Costing the production of OSB using fibre impacted by mountain pine beetle

The current outbreak of mountain pine beetle (MPB) in western Canada has killed millions of hectares of pine forest, but has created the opportunity for oriented strand board (OSB) manufacturers to utilize this forest resource. However, MPB - killed timber is dry, porous and brittle, thus posing significant challenges at various stages of the OSB production process. These challenges include increases in breakage in timber harvesting, production of fine wood material at the stranding operation, wear on stranding blades, and resin use. In this study, a simulation of a western Canadian woodlands and OSB manufacturing process was constructed using the operations based costing framework. Once the simulation was constructed, expected impacts of MPB fibre were introduced to the model in a hypothetical scenario where a mixture of MPB and deciduous fibre were used in the manufacturing process to determine the overall cost impact of the alternative furnish mixture on cost of production. This analysis showed that for the subject operations, the use of a 28.8% mixture of MPB and deciduous furnish would yield 3.6% overall increase in the cost of finished OSB. To eliminate this cost gap, OSB manufacturers could investigate the economic viability of increasing ponds capacity, increasing ponds temperature, sale of excess fines material and alternative resination processes to allow inclusion of fines in finished product. --P. ii.