Forestry Now

[gentle music] Welcome to Forestry Now, where we explore the forces impacting profitable and sustainable management of commercial forests and natural woodlands. I'm Dermot McNally. Today, I speak with Kenny McAuley from McAuley Wood Fuels Limited, who are based near Mohill in County Leitrim. The business began processing and supplying firewood, but evolved and now produces moisture-controlled wood chip. So in this conversation, Kenny explains how the business now works, how biomass forms a vital cog in the Irish forestry supply chain, the processing system he uses, and the machinery and technology involved. Kenny's also a Nuffield scholar for 2026, so we discuss what he'll be studying and what the Nuffield involves. As always, links in the show notes below. Contact me at forestrynowpodcast@gmail.com, and enjoy the chat. Kenny, thanks very much for joining me.

Thanks very much, Dermot.

Maybe you'd give us a very quick overview of how you went from the firewood business and now on into biomass. What pushed you to move that one step on?

It was a, by accident as much as design, at, at least in the earlier days. After we had been running on firewood and, and had gone down that road, there was one year in particular, it was probably around '07, '08, at that time we were buying m- predominantly deadwood from, I think a lot of it was coming from Northern Ireland. And there was just, there was a batch of material had come in that it was quite dozed. Um, we- it would have been very presentable going out as firewood to customers. And at the time, we had a very small disc wood chipper, and we tried running some of it through it, um, to see just what, what we could do with it, honestly, as waste material. The targeted market at the time for that type of material would've been animal bedding. So we started there at the, at the livestock bedding, primarily around that for the first couple of years, and by about 2010, it was just by the luck of the, luck of the draw that we got connected up with Aurigna Fuels. At that time, we had been supplying kind of on and off some smaller boilers, particularly in the poultry sector over around Mayobrid. It was on and off, and we would've struggled a lot with quality in the ear- in, in the earlier years especially, uh, because we just didn't have the scale to be able to buffer it. When we did get rolling maybe a couple years in on chipping with Aurigna, they had, again, a robust system. It gave fairly good flexibility in what we could deliver in terms of quality to them, and that allowed us to stretch our legs and, I suppose, essentially get to know our trade, build up stock. D- and we were paid then based on quality, so it was a fair system both sides and, and, and they had the capability to consume that material. That started opening the floodgates just, just to grow.

Yeah, brilliant. Okay, so Aurigna were able to work with different moisture contents effectively and pay you, pay you accordingly. That's it, basically?

Exactly, yeah. Yeah, so we, e- each s- each delivery was sampled, so a couple of representative samples, um, the moisture w- was then, and then the quality of that was taken in their lab, and then we were paid according to that. So they were paying for what they got, and it allowed us good headroom and, and tolerance bands so as to get to know what we were doing. You know, in the, in the winter months it was a challenge, in the summer months it was easy. Especially in the earlier days when we were just doing kind of a traditional air-drying method, stock rotation and stock quantity was the key thing to managing that quality. But it takes significant cash reserves to get to that point where you have sufficient stock behind you. And from an SME starting really from the ground up from zero to, to get to a point where not only have you, essentially, 12 months stock of someone's fuel ahead of you, your process, plus you have whatever credit terms you have with them, it's a, it's a difficult place to get to without external backing.

Okay. Well, you did it. Let's now talk about how the business works itself nowadays. So you've, you had a couple of years of development. Let's start off with who you supply at the minute, and what your target moisture content is, uh, for the product you're supplying to them.

In the earlier years it would've been what you could class maybe more industrial, larger scale systems that would accept a higher moisture, a cruder biomass in general. Over time, that has evolved as a new market, has kind of grown gradually over time, particularly since maybe 2019 on the back of the support scheme for renewable heat, the SSRH, that's administered by SEAI. That was a step change where there was an uptake of new smaller scale boilers coming onto the market. They've been particularly successful in the poultry sector, but really any sector where you have a reasonably high, consistent heat demand. Poultry sector's a very good example of that, but so is hotels or swimming pools, mushroom, pig units. That market was emerging, and we probably tried to pursue that because it suited our profile of operation better. We've grown to a point now where we're up to about 22 sites we're, we're serving at the moment. They're predominantly in the agri sector, and, uh, those boilers, like the systems, they typically range from, say w- 150 kilowatts up to 500 kilowatts. That, that's the typical. But we are also serving some sites in that band that is up to, say, 1.5 megawatts. But in parallel to that, we still do the industrial lower grade stuff. We still do some contract work, but it's probably less of the day-to-day now. At the moment we're serving three hotels, two of them relatively locally. I suppose the commonality between those three is they're relatively large hotels, older buildings, or at least two of them are, and they all have swimming pools or like a thermal suite. Um, one of them has an outdoor pool. So where we operate there as, or how the wood chip, the, the biomass fuel operates is it's very good as a base load. So right through the summertime they're very consistent. So, like I suppose the largest one in that situation, they're taking a delivery of, of say 20 ton walking floor delivery every five days, and they'll be like that right through the summerThe poultry's farms, um, would be quite different. They obviously run, say, as, uh, their, their heating will be running when the batch of birds are in. You know, typically a six-week cycle. They would demand more heat in the earlier weeks and then they taper off. Some of those farms could be taking three deliveries per batch of chickens over that six-week period, others might only be taking one. You, you, some weeks you get heavy overlap, other weeks you don't. And also different weather profiles will affect different users differently. So wind might, we find might affect, would drive poultry house heat more. We can guess that based on, on how their demand of fuel is, whereas the hotels seem to be more just cold weather as opposed to wind. So different weather profiles will affect them, uh, as well. But there's, o- other agri, mushroom as well is, is pretty consistent, pig units are quite consistent. There are also some, say, seaweed drying facilities, which is maybe more of a novel use but is a very good application of, of wood chip as well.

