Methodology: How WoodComp Builds the Dataset

What is in scope

WoodComp maps wood fibre consumers: facilities that take in roundwood or wood chips and turn them into products. Wood fibre here means primary wood raw material of any kind, sawlogs as well as pulpwood, so a sawmill is as much a wood fibre consumer as a pulp mill even though it never separates a fibre.

Facility categories in the published dataset are pulp mills, wood-consuming biorefineries, and (as the dataset grows) sawmills, pellet plants and wood-fired energy plants. Paper-only, tissue and converting sites exist in our records but are outside the published scope, because they consume pulp or recovered paper rather than wood. The published dataset currently holds 1237 facilities across 52 countries.

Facility status

Each facility carries one status:

• Operating: in production. Planned maintenance stops do not change status.
• Idled: production halted indefinitely for market or ownership reasons, but the plant is intact and capacity could return. Sometimes called curtailed or mothballed.
• Closed: permanently shut. The capacity is gone.
• Converted: rebuilt to another use that no longer consumes wood. A mill that still consumes wood after a rebuild, for example a kraft line converted to dissolving pulp, stays operating and carries the conversion as a dated event.
• Project: announced or under construction, not yet producing.
• Unknown: status could not be verified against an acceptable source.

The distinction between idled and closed matters for fibre balance: idled capacity is latent supply-side demand, closed capacity is removed. Status changes are recorded as dated events with sources.

Location and coordinates

Coordinates are never guessed. Every map pin is the product of a two-part rule: a named source establishes which facility it is, and satellite imagery establishes exactly where it is.

• Identity comes from a source. Depending on country, that source is a national or regional register (for example Ontario's MNRF mill licences, the British Columbia Mill List, the US EPA ECHO facility register, Québec's MRNF register, Chile's RETC, ARESCAT in Catalonia, Norway's Brønnøysund register), an OpenStreetMap industrial feature, or the company's own published address.
• Precision comes from imagery. Register coordinates usually point at the registered address rather than the production site, so every candidate position is checked against satellite imagery before it gets site precision.
• Where no register or map object exists, a position may be derived directly from satellite imagery under a fixed rule: the locating pass reports only an image tile and pixel, the coordinate is computed deterministically by a script, and an independent second pass on fresh imagery must confirm the site before anything is written. Pins produced this way carry the source label satellite-vision.
• Every pin is confirmed by two independent review passes. When the two passes fully disagree, a third pass decides.

Each facility carries a location precision flag: site (verified to the plant itself), city, country, or unverified. Only site-verified facilities appear as map pins, and this applies to every published category, pulp mills and sawmills alike. The rest are listed without a pin until verification completes.

Capacity

Capacity is stored as three parts: a value, a unit, and what the value measures. For pulp mills that is tonnes per year of pulp; for sawmills it is cubic metres per year of sawn timber or of log intake, as the source states it. Site totals and single-line figures are labelled as such. Capacity figures are also kept as dated observations, so a facility's history shows when a figure was reported and by whom, and expansions or closures change the record rather than silently overwriting it.

Wood consumption factors, pulp

Wood consumption is never stored, only computed, and the factors are published here so the computation can be checked. All factors are cubic metres solid roundwood under bark per air-dry tonne of pulp (ADt, 90 % dry solids). Quoting the same mill over bark, or per oven-dry tonne, gives a materially different number, so the basis travels with the figure everywhere on this site.

The chemi-mechanical range is the mechanical bracket applied for want of a published chemi-mechanical figure, not a measured range of its own. Sulphite pulping is not listed: the sources state its wood input in bone-dry tonnes of wood per air-dry tonne of pulp rather than in cubic metres, so it is quoted in that form on the pulping processes page instead of being converted here.

Where a mill's fibre furnish is unknown but the process is chemical, we use 4.5 as a mixed value until the furnish is established.

Two honesty notes. First, we publish ranges rather than point values, because the literature genuinely spans a range and a single decimal implies precision that does not exist; the point values exist only inside the model. Second, no source publishes a CTMP-specific volumetric factor: every statistical source lumps CTMP into "mechanical pulp". Our 2.6 is derived from a published chemi-mechanical yield range of 86 to 94 percent and a basic density of 390 to 420 kg/m³, and is therefore a derived figure, not a measured one.

