description
The paper presents the state of the European market for wood fuels. Wood fuels are firewood, wood chips, wood pellets and wood briquettes. Rising prices of fossil fuels significantly affect the development of extraction, production, and use of wood fuels. The market for wood fuels in Europe has already well developed during the last period. Canada and the United States of America are among the largest exporters of wood biomass to the European Union, main imports are wood pellets. The main exporters of wood fuels in Europe are Germany, Italy, Latvia, and Poland, while the largest importers are Germany, Italy, Belgium, and Great Britain (EUWID, 2011). Monitoring of price trends for wood and fossil fuels is very important for market players to predict market development and market needs. In European Union countries monitoring of prices of fossil fuels is well developed, while monitoring of prices of wood fuels is uneven. In the frame of the European project Biomass Trade Centre 2 prices of wood fuels are being analyzed in Slovenia, Italy, Austria, Germany, Spain, Romania, Greece, Croatia, and Ireland. Within the analyze we found that the prices of wood fuels in first half of 2012are the highest in Greece, Germany, and Ireland, followed by Austria, Italy, Spain, and Slovenia. Among the cheapest are Croatia and Romania. Compared with the prices in the second half of 2011, prices of wood fuels in the included countries increased by an average of 5 percent.