What moisture content are you talking about for those 22 key customers? What are you delivering out at?

We're targeting between 20 and 25. Again, as I, sort of as I mentioned, in the earlier days we were natural air drying, so it was like claws in the line and you were at the mercy of, of the weather or mercy of God. Some years you get on very well, other years you're, you're struggling. You're constantly apologizing for moisture not being where it needs to be, and it's a delicate balancing act for, as we're trying to grow and, and get more output but not undermine your quality. In the last, say, five, six years, we moved towards a mechanical drying system. So we run that in, in parallel because we probably had some site constraints where we, we felt that we, we couldn't expand and, and meet any more market demand with the natural air drying. Particularly where we are in situation of the country as well in, in, in the northwest, you know, we, we wouldn't have as good a drying conditions as the southeast, say, for example. And like that as well, you could get a, a, a bad year where, where drying was, was very poor. But on top of all that, having a mechanical drying system would allow us guarantee a quality to, to the customer and, and have much better control over that. So since moving to that, and I suppose upgrading even that system within itself, we have moisture, uh, reading apparatus and sensors on that. We've temperature sensors fitted to it. We have it fed back into a, a, a small Arduino board, and we're constantly pumping that data. Every 30 seconds it's uploaded to the cloud. It pings us if it increases beyond certain, say, a 25% moisture content or if it drops below 20. We can adjust settings on the machine then that keeps us within that band. As well as that, if there's any issues with a batch, say, a, a month after a delivery has been made and a customer had a query on a load or if there was an issue, we can then reference back and say, "Well, this is the batch from here that was dried at that time. This is the, the, the moisture content, and this is what was experienced at the time." So it gives us confidence then to say, "Well, our fuel isn't, isn't the issue." We were able to, to track on the dryer what our moisture is and keep us within that band of 20 to 25% moisture.

And how does that compare with your industrial-grade chip then? Where, where does it go out at as a rough estimate?

Generally, we're probably up around 45, and if, that would be, uh, say, how the different strands would be where we are chipping from, directly from a stack of, of pulp or logs that have come into the yard pre-drying. At the moment, we typically take in pulp wood, we stack it,

uh, for maybe three to four months. It's then chipped and goes through the dryer. We will have some wood chip or some logs that could be in the yard for maybe 12, 18 months even, and that brings it down to s- say, 20, 25% moisture content naturally. That's there, I suppose, as a backup and to supplement the, the drying system, uh, at peak, at periods of peak demand. But the industrial material would be coming from pulp that would be in the yard, say, three, four months, chipped, and goes out direct. So it would suit very different systems.

Okay. Well, look at why are those customers choosing biomass then, wood chip, over oil or other heating methods? You mentioned the SSRH incentive. Did, did they get a bit of money, I, I'm thinking, to install the boiler?

Y- yes and all. It's, it's a support s- scheme. It's a, it's a tariff that's fed back to the user. The user gets, I believe, it's quarterly payments based on their meter reading. So as part of install, a heat meter will be installed on the system specific to the wood chip output or the biomass output. It could be pellets or, I believe, it could be biogas as well. But that will quantify the amount of heat the boiler's putting out, and the user is then paid a, a tariff based on that. So the, the entry point, uh, of that is it's about 5.66 cents per kilowatt hour, and then as your heat output will increase, that tapers off. So that could be in the first, say, 300 megawatts of heat output. You went to 3 to 500, it'll be a lower rate. I think it's a good system. It's a very good tariff. It's at a good price point, and it's well-structured. You know, where the system, it can't really be abused, and it targets, I suppose, a sweet spot where it might be more difficult for a, a user to justify biomass. But as that customer, if it is a bigger customer, as opposed to the attitude is they probably should be looking at biomass anyways regardless of a support scheme because the fuel savings are there to justify the CapEx on that system. And that ultimately is the reason why users would look at, say, wood chip biomass, the cost saving, the fuel cost savings.

How does it compare then, Kenny, if you're a, a big hotel just using off gas, we'll say, or traditional oil?

We should be at least half the cost, if not a third or even less at any time on, on fuel deliveries at least. So from a fuel point of view, like at the moment we're probably maybe 4, 4 and a half cents per kilowatt hour of fuel, but it's, it's gonna be at least three times that today. It would be significantly lower than what oil or gas would be.

And that's after the tariff is balanced into the equation?

That's totally before the tariff is balanced inSo tariff is only for, for a 15-year period, and it's to, to nurture and foster that in the earlier years to get you up and going. There is additional cost with biomass in terms of maintenance. There might- it's a mechanical system, there might be parts required, you know, in, in years to come. So it's not just as simple as the tariff is to cover the fuel. There is more cost associated with running it, but you have huge fuel savings.

Yeah. Perfect. Okay. And then where are you certified and what standards do you operate then on your high-grade wood chip?