Wood consumption factors, sawn timber

Sawmill capacity has conversion factors of its own.

Sawnwood recovery. Softwood sawnwood recovery is roughly half the log volume. Reported national factors run from about 1.5 to just over 2.0 cubic metres of roundwood per cubic metre of sawnwood, and much of that spread reflects where in the process the output is measured, since the same chain moves from about 1.6 rough green to about 2.1 once the timber is dried and planed. Log diameter drives recovery on top of that: about 0.41 cubic metres of sawnwood per cubic metre of logs at a 15 centimetre top diameter, against 0.63 at 60 centimetres.

Log intake and sawn output are different metrics, and a capacity stated as log intake is roughly twice the same mill's sawn output. They are never summed. Where a mill reports only log intake, the list view shows an estimated sawn output so that every row in the column measures the same thing. The factor is 2.0 cubic metres of roundwood per cubic metre of sawn timber: the round figure the source itself leads with, and the conservative end of the range above, so the estimate understates rather than flatters. Every figure derived this way is labelled as an estimate and shown together with the reported intake it came from, so the conversion can be checked or redone with another factor. The facility page keeps the figure exactly as the source stated it.

Board feet. North American capacities reported in thousand board feet (MBF, lumber tally) are converted for display using the factor of 589 board feet per cubic metre: the nominal 424 board feet per cubic metre adjusted by the 72 percent actualization factor used in FAO and UNECE statistics. That is, 1 MBF is roughly 1.70 cubic metres of actual sawn timber. The figure as reported by the source is kept on the facility page.

A fuller consumption estimate for sawmills is planned and will use these recovery factors, shown as ranges like the pulp factors above.

Double counting: why consumption columns are never summed

Sawmills sit upstream of pulp and board mills: a large share of the chips a pulp mill consumes began as sawlogs at a sawmill. Consider a sawmill that takes in 100 cubic metres of logs and sends 30 cubic metres of chips to a nearby pulp mill. The sawmill consumed 100, the pulp mill consumed 30, and adding them gives 130, yet only 100 cubic metres of wood ever left the forest.

The dataset therefore applies a fixed rule:

• Wood consumption is reported separated by assortment: roundwood, chips and other byproducts, and recovered wood in distinct columns.
• Those columns are never summed into a single figure on the public site: not per facility, not per country, not per region.
• A roundwood equivalent is computed internally for balance modelling, counting each stream once at the point where the log first entered industry, but it is not published as a total.
• Where a chip flow between two named facilities is known and sourced, it is stored as a relation between the two facilities rather than as an attribute of either one, so it can be netted out instead of counted twice.

The chain is not always two steps. A pellet plant buying sawdust and an energy plant buying bark sit downstream of the same original log, so the rule is stated in terms of where the log first entered industry rather than in terms of sawmills and pulp mills specifically.

A missing aggregate is a gap. A wrong aggregate is a false statement, and it propagates into every analysis built on it.

Sources, confidence and certification

Every material fact links to at least one source, graded by type: company disclosures and environmental statements first, then regulator filings, then credible trade press. From source count, source quality and data completeness we compute a confidence score per facility. Certification fields (FSC, PEFC) are strictly evidence-based: true and false both require a source, and where the evidence names only the company but not the site, the field stays unknown rather than assumed.

Verification

High-impact changes (status changes, capacity corrections, deletions, merges) go through independent second review: a separate research pass attempts to refute the claim against primary sources before it is written. Findings that cannot be confirmed stay flagged as open questions instead of entering the dataset as facts. The review queue is part of the dataset, not a hidden backlog.

Licence and citation

The WoodComp dataset and this knowledge base are published under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0). You may copy, redistribute, adapt and build on the material, including commercially, provided you give attribution and license your adaptations under the same terms.

How to cite: WoodComp (2026). *WoodComp facility database*, version 2026-08. Accessed the date you retrieve it. https://woodcomp.world

Third-party sources cited on these pages are not covered by our licence. They are cited with attribution and remain subject to their own terms.

Corrections

If you find an error, we want to know. Every correction with a source is reviewed and credited in the facility's change history. Contact