A counple of weeks ago I attended a small conference dealing with small scale rural bioenergy development in Norway. One of the presenters (from mjøsen skog) showed the audience a graph I thought was quite nice:

Basically, this graph (which is difficult to read, sorry about that) shows the price development for three categories of forest biomass in Norway since 2002.  The red line indicates the price of what was previously considered “low value” biomass – biomass which the graph clearly shows, is not really “low value” any more, since it has caught up with the other categories. The presenter attributed this shift to the emergence of bioenergy as a viable market opportunity in Norway, and I have no reason to object to this analysis. This is one of the obvious points that bioenergy protagonists like to make – bioenergy can literally transform waste into a valuable resource, an argument I thought was nicely summarized with this graph