We're Wood Fuel Quality Assurance Scheme certified, so the WFQA. I suppose it's, it's managed under the umbrella of Irish Bioenergy Association, and it is, it's administered by that group. We would've been one of the earlier certified suppliers. I- w- probably of, of those certified at the moment, w- we'd be the earliest that's currently certified. Um, so I suppose we've seen the benefit of it and having come from a, a firewood background as well, where it was, there was probably a couple years of, you know, being a bit of the Wild West in terms of standards and guys doing it for short periods of time just for a bit of money on the side. We've seen a world without standards, and that's why we felt it was very important to have the standards there, and, uh, we've always been a huge advocate for that. And the Wood Fuel Quality Assurance, I suppose, it's, it's an industry-led certification scheme,

and it gives us a standard. We, we're doing these practices anyways. You know, what it, what it looks for is, you know, I suppose the pillars of it would be sustainability and quality. So sustainability from sourcing of raw material, that we're not causing deforestation or, or, or taking in illegally felled timber or, or causing greater environmental negatives than, than we would always would. And then on the quality side, it's the moisture tracking and making sure that we're putting a product onto the market. So they're the two things that we're really watched on and audited on. So there's an independent audit once a year where the auditor will look at, well, they'll go through all our chain of custody documentation, so the delivery dockets, the felling license. So for each batch of material, you know, we know where it came from. There's a mass balance saying, "Okay, this amount come in. You consumed this much in your own system, and this is what went to the customers." That closes the loop in, in terms of, you know, what we're sourcing is coming off the market appropriately or coming off the forestry side appropriately. On top of that then, going out to the end customers, we have our moisture testing and recording all the results there going back, and we're able to pinpoint everything, you know, on each d- individual load. We've all our, our chain of custody documentation out for the wood chip going out to the individual customers. And that then feeds onto the SSRH. So if you have an SSRH system, and we're billing our fuel, all our Wood Fuel Quality Assurance Scheme certification details is listed on that. So when SEI audit the fuel user then, they're able to say, "Okay, well, this material came from this supplier. This is the tons." And that's essentially linked right back the whole way to the forest where it was grown.

That, that kind of means that w- the total amount that you're putting up should match what your customer is claiming you supplied them.

Exactly. And that's audited. I think users upload all that, that detail to, to the SEI portal, I believe it's quarterly, and that's, that's what closes the loop then. So if from a sustainability point of view, the material is, is correctly sourced, and from a quality point of view, the moisture testing results from all our loads are listed on, on the delivery docket as well. So they're able to say, "Not only that X load went in at this stage, but it was this moisture, therefore this moisture should have had this much energy." That should then correlate to your, uh, meter reading on your boiler. So they can really, really pinpoint it down. They would know if there was an extra load had been delivered in a period that was unaccounted for. It creates a scenario where if a supplier, say you're a, a poultry farm and you have your own forestry, and you want to cut the timber or, or you're thinning, you have pulp, you want to air dry it, chip it yourself, um, you, the only way you can supply your own fuel into your system is if you, there's like a, a, a mini quality assurance cert that you can get with WFQA where you can kind of self-certify your own material, and that will, will pass for SEI. But unless you have that, you, you can't take material in from a local tree surgeon or something.

Yeah. Yeah, no, very good. Okay. Well, look at, let's now talk a little bit more detail about the raw material that you're chipping itself. Who you getting it from? What grades of timber you're using? Are you using a mix of hardwood and softwood? So maybe, maybe talk a bit about that.

Big picture, we, we consume any forest biomass material. We're essentially agnostic in terms of, of species type. We can consume hardwood, softwood, even short rotation like the likes of willow. But we're predominantly consuming what's coming from the commercial forestry sector. I wouldn't see it as a, as a driver for forestry. It's, it's part of a healthy forest cycle. It promotes wood management, uh, practices in earlier stages and formative years of forest growth. So it, it provides a market at thinning stages, like cashflow. Even though it mightn't be a high-value product that, that a forest grower will be selling in terms of pulpwood, it's, it's better than nothing, and it, it gives some market to cover costs incurred at, at a thinning stage. So it supports better forest management. So from that point of view, what we end up receiving is commercial forest pulpwood. And species-wise, because of, of, I suppose, where we're located and the, the forest, commercial forest sector that's there, it's predominantly Sitka spruce. Although at the moment, just like in the last few days, we see a lot of larch coming in. We've seen hemlock coming in previously. You would see pines. But by and large it's, it's Sitka spruce.

Okay. And, um, here's a question. If I was bringing you a load of softwood, or for whatever reason, bringing you a load of hardwood, would the burning quality of the hardwood end up being better than a wood chip load of softwood? And how do you mix all those different species? Or is it a kinda case that 90% is Sitka or Norway, so it's a kind of irrelevant?

It's generally irrelevant, uh, because I suppose w- we're rolling on averages and it, there's such a vast majority of sitka. Our pines, everything else is so diluted within that, it doesn't really matter, and it's pretty much unnoticed. Now we would see larch might perform a little bit better, but not from a forestry technical point of view, and I, I wouldn't be as in, you know, up to speed with specific species and their, their individual properties as, as, as a forester would. But from a, I suppose a, a boiler and a technical point of view, we would see larch would perform a little bit better. Hardwood maybe the same, but m- so marginal, I, I don't think even boiler operators would, would, would even realize it. On a ton per ton basis, there is as, as near as makes no difference all the same.

