Ed and Mack Musser are identical twins who grew up helping with their father’s sawmill. Ed got an MBA from Virginia Tech. Mack’s degree is from UVA, but both returned to Rural Retreat – a small town near Wytheville – to run the family’s new company, drying and finishing lumber.
“A lot of our customers were furniture companies in North Carolina,” he recalls, “and then we started shipping material into the Midwest.”
The furniture business dried up as production moved to China, but Midwestern cabinet makers were a new market, and the Mussers continued to supply home builders.
“You know lumber is cyclical,” Musser explains. “I feel like in the late 1990’s to where we are now, there have been probably four pretty drastic cycles for the lumber. Fourth quarter last year the lumber just fell off a cliff.”
But the brothers were again ready to pivot. They knew demand for biomass – wood pellets and chips – was rising, and in this part of the country, the raw materials from sawmills are plentiful.
“If you look at a round log, when they saw those square pieces they’ll trim the edges and cut down to square boards, so everything that doesn’t make that is a byproduct of that,” Musser says. “Any sawmill in the country will have that. And we bring material in from probably 150 miles from us.”
Today, the company employs a hundred people and owns a fleet of trucks. Huge piles of sawdust sit inside giant warehouses on their 90-acre site just off I-81.
“When we’re running full we’ll be bringing in probably 40-50 trailer loads a day,” says Ed Musser.
The waste material from mills – sawdust, shavings and bark – are placed in huge dryers – then molded into briquettes or pellets that can be burned in barbeque grills, boilers or wood stoves to heat homes and buildings. Wood shavings also make good bedding for chickens and other farm animals.
So far their sales are domestic, but they’re eyeing a growing market for wood pellets in Europe and Asia. Already there are five other plants making wood pellets in southeast Virginia and North Carolina – shipping their products overseas.
“We don’t compete with them, because they have their facilities pretty close to the port. They’re in eastern Virginia, and we’re so far inland that it’s hard to compete with them,” he says.
But Musser has been exploring ways of getting his products to Norfolk – either by a rail spur or an inland port, and – in the meantime – they’re boosting production. This summer, Virginia awarded the company $75,000 to help with a $7.5 million expansion. Once a small part of the enterprise, Ed Musser says biomass is now a very big deal.
“Since 2020, and it’s 2023, the biomass went from like a small fraction of what we’re doing to probably 75%.”
And he’s always on the lookout for other ways to maximize profits. For example, the drying process removes a huge amount of water from wood. Noting whisky is often aged in wood barrels that impart the subtle flavor of oak, Musser thinks his operation could yield liquid that could be added directly. Of course in the age of climate change, some environmentalists argue the state should not be supporting companies that depend on cutting down trees, subjecting wood to energy-intensive processes and shipping their products around the world. Musser might be an exception, since the company uses only sawdust and chips and sells less than 10% of its products abroad.
But critics are going after other pellet producers working to supply growing demand in Europe and the UK. They’re trying to meet global climate goals and are turning to Virginia and other Southeastern states to supply wood pellets that can be burned to produce electricity. Environmentalists argue that the trend toward so-called biomass is dangerous, and they want governments to stop subsidizing the use of wood for power.
Scientists say the area stretching from the southeastern United States to Louisiana and Texas constitutes a global biodiversity hotspot, with dozens of rare and endangered birds, amphibians and plants depending on hardwood forests to survive.
Environmentalists say those forests are coming down as demand for wood heats up. Countries in Europe and the U.K. consider it sustainable, and a UN formula counts carbon released by burning against the country where that wood was grown.
After it’s cut down in the U.S., wood is usually turned into boards for construction, with the leftover chips, sawdust and bark sold to firms like Bethesda-based Enviva, which turns that wood waste into pellets at five plants in Virginia and North Carolina. Ten years ago company spokesperson Elizabeth Woodworth told me:
“We use low grade byproducts of other lumber industries, and that includes saw dust, wood chips, tops and limbs of trees that otherwise wouldn’t have another market.”
But after multiple visits and flights over Enviva mills, the Southern Environmental Law Center concluded the company was, in fact, using whole hardwood trees – some 80-100 years old, clear cut from bottomland forests.
This year we called back to see what changes the company had made. We left voicemail and sent e-mails but got no response. We did hear from Virginia’s State Forester, Rob Farrell, who says the company no longer accepts wood from clear-cut hardwood forests.
“Enviva has the most thorough track and trace system of anyone, so they know where all their material is coming from.”
Today, he says, Enviva is getting most of its wood from sawmills and pine plantations. Yes, local loggers still clearcut hardwood, but – Farrell says — that makes replanting high quality trees like oak and hickory easier.
“That forest is changing due to age and a lot of other things, and it’s getting replaced by a maple/gum forest. Nothing wrong with maple and gum trees, but if you’re an animal that needs acorns and hickory nuts to get ready for the winter, a maple/gum forest isn’t very good for you. We need a market to harvest that maple and gum understory so that our oak and hickories can regenerate.”
Without a market for waste wood and lower value trees, he says, landowners might be tempted to sell their property for development or farming.
That has not prevented critics like the Southern Environmental Law Center’s David Carr from lobbying to stop British government subsidies to Drax – the UK firm that burns 8 million tons of wood pellets each year – 5 million from the Southeastern United States.
“We’ve estimated that’s about 125 square miles of harvesting every year to feed Drax’s demand,” he says.
Members of Parliament are backing away from those subsidies, but Drax wants government money for another venture.
“The company is talking about trying to carbon capture and storage on top of their biomass facilities,” he says. “They’re seeking subsidies to do that.”
Carr argues, there’s no proof that will keep 12 million tons of carbon a year out of the atmosphere, and while the message may be getting through to the U.K. and the E.U., wood pellets enjoy growing popularity in Asia.
