Maine’s forests, stretching across 89 percent of the state, have long been the backbone of its economy, sustaining generations of loggers, truckers, and mill workers. Over the course of four centuries since Europeans first arrived on the shores of what is now the United States, the forest products industry has relied on the combination of abundant resources and new technologies to drive economic growth, create jobs, and support rural communities and culture. But that seeming continuity has been attained through what might be best described as a “successional” economy, as new industries rose up, dominated, and declined – always driven by innovation, competition, changing markets, and the availability of raw materials.
“Ours is a story of continuous evolution – of how we have used the forest resource to serve markets and to drive innovation,” said Jake Ward, vice president of Strategic Partnerships, Innovation, Resources, and Engagement at University of Maine. “What’s interesting is the dynamism of the forests. They have evolved as we have manipulated them through harvesting. And then we respond to their regeneration.”
Ward paints with a broad brush to make the point. The region’s first global export – the long, straight boles of the eastern white pine for use as ship masts in the British Royal Navy – drove the industry until advances in ship propulsion technology, competition, and supply (at least, conveniently located supply) changed its economics. When demand for masts diminished, sawmills sprouted up along the state’s rivers, utilizing different species and powering the next generation of forest products. By some historical accounts, Bangor – which came to be considered the lumber capital of the world – was home to more than 300 sawmills by the 1850s. Pine, cedar, spruce, and fir became the raw materials for finished goods shipped around the world.
And just as demand for those wood products and containers went slack at the dawn of the 20th century, pulping and papermaking arrived in Maine – often taking over the very sites where the sawmills had stood and utilizing feedstock the sawmills could not. Thanks to this abundance of raw materials, cheap hydropower, and a fluvial superhighway for transportation, pulp and paper came to dominate Maine’s economic landscape for more than a century. Newspapers including The New York Times built and operated entire mills for their exclusive use, churning out newsprint 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. But even that industry found itself in crisis when market conditions shifted and demand for paper (especially newsprint) dried up.
The reader migration from paper to screens was compounded by rising energy costs, a divestment of paper companies and the selling of many mill properties, and competition from increasingly globalized markets. In the first decade of the 21st century, 22 of the remaining 28 Maine-based paper mills closed, and with them, 13,000 good jobs disappeared.
What’s next in the succession? Can Maine – its entrepreneurs, policymakers, workforce, and investors – adapt quickly and strategically to the changing global forest economy? Unlike past cycles in the forest products economy, there’s no obvious single replacement product to fill the yawning gaps created by the irreversible contraction of the state’s pulp and paper industry.
But if the research and engineering centers at UMaine provide any guidance, the next generation of Maine’s forest products will be far more diverse than its predecessors – and unlike anything that has come out of the woods before it.
According to Ward, more than 40 colleges, departments, research units, and groups across the Orono campus are now directly involved in supporting Maine’s forest-based economy. UMaine is explicitly charged with assisting the state through its transition from a predominantly pulp-and-paper industry to a more diversified portfolio of products, aligning its assets with global market demands, and collaborating with initiatives such as the 2018 Forest Opportunity Roadmap/Maine (FOR/Maine), which counts Ward as one of its primary authors and plan architects.
“The world is evolving around us, and we have to figure out how to use the material that may have traditionally gone into saw or pulp and paper mills,” Ward said. “The fundamental backbone of the road map was to take the feedstock and align its annual growth with new uses, whether through product innovation or economic advantage.”
Innovations Underway: Transforming Wood Fiber into Tomorrow’s Products
The core of UMaine’s effort lies in unlocking the potential of wood fiber beyond traditional lumber and paper. Finding new uses for the state’s most abundant forest resource is critical to the long-term health of Maine’s economy. The university’s research focuses on extracting biological building blocks from these trees in the form of cellulose, manipulating them, and manufacturing environmentally sustainable products to complement or replace existing ones.
These new “platform” technologies include new applications for pulpwood, such as molded fiber packaging that has the potential to replace single-use plastic containers. The new technologies also involve transformational uses for sawmill waste, low-value species, and slash that, in the form of biochar, can help store carbon in the ground, improve the soil, and potentially mitigate environmental pollution caused by PFAS and other hazardous materials – all while creating energy in the form of heat as a byproduct.
New processes – some still in the lab, others already in the marketplace – can make wood-based construction materials lighter, stronger, and more durable than existing carbon-intensive products from concrete and steel. Wood-fiber insulation, wood composites, glulam structural beams, and cross-laminated timber are winning acceptance in both home and commercial construction.
And on the near horizon are nonpetroleum, renewable biofuels that will heat our homes and reduce emissions from our automobiles and airplanes; single-family homes printed from forest-derived, recyclable materials; and exotic products made from nanocellulose fibers that are already being tested across a multitude of uses, from fire suppression to artificial bones.