Yeah. Very good. Okay. Okay. You're putting all of your, uh, timber that's coming in through the chipper. I suppose then you have to be careful about what comes in on the loads. Is there dirt? Is the, is, is much of it contaminated in that sense, or is there rubbish? Is that an issue for you with what's coming in off the Irish forests that are supplying you?

It's something we have to be conscious of. It's probably a legacy attitude towards pulp in particular, whereas in years gone by it, it would've been seen as a waste material and then as a low-value material, and you'd often see where, you know, as well when it's, it's, it's often the last material that leaves a forest site. It could tend to have rubbish and contamination and foreign objects accumulated in it, and in the past it could have been careless machine operators in the woods. Now I, I would say in, in the years we've been working this space, I think that attitude has changed. There's definitely less material from, from that stream coming in, but you, you still end up getting foreign objects by accident. You know, you, you, you could get stone, you could get, you know, a bit of, of metal. So it's something we always have to be conscious of.

Okay. And then the loads are coming in on standard forestry haulage trailers. I presume that it's the vast majority of is, is very straight. If it's straight enough to go on the load, you can chip it. There's no issue there, is there?

From an air drying point of view, if we're stacking stuff in stacks, we're nearly looking for stuff as crooked as possible because you get more air through it, and it'll dry quicker and dirt will, will, will fall out of it quicker. We would've seen a few very straight material, and you'd especially see it, as is mentioned earlier, you know, you could have a cleanup job in the site where there's a y- a couple of lifts of saw log and there could be a couple of lifts of

stake or pallet, and then you've pulp to finish off the load. You could have just all the material in one stack. The pulp will have air-dried reasonably well, as we would expect, you know, in, in a given timeframe for pulp. The stake beside it could be pretty much as wet as the day it came in because it's sitting so tightly together. If there's any muck or debris around the logs, they're sitting there damp. There's just no airflow getting through it. Whereas if you get nice misshapen pulp, you'll get good airflow through it, and it'll perform well. So it... I won't say the crooker the better, but in general if, with pulp it's never a problem. I- if it's stake and pallet and saw log, we would actually tend to try and take that out of a stockpile, chip it as soon as it comes in or, or near enough to it, and just, just pass through the system and, and, I don't want to say get rid of it, but, you know, just it, it's only taking up space then. It's not performing in, in an air drying scenario for us.

And what, yeah, you could, you could leave a load of saw log or stake wood i- in a pile for 12 months, and it's not really gonna perform, uh, from an air point of view or drying, so you're, it's defying the point of having it there.

E- exactly. And like, again, it, it can come down to species, too, and maybe there, there, there is some outliers there. We've seen interesting ones [laughs] in the past. We've, we've had poplar come in at, at some stages, and you could see six or nine months into a stockpile in poplar, it could still be growing in a stack. It'll have grown shoots and be starting to sprout again. That's a devil to try and, to try and air dry. To be honest, it probably doesn't make the nicest of chip either, so thankfully we don't see too much of that coming through.

Yeah. Very good. Okay. And then do you chip any brush, before we move off that topic?

Very little. We, we have done in the past, and I'm sure we will do ad hoc into the future. We're not really set up for it. It's, it's only if we kinda have to do it, to, to be honest.

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Kenny, d- you have a, a large yard there, and you store a lot of your loads that are starting to air-dry there beside you. At times, do you try and negotiate with the forest owner to leave some of that pulp drying on their site for as long as you can just to save your own m- maybe logistics and, and moving stuff around a tight yard?

There is an element of that, and it, it probably has come to the fore in the last 12 months on the back of, of last year's storm. Every year brings its own challenges and, and new learnings. Last year's learnings was trying to manage stock and keep stuff moving, and, like, we're conscious we're part of the supply chain, and we want to keep material coming in, uh, particularly from suppliers that's sort of we're loyal to and they're loyal to us. We're essentially were bursting at the seams there for the last 12 months because of the volume of material that, that's been on the, on the market and, and coming in, and par- particularly in the northwest region, which probably was harder hit, say, than, than other parts of the country, although it was very countrywide. So there is scenarios now at the moment where we, we have pulp bought, but it is in forest sites because we just simply don't have space for it in the yard.But that would be probably more refined to locations that is, is closer to us, and it might be sites that might suit processing on site. So our chipping equipment is mobile, and we can move it to a forest site, and we could process it there and draw it into ourselves as chip, which also helps our logistics piece on the logs.

Kenny, just on that, if you have loads of pulp, we'll say lying in a forest, and it's, it's, it's five miles from, from Mohill, and you take the chipper across to it and you chip it, does that reduce the number of haulage loads from the forest? I mean, the, do you end up having less haulage back to Mohill rather than taking lots of bulky, volume-y, uh, loads of sawlog?

As in truck movements?

Yeah, truck movements.

Uh, it, it could po- potentially. When the material is, is fresh, if it's, if it's wet, we would probably hit max weight on a walk-on floor truck before the truck was full.

Whereas if the material has air dried, uh, down to, say into the 20s, we would hit maximum volume on the truck. So if the material is dry and we are chipping it into a walk-on floor, you could end up with less truck movements, but marginally so. It would only be on a really big site where you could have, you know, many, many truck movements where you might notice one or two less.

And excuse my ignorance here, is there a different weight limit on the chipped loads as regards to the pulp loads?

