Colorado finding use for trees killed by pine beetles

It’s become a depressingly familiar sight to anyone who drives into Colorado’s mountains along I-70 and points north: Miles of steep mountain slopes covered with rust-brown, dead pine trees.

Since the mountain pine beetle, also called the bark beetle, arrived in Colorado in the late 1990s, its ravenous appetite has left thousands of acres of dead and dying trees.

The black, rice-sized speck of a bug has ravaged parts of Colorado’s forests, but it’s also created business opportunities for some, who are using the trees as lumber, furniture, or to burn to generate heat or electricity. But significant obstacles stand in the way of harvesting those trees before a spark, or a flash of lightning, ignites a tree and then the whole forest.

“There will be fires,” said Mark Mathis, owner of the Confluence Energy LLC wood pellet plant in Kremmling. “It’s how big and when and exactly where. It’s just the way it is, and I don’t wish that on anybody.”

Of Colorado’s 1.5 million acres of lodgepole pines, 68 percent of them — 1.02 million acres — are infested with the pine beetle to some extent, according to the state’s 2009 report on the health of its forests.

Colorado is finding ways to use the beetle-killed wood for building products and renewable energy.

Read more the full story Denver Business Journal.