According to Clay Wheeler, a professor of chemical engineering and the director of the Forest Bioproducts Research Institute at UMaine, the common goal across all these areas of research is to “take something that we discovered in a laboratory on campus and scale it up, turning it into a process that you could envision at the commercial level.”
Beaker to Bucket to Barrel
Alchemy, or something like it, is underway at UMaine’s Technology Research Center (TRC) in Old Town, where Wheeler and his colleague Amy Luce are turning sawdust into black gold. Occupying a quarter of an old warehouse at the idle Nine Dragons Pulp Mill, the TRC perfectly symbolizes the successional history of Maine’s forest products industry. The earliest building on the 400,000-square-foot site was constructed as a sawmill in the 1860s and converted to a pulp and paper mill two decades later. Under a number of different owners, the mill operated for the next 125 years until 2015, when it shut down – along with five other mills on the Penobscot River in an 18-month period. Today, the vacated warehouse on Portland Street houses UMaine’s “one-stop shop” for processing and analyzing forest-focused technologies.
“Today, we are running our organic-acids-to-fuel pilot system, which involves very high temperatures,” Luce, TRC’s facility manager, explained as she handed out helmets and eyewear to a small group of visitors this past spring. “We call that system SynCOPP for short – it stands for synthetic crude oil pilot plant.”
Luce led the group through a set of double doors, revealing a large industrial space chock-full of conveyor belts, large screws, hoppers, furnaces, a centrifuge, pipes, tanks, faintly glowing electronic devices, and 125-kilogram super sacks of sawdust. One of two pilot-scale plants at the TRC, the Biomass to BioProducts Pilot Plant (B2P2), can turn a ton of “woody biomass” into organic chemicals every day. These chemicals, which include a key building block called levulinic acid, can be used to produce biofuels, biochemicals, and other bio-based advanced materials such as biochar.
The SynCOPP pilot plant takes some of the B2P2’s organic acids and refines them into high-quality crude oil through a series of chemical reactions and heating in a process called thermal deoxygenation, or TDO. The resulting bio-oil is a mixture of gasoline, jet fuel, and diesel grades, which are separated into components through a distillation process similar to those used in a petroleum refinery.
“We have been focusing on the fraction of the crude that is jet fuel,” said Wheeler, who co-invented the TDO process with an undergraduate honors student, Thomas Schwartz, two decades ago. That collaboration continued after Schwartz returned to UMaine, where he is now a professor of chemical and biomedical engineering and the associate director of the Forest Bioproducts Research Institute.
“In our next project, we are planning to try to optimize other fractions – gasoline, military diesel, Number Six fuel oil that’s used in commercial boilers – to improve the overall economics,” Wheeler said. “But right now, we have a refinery partner that has been evaluating our jet fuel fractions for fit purpose testing in blends with their jet fuel. And we’ve demonstrated that we can meet specifications in a 20 percent blend with commercial aviation fuel.”
The processes involved have already been scaled from the laboratory bench level to near-commercial levels of production. One company that has worked closely with the university, Biofine, donated the 10,000-square-foot B2P2 pilot plant to the university in 2017. After UMaine developed a proof-of-concept continuous process with the pilot plant, Biofine announced plans to open a $100 million home heating biofuel plant in Lincoln and already has a distribution agreement in hand with Sprague Energy. Another company, DG Fuels, is planning to build a $4 billion sustainable aviation biofuel facility at the former Loring Air Force Base in Limestone. Officials say it will use an existing pipeline to transport the fuel to Sears Island, from which it can be transported anywhere in the world.
Those kinds of research partnerships, UMaine officials say, are essential in bringing forest bioproducts out of the labs and onto the commercial stage.
“We have great researchers and they’re just going to keep doing that research on different things,” said Shane O’Neill, the university’s Forest Industry Business Development manager, describing the school’s “proof-of-concept” approach to product development. “But then you also need someone who can move it into that development stage, to go from beaker to bucket to barrel. The ability to demonstrate it at a precommercial scale – like what we are doing at the TRC, or at the Process Development Center (PDC) and the Advanced Structures and Composites Center (ASCC) – where a new technology is near-production size, is what gets the interest from the big companies and the investors.”
Proof of Concept
“Proof of concept” might also explain why a visitor to the ASCC can see a gorgeous, single-story, 3D-printed “biohome” sporting a futuristic Jetsons aesthetic just beyond the manufacturing facility’s drab walls. Made entirely from wood fibers and bioresins, the house is fully recyclable, and the printing process eliminates almost all waste from the construction process. Without any mechanical fasteners in the structure – no bolts, nails, screws, or tensioning rods – the house has withstood ice storms, blizzards, and minus 50-degree windchills in winter, and heat waves and a bomb cyclone that generated hurricane-force winds in summer.