No. Weight, weight limits are the same. The, the, the only one where we might see if, if you had maybe a double handling site where, you know, there might be a weight restriction o- on trucks going in, sometimes it could be handier. We've done sites where we're going in with tractors and silage trailers. We're staying within the weight limit on that road. We're able to mobilize and move material a little bit quicker. But again, it's location specific. We would do that where it's closer to us.

If something is cut in the forest today, you will want it to air dry for a minimum period before you bring it anywhere near your chipper or before you dry it, I suppose is the key part there.

Y- yeah, and different sites, it's different. Different forest owners and different hu- harvesting contractors, we don't necessarily dictate that. In some cases, we could benefit from it sitting in the forest a little bit longer. You're talking maybe, you know, a couple of weeks. Often there's more of a focus on the higher value products, your sawlog, your pallet, and pulp is, is, you know, many times the, the last to leave. So we probably benefit a bit from that. You really only benefit in the summer months, say like from, from now until September. Wintertime it's not really going to dry that much, especially in a forest site, and especially if it's a thinning site. You're not gonna have a lot of air flow through it. If the, the truck turn table and stacking areas on a clear fell site up on the side of a hill, it will obviously perform a lot better than, than a thinning site in a, down in a hollow somewhere. You, you might be better off moving that material sooner rather than later. If it is left there for a long period of time, we've seen in the past it, it can start to deteriorate and, and, and rot quite quickly, quicker than you'd expect.

In the wintertime, is there much air drying then at all on a, on a load that has come into the yard?

When it comes into us, no. It's very de- weather dependent. So 2026 so far from New Year up until, I suppose, halfway through April, it was, it was quite wet. Our air drying would have performed a lot less than last year at the same time. Summer months it would, would perform quite well. We would be keen to, I suppose, have our stockpile coming in, say, end of spring, early summer, and that would be our, our main stockpile for the winter months. It works well coming off, you know, in a, in a normal year. Last year probably was an abnormal year after the storm. We, we, we, the stockpile had, was, was completely full in the yard all year round. But on a typical year, we're kinda ramping down April, May. The stock is, is, has dwindled, and we're replenishing that stock for the, for the next season to kick off kind of in September. This year's been the first year we've been jammed all year. It brings its own challenges logistically. To be honest from a small business point of view or from a cashflow position, you know, you're, you're juggling that as well. On the other hand, the positive of it is you have a great stockpile heading into the next year. It'll probably reduce our mechanical drying needs next year. So what we're probably paying now, we'll save in 12 months' time.

Yeah, you have to look at the long picture. Okay. So your, your material is chipped, and on average how long does it lie in the yard before it goes into the mechanical dryer if it's going to be dried?

We can vary that. So again, in a typical scenario, we would try and let it sit there for about four months, chip it when it's maybe, say, 40, 45% moisture, run it through the drying system then, and we feel that that gives us kinda best output in terms of speeds in the dryer, inputs, temperature, air flow. And also, I suppose ease of chipping as well comes into it. We find if the material is drier, it can lead to marginally increased maintenance on the chipper. If it's very wet, we might lose some quality on the particle sizing on the chip. So again, just the way we are s- happen to have kind of evolved and set ourselves up, we find that's a sweet spot. However, there is anomalies outside of that. So if we see a slow week coming, and we, we tend to have kind of a week to two weeks of a projection ahead of, of what boilers are going to be needing fuel. Say we're coming off the back of three very busy weeks, which has been quite untypical for April. We'd normally be starting to ramp down, but we're heading into May. We can foresee the next week is going to be a little bit slower. So what we'll do is we'll chip probably wetter material ahead of that. We'll have wet chip, pre-dryer, up to maybe 50%.So the dryer run a little bit slower with less productivity, but we don't need that productivity on a slow week. We can adjust. We work on a, a harder week on the dryer when we don't need it, and we conserve better material for a week where we really need to, really need to open the taps and get material moving.

It kind of, you know, it's the idea of the orchestra here. Kenny, you're, you're mixing a lot of different things that maybe aren't entirely obvious to someone who's just looking in and saying-

Yes

... he takes in pulp, he fires it through that machine, he heats it, he turns it into cash. There's, there's a lot of different little, lot of little bits of fine-tuning. You're able to deal with the peaks and the troughs, keep the business flowing in a way that suits yourselves, you know?

There's, there's a huge amount of variables. I suppose the biggest variable is, is, is going to be weather, and it, it obviously follows a trend from, from time y- across time of year. But because biomass is, it's a volume game, it's a low-margin volume game, and it's, it's, you know, it's, it's like agriculture, it's like forestry in that regard. The cycles are long, so we make a change today, it could be 12 months before we see the result of that. But because of all that, it's a delicate balancing act. We're trying to maintain a set moisture to our customers. Stability is very important to them, the nature of their businesses, which I suppose we have to be very sympathetic to. So quality, stability, and commercial stability is important to them. Maximizing all that and the margin consideration on our side, that it is a low-margin game, we have to maximize every efficiency we can to sustain ourselves.

Yeah, very good. There was a part that you, uh, explained to me before, and I think it's worth explaining to listeners here. Your dryer, your mechanical dryer is electrical, but it has its own boiler built in. You burn your own wood fuel within it to, to really reduce your use of electricity. So maybe you just talk about what percentage of your own chip that you effectively put back in to keeping your own costs down.

