Will the Materials for Paper Production Compete with Bioenergy?

Paper and bioenergy production, especially wood pellets, use the same raw material, namely wood. Currently, most of the wood pellets in Indonesia and Southeast Asia still use wood wastes such as sawdust as a source of raw material, while paper mills use wood from their own plantations such as acacia forests. With this condition alone, the raw materials for the two types of industries have different paths so that there is no competition. Even the paper industry only uses wood with a large diameter of 8 cm and above so that wood with a small diameter of less than 8 cm can be used for bioenergy production such as charcoal, wood pellets or wood briquette.

The need for paper appear not to have increased much so that paper production tends to be stable, even decreasing. This happened because of the era of information technology so that the use of paper was replaced by electronic media, the use of recycled paper and the recent pandemic conditions. This of course makes the use of wood as a raw material for paper tends to be stable or even reduced. In contrast to bioenergy, especially wood pellets, with the increasing number of biomass, especially wood as renewable energy, the need continues to increase. But the quality of wood needed for wood pellets is also lower than the quality of wood for paper production. The extent of land in Indonesia is also very possible for the production of wood pellets from energy plantations. Indonesia's wood pellet production is currently still small, which is estimated at less than 200 thousand tons per year.

Wood pellet production always uses wood waste or wood worth as wood waste. Log from energy plantations such as calliandra and gliricidia is cheap wood worth the wood waste so that it can be used for the production of the wood pellets. The high productivity of wood is the main goal for this energy plantation, even the energy plantation relies on coppice to maximize wood production from energy plantations. Another advantage of energy plantations or biomass plantations is that they can be integrated with livestock businesses, for more details, please read here. Whereas wood for paper production always uses gardens or timber forests such as acacia or eucalyptus. This is what makes the material needs for paper and bioenergy, especially wood pellets, not compete with each other. Whereas in countries like Canada that use the same type of wood, namely pine for paper and wood pellet production, indeed when a drastic increase for wood pellets, competition for wood with raw materials for paper is inevitable. Canada is currently one of the world's top producers of wood pellets with a production capacity of 3.9 million tons per year.