By Ryan Dezember
Weyerhaeuser, America's largest private landowner, said it has launched a venture to turn runty trees and sawdust from its fleet of mills into a replacement for metallurgical coal used in steel making.
The forest-products company said it expects production to begin in 2027 at a facility being built next to its sawmill in McComb, Miss. -- the first of several biocarbon plants planned by Weyerhaeuser and partner Aymium.
It is the latest effort to find a market for the trees too small or otherwise unsuitable for making lumber. Such wood has typically been sent to pulp and paper mills, but U.S. wood-pulp consumption capacity has plunged due to waning paper demand. This year alone, the U.S. has shed roughly 10% of its capacity to produce containerboard, the thick paper used to make corrugated boxes.
The closures have walloped timber growers, especially in the South, where landowners ranging from Weyerhaeuser, with its vast loblolly plantations, to families with 40-acre woodlots raise pine for the forest-products industry.
Southern pine is planted thick then thinned after a decade or so to make room for the best specimens to grow into two-by-fours and utility poles. Mill closures have left parts of the South bereft of buyers for the culled pulpwood. In some cases, smaller timberland owners have had to pay for thinnings, turning what is typically a payday into a major expense.
"Looking for homes for that fiber has been an important component of our business-development efforts," Weyerhaeuser Chief Executive Devin Stockfish said in an interview.
Weyerhaeuser this summer started building a $500 million facility in Arkansas, where pulpwood prices have dropped more than 50% over the past decade, to make engineered lumber from the crooked or stunted trees that would have historically been pulped.
Stockfish said he envisions the venture with Aymium operating as many as 10 or 11 biocarbon production facilities across Weyerhaeuser's U.S. properties, which include 27 sawmills and panel plants and timberlands that add up to an area bigger than Switzerland. Building permits are being sought for the plant in Mississippi, where pulpwood markets have also been depressed.
Aymium CEO James Mennell said the company's process works with all species of wood as well as agricultural residues, grasses, nutshells, cherry pits or any other lignocellulosic biomass. The material is heated in the absence of oxygen, driving out elements other than carbon.
The result is a drop-in replacement for metallurgical coal. Also known as met or coking coal, it is key to the chemical reactions that produce steel and other metals. It is different from steam coal, which is burned to generate electricity.
The U.S. Geological Survey last month added met coal to its critical minerals list. The designation deems it vital to the economy and national security and opened met coal to the sort of tariffs that President Trump has slapped on steel, aluminum, lumber and copper products.
Aymium has been making its products and running trials with metals manufacturers for several years, Mennell said. It has a facility near Marquette, Mich., that is fed sawdust and tree tops from the Upper Peninsula's pineries. It has another completed recently in California and pacts with metals producers around the world.
Steel producer Steel Dynamics said its own venture with Aymium is ramping up production after biocarbon made in September at a plant in Columbus, Miss., was used successfully by its flat-rolled steel division.
The global race to clean up metals production has revved up demand to replace fossil coal inputs, Mennell said. Emissions rules in Europe and elsewhere favor forest products over fossil fuels because trees remove carbon from the atmosphere as they grow.
"Aymium has built a $25 billion pipeline under contracts and term sheets, " Mennell said. "What we need to do now is get capacity in the ground rapidly to meet that demand."
Paul Hossain, who runs Weyerhauser's real-estate, energy and natural-resources businesses, told investors earlier this month that 10 or so facilities like the one being built in McComb could annually produce about 1.5 million tons of biocarbon.
That is a sliver of the 1.2 billion-ton met-coal market, but it would significantly boost wood demand -- equal to adding five or six pulp mills around Weyerhaeuser's timberlands, Hossain said. Weyerhaeuser forecast annual biocarbon profit of about $85 million by 2030.
"It is a fundamentally new market for our fiber and the opportunity is enormous," he said.
Write to Ryan Dezember at ryan.dezember@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
December 17, 2025 13:00 ET (18:00 GMT)
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