It's a mechanical bed dryer. It would be something that you would see in a anaerobic digestion industry for drying digestate. Because it's a mechanical system, there's an electrical demand in terms of the conveying systems within that. However, the, the main electrical consumer is the fan, so the air fan that drives the warm air up under the floor through the bed of material. That's our single largest consumer of electricity. But overall, our electricity demand relative to the output is quite small. We've a kind of a very steady electrical demand of about 20 kilowatt hours, so it's not major. Our biggest energy input on the dryer is thermal. We need something to create the hot air to blow through the bed of chip. To achieve the hot air, we use a, a, a biomass boiler ourselves. It's a 500-kilowatt biomass boiler. So for, say, 20 kilowatts of electricity input, with 500 kilowatts thermal going into it. And to fuel that boiler, we consume our own material. Obviously, wood, wood dryer raw material, we pass that through the boiler then. To some, that might not make sense, but when you look at, I suppose, the parasitic load that we're consuming of our own output, it's very small. So I would say typically across the year, about 5% on average of our own output is consumed in our process. It's a little bit full circle in that regard, but it gives us very good autonomy and I suppose cost insulation from external factors on the market. To be honest, it's the only technology we could run on to drive the dryer. There's loads of different technologies in the, in the renewable space or, you know, that aren't reliant on fossil fuels. You know, you could look at something like a heat pump to drive the dryer. You could get enough thermal output in terms of kilowatts. We could get enough temperature out of a heat pump, but the commercials of it doesn't stack up. Wood chip is that much cheaper for us to run on. And again, because of the margins that we're dealing with, wood chip biomass is the, is the only fuel. If, if we didn't have that, we'd be out of business.

Yeah, very good. Okay. We'll move on just to the delivery radius. Again, you're talking about low-margin business. Is there a point at which it, it doesn't make cost-effective sense to deliver a load of high-quality wood chip to Cork? Or do you have a radius of two hours that really beyond that it, it starts to increase the unit cost too much, or can you deliver as competitively as anyone else anywhere in Ireland?

It's case specific. We've two sides of it here, I suppose, on the, with the log side. Our main diet is pulp. We source that predominantly from private sector forestry in the northwest region, so Leeds and surrounding counties. And it's usually within maybe an hour, hour and a half's traveling distance because at that stage, we're dealing with fresh pulp or reasonably fresh pulp. The load weights are averaging 27 tons. It's a low-value product at that stage. It's not cost-effective, so the cost of transport relative to the value of the product and its, and its physical properties, it doesn't lend itself well to moving at much of a further distance. However, with wood chip, we've it dried. You know, it's, it's a refined biomass product at that stage. Its value is much higher. We're moving a bigger volume, but our weight is lower because it's dry. We can afford to move that a much further distance. And then add that to opportunities for back loads and truck logistics in general, and we deal with a, with a number of subcontract haulage companies. It gives much more bandwidth to how far we can go. So the furthest we are supplying at the moment, or the furthest boiler that, that's running on our fuel is in Cork, but that is an outlier. The main band, I suppose, would be across the central belt of the country, so from Dublin right across to, to Galway, uh, and down as far as South Kildare and up as far as the border. So that central belt would be really where, where we're operating. So yeah, it depends on, on what product it is that you're moving.

Okay. And just then on future growth for the biomass business, are you more limited by processing speed of your chipper or your mechanical drying, or is it customer demand? Because if, if I had three new hotels in the morning and I came to Kenny-How quick can you get me the stuff? Where's your bottleneck if you wanted to double the size of your turnover, we'll say?

Our drying output is linked to customer demand. You could say kind of bought with us as a bottleneck. We do tend to take on extra customers every year as a gradual growth, but we can only really take on three to four new boilers a year. And it's, it's not like going out buying oil where, or at least we don't see it as, say, if we were going to buy an oil, you could be priced to a number of different suppliers and you could go with one today and one tomorrow. I'm sure wood chip customers or biomass customers are pricing around to see who's most competitive to serve their site. Because there's probably less suppliers on the market, they would tend to stay with you on an ongoing basis. They will shuffle around from time to time, but you could have someone who you're supplying this year, they might go for a year, but they could come back to you and go again. Comes down to commercials on a specific site. But there isn't that many customers coming on stream where we're going to get a deluge of 10 extra customers this year. So a- again, because it's regional specific as well, you know, we're, we're not really pitching at the whole country here, while we've capability of it. There is suppliers, you know, in, in other parts of the country that will be more competitive in that part of the country. So, you know, we would generally only see two to four new boilers coming, coming to us each year, which we have capacity to absorb, which is say stockpiles of dry pulp. So we, we can take them on, depends on the size of the customer. Our drying capacity tends to be linked to that, and we would have some lead-in to a supplier coming on stream so we can ramp that up and ramp it back. It doesn't just happen overnight. So they're kind of linked, but our chipping capacity is, is much higher. Probably over-mechanizing that space just for redundancy purposes and backup and ability to match peak in demands on a given week. So for instance, our average dry output is two truckloads per day. That's what it has been for April, and April would, would usually be tapering off and getting a little bit slower, but we've managed that across April this month. So dry output is two per day. Our chipping output, we could be up to 15 per day.

Wow, okay.

So there, we've vastly more capacity on the chipping side, and I suppose if I'm honest, we're probably underutilizing the industrial piece. But I suppose the main industrial market for us would either be Masonite on our doorstep or Eden Dairy in County Offaly, and certain market conditions and price points and logistics kind of hamper us at certain stages for those. We could do more into those situations, but we don't because I suppose the value isn't there.

