Wood Pellets

What a pellet is

Standard wood pellets are cylinders of 6 or 8 millimetres in diameter and up to about 40 millimetres long, with a moisture content below 10 percent and a bulk density of at least 600 kilograms per cubic metre. A tonne of pellets holds roughly 4.8 megawatt hours of energy, about twice what the same weight of fresh sawdust holds, because the water is gone. No binder is normally added: the heat and pressure in the press soften the lignin, which sets as the pellet cools.

The raw material is almost always a residue of some other wood process. Sawdust and planer shavings from sawmills are the preferred feedstock because they are already small and, in the case of shavings, already dry. Sawmill chips need grinding and drying first. Debarked roundwood, usually small pulpwood logs, is chipped and ground where residues are scarce; this is common at the large export plants of the southern United States and the Baltic states. Bark gives a dark, high-ash pellet sold as a separate product. Recovered wood is used by some industrial pellet makers under stricter contamination limits. Which streams a plant uses, and whether they come from a sawmill on the same site or are bought in, is recorded per facility (see methodology).

Grades and standards

The international specification for wood pellets is ISO 17225-2, which defines property classes by ash content, mechanical durability, fines, moisture, calorific value and the permitted raw material. Three classes cover the heating market and three the industrial market.

Two certification schemes sit on top of the standard. ENplus, run by Bioenergy Europe, certifies producers and traders of A1, A2 and B pellets for the heating market; a certified plant carries an identifier such as DE 008 or SE 003 and appears in the public ENplus register. SBP, the Sustainable Biomass Program, certifies the sustainability and chain of custody of industrial pellets bought by utilities, and is the badge the large export plants carry. WoodComp records both as certification rows on the facility, with the identifier and status, and treats a certificate as evidence that a plant exists and what it produces, never as a capacity figure.

Two further product types are tracked separately. Industrial wood pellets are the I-class fuel for power and heat utilities, often sold under long contracts and shipped in bulk. Torrefied pellets, sometimes called black pellets, have been roasted in the absence of oxygen so that they shed water, grind like coal and tolerate outdoor storage; a handful of plants in Europe and North America make them.

Where the plants sit in the wood chain

Pellet plants come in two shapes, and the register keeps them apart because they behave differently.

The sawmill pellet line. Most European pellet plants stand on a sawmill's own site and press the sawmill's own sawdust and shavings. The sawmill decides how much residue exists; the pellet line converts it. These plants rarely buy wood, their output tracks the sawmill's cutting, and their capacity is sized to the residue stream rather than to the pellet market. In Germany and Austria roughly three in four plants above 50 000 tonnes a year are of this kind.

The free-standing plant. Export plants, utility-owned plants and merchant producers buy their raw material, often from many sawmills and sometimes as roundwood. Their capacity is set by the press hall and the dryer, not by a host, and they compete with pulp and board mills for the same residues. Where a pellet plant sits next to a sawmill but on another plot, or buys most of its feedstock from a neighbour, it is a free-standing plant in the register, not a sawmill line.

The distinction matters for the fibre balance. A sawmill line consumes nothing that the sawmill did not already consume as logs; a free-standing plant consumes residues that would otherwise have gone to a pulp mill, a board mill or a boiler. This is why pellet capacity is never added to sawn timber capacity or to pulp capacity, and why the input materials and their origin are recorded for every pellet row.

Capacity and production

Capacity is stated in tonnes of pellets out per year. It is not the raw material intake, not the press's hourly rating multiplied by an assumed number of hours, and not a group total divided between plants. Where the operator publishes a capacity, that figure is used; where only production is published, the highest of the three latest reported years stands in for capacity and the figure is marked as such. Industry tables, such as Bioenergy International's annual World of Pellets map, Holzkurier's table of pellet plants in the German speaking countries and Bioenergitidningen's Pelletskarta for Sweden, are used as registers of existence and as capacity sources when no operator figure exists; an operator's own stated capacity always takes precedence over a table.

Production is recorded per year where published, with its source, so that a plant running well below its nameplate shows as such. For the North American plants, which report to the US Energy Information Administration in short tons, the figure is kept in short tons per year as reported; lists and country tables show it converted to tonnes, and the facility page shows both.

The market in brief

Wood pellets are made in every forested region but consumed in two distinct markets. The heating market, concentrated in Italy, Germany, Austria, France, Denmark and Sweden, buys bagged and bulk A1 pellets for household and commercial boilers and is served largely by regional producers. The industrial market, concentrated in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Japan and South Korea, buys I-class pellets by the shipload for power generation, served by export plants in the southern United States, western Canada, the Baltic states and, until 2022, Russia and Belarus. Bioenergy International's World of Pellets 2026 lists 1 388 plants of 10 000 tonnes a year or more in 73 countries, which is the population WoodComp works from for this category.