John Shelly

Congressman Mike Thompson
Attention: Elizabeth Murguia
317 3rd Street, Suite 1
Eureka, CA 95501

Dear Congressman Thompson,

I am writhing this letter to encourage your support of the restart of the pulp and paper mill in Samoa. Under its new ownership, Freshwater Pulp, this facility is well positioned to not only bring back many jobs to the area but also to encourage responsible management of the redwood forest region. The intent of Freshwater Pulp to source one half of the mill’s needed fiber from tanoak will provide a value-added market for this species that is considered a nuisance to industrial forest land owners. The management of the commercial doug-fir and redwood forest in northern California require that the tanoak species also be managed because this species comes in strong after commercial harvests and if left unchecked will overtake the more valuable redwood and Doug-fir. The current choice of most landowners, in the absence of any viable market for tanoak is to chemically treat the tees, killing them where they stand. This practice unnaturally increases the loading of dead and dying trees in the forest which may greatly increase the risk of insect infestations, the spread of disease and wildfire.

I have been actively engaged in studying the utilization of tanoak for nearly 20 years and although we have made small inroads into developing tanoak lumber and hardwood flooring markets, these markets can in no way keep up with surplus of of tanoak wood that could be sustain-ably removed from the forests. Work I conducted on the analysis of utilization options for tankoak infected with sudden Oak Death disease revealed a major gap in wood markets that could use the material and provide value to landowners, thus helping to offset the costs of managing the disease. A pulp mill that can consume 240,000 bone dry tons of tanoak chips per year, while diverting high quality logs to lumber or veneer uses, will be a significant boost to the market and provide a needed incentive to landowners to intelligently and sustain-ably manage tanoak.

As I’m sure you know, the pulping facility in samoa is a totally chlorine free facility. That combined with its intent to source FSC certified fiber will give it an impressive marketing advantage in providing a high quality tissue and toilet paper product acceptable to many environmental goals. Producing a quality product close to the resource, with effective environmental controls makes much more sense to me than shipping the raw material to an oversees mill with less effective controls and then producing a product that is again transported back to US markets.

I am please to offer my letter of support to this venture. Let me know if you have any questions. Thank you for your interest.

Sincerely,

John R. Shelly, Ph.D.
Woody Biomass Advisor