Energy From Wood
The energy source that powered the Klondike and later goldrushes was wood. It has been said that without the forests of Alaska and western Canada the goldrushes could not have taken place.
Though many of the goldrushers arrived on coal-fired steamers, they had enough else to carry over Chilkoot and other passes into the gold fields that they could hardly carry fuel too. Early-day photographs of the diggings show areas denuded of forest; the miners cut essentially all the trees around to build their cabins and mine shafts, and for fuel to cook and heat with and also to thaw frozen ground.
The miner's use of wood as almost their only fuel source illustrates some of the characteristics of wood as an energy source. Though wood is difficult to transport, it grows almost everywhere so, within limits, is readily available. Also it takes little technology to utilize this energy resource. Anyone with a match or two sticks of wood to rub together (and skill or lots of patience) can make use of it, though the efficiency of a modern air-tight stove beats heck out of an open campfire. With even more technology, the wood can be converted to liquid or gas fuel to burn in engines.
Suppose that today we were to get all our necessary energy from wood, just like the old timers did, how would we fare using Alaska's forest resource? In answering this question, we have to remember that the forests grow slowly. To avoid running out of energy someday, there is a limited cut we can allow ourselves to take each year. Otherwise the forests cannot remain as a truly renewable resource. We would also have to assume that we really could convert the wood to liquid fuel to power our cars, airplanes and other motored devices.
Alaska has about 120 million areas of forest land of which about 28 million acres is productive enough to be considered commercial forest. That designation is given to land capable of producing at least one quarter cord of wood per acre each year. The coastal forests of southern and southeastern Alaska can produce more, somewhat over one cord per acre per year. All told, Alaska's commercial forests, if managed only to produce wood for fuel, could yield about 40 million cords of wood each year, on a sustained basis.
The burning of 40 million cords of wood each year would produce a lot of heat (and smoke), it would release about as much energy as is contained in the oil flowing down the Trans-Alaska pipeline in 113 days, 600 trillion BTU. This is far more energy than the 400,000 Alaskans now use. The pipeline can produce all the energy currently needed in about 16 days each year.
Of course this discussion is somewhat nonsensical because we would never allow our forests to be used only for producing fuel, nor would we likely want to use wood as our only fuel source. Nevertheless, it is obvious that Alaska has enough forest to make far more use of wood for fuel than it does now.
But even with the vast forests we have, local shortages of fuel wood are showing up. The problem is that the trees don't always grow in easily reached places, and transportation of wood for long distances usually is prohibitively expensive.
