Support for President Bush's initiatives to cut oil consumption is among the Texas Forestry Association's efforts to help stem a painful expense within the timber industry.

"Top issues facing this industry, whether it's wood products or in any other related areas of manufacturing, are energy costs and the rising transportation costs," said Ron Hufford, the association's executive vice president.

In his January State of the Union address, Bush announced an Advanced Energy Initiative that seeks to help break U.S. dependence on foreign sources of energy by developing new technology. The ambitious goal he set was to replace more than 75 percent of oil imports from the Middle East by 2025.

Hufford said the Texas Forestry Association, a nonprofit trade association, supports programs that will encourage some of the things Bush talked about, such as the perfecting of technologies that would advance making fuel ethanol from plant fiber biomass, a potentially valuable resource currently discarded as waste.

Bush said the ethanol could come from sources such as wood chips. He put forth a goal of making the new fuel "practical and competitive within six years." Hufford said the association backs the future of a viable alternative fuel from whatever source, whether it's agricultural, such as corn or soybeans, or wind power or woody biomass.

"We are very much following and supporting such efforts," Hufford said. "Our industry will not be the overall solution, but we can play a big part in achieving the president's goal. We already have some industries looking at East Texas as a site for a biomass plant."

He said the most recent Harvest Trends report, prepared by the Texas Forest Service, shows the annual delivered value of logs to mills in East Texas exceeds $781 million with an overall economic value to the state's economy of $22.1 billion.

"The forest products industry is a major employer in East Texas and an important part of the state's economy," Hufford said. "The logging and transportation of logs from the woods to the mill is the link that is vital to the future success of the forest products industry in the United States."

Hufford said the Forest Family Fun Day and Equipment Show allows manufacturers of logging equipment to display the latest technology, now designed to better incorporate environmentally friendliness with efficiencies in the harvesting process.

But no one field can isolate itself, he said, as many of the issues in forestry mirror and interconnect with those of virtually every other industry in the world.

"If the United States is to stay competitive, we need to support research and development programs that identify cost-competitive uses of our forest resource, encourage the use of renewable forms of energy, and above all, we need to make sure our kids are coming out of college ready to enter the workforce with the technical knowledge that will be required on the job."

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