“It has really good thermal density, so regardless of the weather outside, it’s never too hot or too cold,” said Susan MacKay, chief materials officer at the ASCC. “And that high thermal density means it won’t transmit moisture, so even here in Maine you’d never get any mold growth.”
In addition to gathering data measuring the impact of environmental factors such as temperature and wind, BioHome 3D is a kind of model home for entrepreneurs and investors who are hoping to address the state’s chronic housing shortages. In a state desperate for more construction workers and tradespeople, the prototype was printed indoors in a month, a process MacKay expects to shorten to two weeks or less once the center’s new “Factory of the Future” comes online in 2026. Compared to a 12-month-or-longer timeframe for stick-built houses, the savings are straightforward to calculate.
“I have a young MBA working with me, and her role is to build the business cases and financial models,” said MacKay. “But while cost is easily quantifiable, there’s more to research and understand. It’s all about developing the industry, developing the materials, the supply chain, getting the costs down by improving the equipment and the approach. And we’re doing that kind of research here now.”
In addition to 3D printing on a massive scale, the ASCC has been working to develop other bioproducts for the construction industry. It’s currently partnering with TimberHP, a Maine-based manufacturer of high-performance, sustainable wood fiber insulation products, on a project to bind wood fibers and nanocellulose to make a lighter, stronger, and more climate-friendly alternative to gypsum. The ASCC is also a national leader in cross-laminated timber (CLT) and other mass timber research.
“We’re taking different recipes, different additives, different adhesives, often things like bio-based adhesives, and then making product with it to evaluate it against traditional recipes,” said ASCC Wood Technologist Jake Snow, a recent UMaine graduate, of the work he oversees at the ASCC. “Our wood fiber pilot line is used basically to create the variations on recipes and then to evaluate them on a comparative basis. Our equipment is the same as what is used at the mill – just a bit smaller – so we can de-risk the process for them at a scale above bench top but below commercial.”
Nanocellulose Valley
Of all the forest bioproduct innovation emerging from the university today, nanocellulose fiber is attracting the lion’s share of media attention, industry interest, and research grants, Ward said.
Cellulose is a building block found in the fiber of every plant and tree, comprising carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen atoms, and is natural, biodegradable, abundant, and renewable. “Nano” refers to the size of the cellulose after it is processed: one nanometer is about 1/100,000th the width of a human hair. At that scale, cellulose nanofibrils (CNF) – the form of nanocellulose UMaine has been investigating and developing – look and behave quite differently than cellulose does at a macroscopic scale. For instance, CNF can act as a super adhesive, forming incredibly strong bonds with other materials. It also can create a nearly impermeable air barrier.
“CNF is made from traditional wood pulp – the kind of material that is used to make paper towels or tissue, for example,” said Colleen Walker, director of UMaine’s Process Development Center (PDC), which can produce two tons of nanocellulose fiber per day. “It starts as a very standard material, but we take it and do a mechanical process to refine it down. We don’t add water, we don’t take away water, but grinding it down beyond what you would for pulp leads to this really goopy, mashed potatoes–like material that’s 97 percent water. By doing this, you open up all these spaces for hydrogen bonding, and that’s what gives it all these really amazing properties.”
As such, CNF is not an end product but a platform technology on which many products might be built. UMaine scientists, whose nanocellulose research has led to 87 different patents on 12 related technologies, are exploring a wide array of new applications for the “goopy” material. According to Walker, engineering professors are intrigued with CNF’s high strength-to-weight ratio, biodegradability, and customizable surface chemistry. They’re investigating advanced composite materials as sustainable alternatives to traditional plastics, concrete, and metals in the transportation, shipping, and aerospace industries.
“Another use that we really love is that it can put out fires,” Walker said, describing a series of field tests in which CNF was used as a fire suppressant. “James Anderson, the researcher working on that, just takes this material, sprays it on burning pallets, and puts the fire out. The thing the firemen liked is that when they went back with their torch, they couldn’t relight the pallet because CNF is sticky. It puts this nice coat on top of the pallet to prevent it from reigniting.”
Other researchers are testing CNF’s unique optical and barrier properties for transparent flexible electronics – yes, there are computer chips utilizing nanocellulose – and sustainable packaging solutions, potentially revolutionizing how we interact with technology and consume goods. And the biomedical field is seeing promising advancements with nanocellulose-based drug delivery systems, tissue engineering scaffolds, and wound dressings, thanks to its biocompatibility and ability to mimic natural biological structures.
While many new companies begin with promising ideas, Walker said, those that hope to transform lab results into products are often stymied as they try to scale up from “beaker to bench to barrel.”