And, and what about the animal bedding, just before we move on to Nuffield then? Do you still do a little bit for that market?

We do, and we do it on an ongoing basis. So the volumes of it is, they're generally negligible compared to the fuel. They're very ad hoc. They're maybe more niche areas where, you know, they're once a year and the volumes, it's, it's just kind of fallen away.

Yeah, okay. Well, look it, that tails us up nicely for future plans because you're looking at options and you're thinking about what you can do in this space, and now that brings us to your application. You've been accepted as a, a Nuffield scholar for 2026. Maybe start off, Kenny, and tell us what your chosen study topic is.

I was very fortunate and, or for 2026 to be accepted as a, as a Nuffield scholar, where I put forward my chosen research topic as mobilizing forest biomass, its use in renewable heat, and its future opportunities arose into wider bio economy. I suppose within that, what I wanted to look at was a s- state of play of where mobilization is, where we are situated in the country. I suppose we'd see a lot of private sector forestry that would have maybe in the past been, you know, you're talking about sites that are planted in the worst part of the land, in the furthest corner, and they're a small plot, and they're n- often not really economically viable to, to win and harvest, you know, especially in a traditional sense anyways. And as, I suppose machinery has got bigger and things have become more mechanized, mobilization of sites like that is difficult, and in s- one sense you could say it, it may become an underutilized resource. I suppose I wanted to look at that and see was there opportunities that, well, hold on, there might be a way we, we, this can be mobilized or it could be utilized. In terms of mobilization as well, I suppose the whole piece on forestry and, and the cultural attitude towards it, and coming from Leitrim, I'm maybe a, a bit of a contradiction in itself that I'm a Leitrim person who's pro-forestry. I do like to think that I can see both sides of that scenario. Commercial forestry comes in for a lot of stick. You know, there's cases where I, I can absolutely understand why it would. I do believe a lot of the issues are, are legacy issues. I suppose policy and approaches to it has changed, but it takes so long for old legacy

problems that were probably done for the right reason at the time, you know, back in the '70s through to the '90s.

The cycles are so long, it takes generations for them to filter out. I can fully sympathize with why there is concerns f- for increase in forest cover. But on the other hand, i- in a place like Leitrim, it has such huge potential. Like, I would argue Leitrim should be a center of excellence for forestry in Europe, with huge growth yields, massively productive, and if the balance can be struck right with commercial forestry that supports biodiversity, broadly forestry, recreation, and employment, you have a huge engine there to drive a local economy, and you see it in other parts of Europe. We're not tapping into that enough, particularly in Leitrim. You know, forestry is hugely viable compared to other land use activities in the northwest. But at the same time, you can't go in with a bulldozer, just blanket forest everything. There's a sensitive piece around the mobilization. And then the renewable heat part of Nuffield, obviously what we're doing and the use forest, particularly within the agriculture sector, dovetails into Nuffield as, as an agricultural scholarship and its benefit within that and, and how it deliversCarbon displacement and moving away from fossil fuel intensity, but also using local supply chains and insulating the agriculture sector from global energy crisis that we've seen with the, with the current situation in Iran. And then, you know, looking forward, what does the roadmap look like out to 2050? What will the biomass supply chain look like in 2050? Where is that resource going to be used? We have a resource here. We have forestation requirements, so what we're harvesting today and consuming as biomass fuel, it will be replanted. When that material is harvested in 30 years' time again, is biomass fuel going to be the market for that low-grade pulpwood, or is, are we going to have other opportunities for that? Is there going to be opportunities to, I suppose, decarbonize other streams? That's what I want to explore and, and try and map out as the roadmap.

Yeah. Very good. There's two main parts as far as I'm aware. You've got your group focus program, which is not topic specific, and then you do some private travel where you go and study topics and places that are of specific interest to you. Tell us a little bit about that and what you're gonna learn from those trips.

The GFP, or, or Global Focus Program, it's a five to six-week trip. It's almost like a around the world trip, visiting farms and, and, and agriculture processors. There are various options. I'm on the fifth one, so I'm not traveling till September. The first group left on their trip immediately after Japan, after our CSE, the 2026 EO Group Conference, which took place in Japan this year. Next year is in Zimbabwe. Every year it's in a different location. That's the chance for a EO group to meet up, spend a week getting an in-depth deep dive on that specific country's agriculture situation, I suppose network and, and share each other's learnings and backgrounds. That's the initial trip. The CSE, which takes place earlier in the year, and then the GFPs take place across that year following that. Then after that you have your own personal travel, which is dedicated to your research topic. I'll be looking at, say, the Nordics, Central Europe, possibly the UK, and I might try tag on some research travel in, in New Zealand, which would have some s- strong forestry focus as well. Like I suppose at the moment, I've some of it planned out. I'm traveling to, to Serbia first week of June, and I'm in the Netherlands second week of June, and I'm then due to travel to Austria and Germany later on in the summer. So within the personal travel space, you can go as, as long as you want. A minimum would be four weeks, and that would be to, I suppose to, to try and get an in-depth behind-the-scenes look and ultimately learn about your topic and to try and target areas where it may be better progressed to take those learnings home and apply it at home. And that is the essence of what the Nuffield Scholarship is about.

