deep water port to the forests meant building roads. Clearing all the land needed for the wood yard and pulp mill involved much more acreage than was first thought. But...putting in all the logging roads for the giant trucks to haul the felled logs back to the pulp mill proved to be an even greater problem. For one thing the forest kept trying to reclaim the land cleared by the pulp mill builders.

The final straw (the kind that breaks camels' backs) came when they analyzed the fibers in all the various trees. These fibers ranged from very short (0.5mm) to very long (2.5mm), very thin (10-12 microns) to very thick (40 microns), some with very thin walls (which easily collapse) to very thick walls (which make for coarse/grainy papers).

Paper makers greatly appreciate single species pulps like birch, eucalyptus, aspen and acacia. Having all these fibers with all different properties presents a myriad of problems.

To conclude this analysis, it should be reiterated that while the supposed safety and environmental benefits may seem considerable, in our opinion we believe there is little chance this project could ever be consistently profitable over a long period of time. That is, unless some exotic, very forgiving, nontraditional products or applications can be found for all the harvested logs.