“They’ve done something in their kitchen and they think they can go right into production,” Walker said. “Usually, their concept falls apart once they move to a demonstration pilot scale. They’re using just simple things that they have in their lab, but when you scale it, you’ve got to go find the larger pieces of equipment. Or the way you did it on the lab bench just doesn’t work at larger scales, because sometimes they lack the knowledge to really understand what’s going on.”
To address that issue, much of the PDC’s work involves contracts with entrepreneurs and start-ups, providing expertise and access to commercial-scale equipment. The PDC has also become the world’s leading supplier of CNF. “We give it to researchers all over campus and all over the world because there’s no place where you can buy it,” Walker said. “We’re up to 5 tons of 1-pound samples shipped to 600 organizations in 50 countries. This has put Maine on the map.”
Crossing the Valley of Death
Being on the map is fine, but the ultimate goal – the one by which UMaine will be measured by its funders, trustees, and state officials – is whether it can help entrepreneurs move from interesting concepts to commercialization, boosting the state’s economy and creating new jobs. Can the school really help forest bioproduct innovators get there from here?
In the 2018 FOR/Maine report that Ward helped to write, the state set an ambitious goal (some would say audacious, given the pulp and paper industry’s contraction) of growing its forest products industry by 40 percent – from $8.5 billion annually to $12 billion – by the end of 2025. That growth would come from unprecedented collaboration between industry, government, academia, and the public to 1) attract capital investment, 2) accelerate innovation, 3) optimize existing manufacturing, 4) prepare the workforce, and 5) continue to manage forest resources sustainably.
Seven years after the FOR/Maine report’s release, having built out the cross-disciplinary and cross institutional collaborations that it called for, Ward acknowledged that he and his coauthors might have overemphasized the technology challenges and underestimated the business challenges that innovators and entrepreneurs face in scaling up. While economic data often lags years behind the calendar, Ward said that when they become available, the numbers forecast by the report – such as the total value of the forest products industry and employment figures – are likely to fall short of the marks.
Maine’s challenge wasn’t innovation. Instead, the real work would require “productizing” the innovation that was already happening within and beyond the university’s labs. To address that, FOR/Maine authors and collaborators – bolstered by institutions including the Rioux Institute and Maine Community College, and industry partners such as Idexx and SAPPI – collaborated on a follow-up to the FOR/Maine road map: the Maine Forest Bioproducts Advanced Manufacturing Tech Hub.
Based in large part on the “beakers to buckets to barrels” philosophy already at work in the TRC, PDC, and ASCC, the Tech Hub plan had two components. The first, led by the Maine Technology Institute, would focus on supporting the broader industry’s efforts in developing and producing climate-friendly, forest-based biomaterials. Specifically, it would help early-stage companies with mentoring, collaborative opportunities, and grants to develop innovative technology and products. The second component, led by UMaine, would work on accelerating the commercialization and scaling of these new technologies through a dedicated maturation program. Both components, Ward said, would aim to “help entrepreneurs cross the Valley of Death where all good ideas go to die.”
It’s an accurate, if depressing, characterization. Essentially, the Valley of Death describes a journey entrepreneurs must take to move their idea through prototyping, pilot testing, proof of concept, and full-on commercialization. The problem is that to attract the huge capital investment needed to reach commercial scale, innovators need ways to fund the early, unprofitable stages. Friends and family can sometimes provide a little money. Early-stage “angel” investors can provide more resources but are always looking to minimize risk. As for venture capital, Ward said, “If you have the capacity to invest, you are probably looking for innovation that is proven and ready to go.”
An estimated 30 to 35 percent of all start-ups fail because they can’t attract sufficient funds to reach the commercialization stage. Ward said UMaine’s proposed maturation program would de-risk new forest bioproduct ventures by expanding programs at the university’s existing centers – including the ASCC and the TRC – to help companies with similar technical barriers validate new bioproduct ideas, test processes, scale production, and meet safety standards. In short, it sought to provide investors with the confidence that these prototypes were ready to be scaled up and commercialized – bypassing the treacherous journey through the Valley of Death.
In early 2025, the U.S. Department of Commerce awarded the Maine Forest Bioproducts Advanced Manufacturing Tech Hub a $22 million grant as part of the Fiscal Year 2025 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). But almost as soon as the announcement circulated in the press, the new Trump administration signaled that the grant money might not arrive, as it moved to defund many federal grants and contracts to state and private universities.
As this article went to press, the Tech Hub remained unfunded. In May, the ASCC laid off nine engineers, scientists, and technicians, citing cutbacks and cancellations of federal contracts. Around the same time, the U.S. Department of Commerce’s web page announcing the award had been taken down; according to the website, the information contained in the online press release “has been considered archived and will no longer be updated.”
“The contracts have yet to be completed,” Ward said. “And you never know with these programs – each administration decides which programs they want to keep or leave.” But he added, “We’ll find a way to keep our programs moving forward.”