You mentioned the Netherlands, for instance. What are you gonna look at there? Is there a biomass plant? Is there some process that's been developed there that's of interest to you?

The, the Netherlands, it's hinging to the, the main part of my trip there is to visit a, a biomass boiler site not far from Amsterdam, and it has bioenergy carbon capture storage piece of equipment fitted on the back end of it. It's early days or relatively early days in that technology. It's not widespread. There is a couple of plants operating at least across Europe. It's technology that's probably growing and developing and starting to filter down through to smaller scale sites. And the reason I want to look at it is obviously it's a biomass site, consumes biomass, distributes heat, believe it may be a district heating network, and then on the back end of that, of the combustion process, they're capturing the carbon. It's been stored for longer term storage. In that case, now it can be used in other applications. It can be extracted and used in horticulture or in, say, the food and beverage industry. I believe in, in my head it is one of the next iterations of, for biomass slots in, and you could call it it's gone from being carbon neutral to being carbon negative.

Yeah, so if, if we were able to have some kinda carbon capture anywhere that we were burning carbon itself, we would hugely address our, our emissions issues.

Yeah. Even at the moment and I suppose within, say, going back to the certification schemes with the wood fuel quality assurance, you know, we're linked back to the forest licensing piece. So everything that's consumed is harvested off a licensed site, which has a replanting obligation, so that we're part of a closed cycle, a closed loop of carbon in that sense. And, you know, higher level certification schemes like, like REDII becoming RED III is, you know, will have the same thing at its core as well, you know, that, that you haven't a net, a carbon stock loss because of the harvest of that material. What bioenergy carbon capture will do is we would still be part of that cycle, but the carbon that is emissioned at that specific emission point can be captured and can be then taken as a negative, so the carbon value could be sold on the carbon market.

Okay. Very good. Okay. So that was the trip to the Netherlands, and then a number of other countries. Is there any of the partners that you're hoping to meet there or the industries that's particularly stands out and is unique?

Yeah. I suppose, like even within our own network with our biomass, you know, processing set up at home in the family business, you start reaching out to suppliers within that, you know, and, like, one that would stand out, say, our wood chipper at the moment. It's a Mussmax machine. It comes out of Austria. The region they come from is, you know, it's the home of forestry and, and biomass, and it's just part of the culture to have a local co-op, could be a group of farmers who have some forestry, and they will own the boiler. They'll own the whole facility, and they'll sell heat to the local school, the local co-op. So i- it's just normal over there, whereas that isn't part of the culture here, taking that as an example. Mussmax have invited me over to look at their factory and introduce me to some of my biomass cousins in Austria to try and learn from them, where it's just normal there, but it's, it's less normal here.

Yeah. I've heard of this, that their whole village-It's a district heating scheme, and I think Cloughjordan use something very similar in Tipperary. They have the ecovillage down there, and I think they're maybe doing something akin to that. So in effect, the, the village is planned or the, the small town is planned with all of the homes receiving some centrally produced heat. Isn't that it, Kenny?

Correct, yeah. Th- there's some plans in, even in Ireland at the moment, and it's probably a little bit more common in the UK, where you have a, a centralized located energy system, and it's, it's distributed on a network to houses or heat users. It, it doesn't necessarily need to be residential houses. But it's like your heating system at home, your central heating, where you have a boiler, and it's feeding a network to your radiators within the house. Just multiply that concept up to a street level, and each house is a consumer instead of a radiator. So that's the principle of it. But also, and often, you know, unknown, you look at Manhattan. Manhattan has a steam network running around, and that's where you see the steam billowing up from manholes, and that would've been the tradition where that city and that, that area was, was run on a steam network. So you had building heating, and you had industry operating off a steam network in Manhattan.

Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. And, and o- obviously that's still running then, Kenny.

Still runs, yeah.

So is there anything else we've missed in that Nuffield journey that's worth pointing out at this stage?

Anybody with an interest in agriculture or the sort of rural environment in terms of the wider environment, I'd highly recommend considering doing a Nuffield scholarship. It's a fantastic opportunity. It's a great group of people. There's nothing like a bit of travel, rubbing shoulders with peers, not just within your industry but with a shared passion for their industry. There's nothing like that to open your eyes and broaden your mind and experience new things and inspire you to go deeper down the road you're on and, and try and progress and drive the thing forward. So I'd highly encourage Nuffield's scholarship to anybody with an interest, for sure.

Yeah, Kenny, just to put brass tacks on it, this must be worth quite a bit of money here because there's a lot of trips that are funded, and they're not cheap.

How it works is y- each scholar is given a bursary. It's broken down different ways. So, say, personal travel, we will, we will fund that ourselves and then reimbursed up to a cap of our bursary. Some of the, the, the more structured travel, like the CSE to Japan or the GFP later on in the year, the five, six-week travel, they're funded more centrally, where it's automatically deducted from your bursary. But the bursary amount is 18,000 euro at the moment in Ireland. Different countries will have different bursaries, but that's on the back of, you know, very loyal and, and strong sponsors. The scholarship globally can only operate now on the back of sponsorship from industry being fed into it.

Okay. Kenny, um, thanks very much for joining me, or thanks very much for your time. It was great chatting to you.

Thanks again to Kenny and to you, the listener. Hope you enjoyed that. Please sign up to my newsletter in the links below, and if you can share this podcast with a friend or colleague, I'd really appreciate it. Until next time, take care. [outro music]