Burned by oil, Mainers look to wood

Instead of waiting in line at a tollbooth, Mainers battled crowds in wood stove showrooms over the holiday weekend, trying to cope with high fuel prices sweeping the nation in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Oil production in the Gulf of Mexico slowly is coming back on line, but it could be weeks or longer before the industry reaches any semblance of normality, federal officials said late last week.

And so, Mainers adjusted.

Last week, Gov. John Baldacci gave up his sport utility vehicle in favor of a more efficient sedan, Unity Raceway announced that all events would be canceled until Columbus Day, and gas stations all over the state scrawled 3s on bits of paper to post prices they never expected to be charging.

With prices already relatively high when Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, the loss of refinery capability and the temporary closure of two fuel pipelines that supply the Northeast did cause a price spike nationwide.

However, with gas going for as much as $6 per gallon in some parts of the country, price gouging is an ever-present possibility. During the long Labor Day weekend, the Maine Attorney General’s Office monitored gas prices with the assistance of state and local police officers.

Dozens of complaints were lodged, some of prices a dollar or more higher than the statewide average, which seemed “a little out-of-whack,” Chuck Dow, spokesman for the Attorney General’s Office, said Monday.

However, confusion over some pumps that lack the capability to display prices in excess of $2.99 per gallon may have accounted for the most extreme complaints, Dow said, adding that he intends to follow up on each of the reports this week.

Some simply stayed home this holiday weekend to conserve gasoline.

Others have looked to energy efficiency or alternative fuels for relief. In Maine, 75 percent of households use either oil or natural gas, while just 6 percent heat their homes with wood, according to the 2000 Census.

“It’s been busy every day. It’s been like a used car lot,” Boyce Holman, a salesman at The County Stove Shop in Caribou, said Monday.

Most customers want pellet stoves, smaller systems that can be used as a supplement to oil or natural gas systems to reduce the need for fuel, he said.

“They say they’ve got to do something about the oil prices,” Holman said of the 40 or so people who visited his shop this week to look into wood heat.

At $1,799 to $3,000 apiece, the stoves aren’t cheap, but they’re a lot more affordable than a complete overhaul of a wood-burning furnace, he said.

This latest spike continues a boom in interest in wood fuels that started earlier this year as gas prices rose. Sales of wood stoves in the Northeast are up 80 percent over last year, according to one industry group.

On the other side of Caribou, Brenda Bourgoine of Burning Log Stove Shop is seeing the same phenomenon – customers are coming in, but they want pellet stoves, not the larger traditional wood stoves and wood furnaces she has sold since 1976.

“This is the third energy crunch I’ve been through,” she said. “A lot of our customers already have a wood furnace. We installed a lot of [wood-burning] central heating systems here in the ’70s.”

As people clean out their furnaces and prepare to burn wood, some for the first time in years, the cost of firewood has followed oil prices to record highs.

In Aroostook County, one homeowner reported paying $150 per cord, a third higher than last year. In southern Maine, dealers are reporting prices in excess of $200 per cord – about $75 higher than last year. In New Hampshire, one dealer advertised seasoned (dried) wood for $300 per cord.

Compared with fuel oil, which would cost about $500 for a comparable amount of heat, the high wood prices seem reasonable, buyers said.

But investors are betting on lower fuel prices in the months to come as the Gulf of Mexico oil industry begins its long recovery.

On Friday, federal officials announced that the region was operating at about 12 percent of its oil production capacity and 23 percent of its natural gas capacity. Nationwide that accounts for about 42 million gallons of oil, or 10 percent of America’s daily consumption, that was not being produced as a result of Katrina.

Eight refineries remained closed this weekend but a handful have reopened as electricity is restored. And the Plantation and Colonial pipelines, which carry oil and gas to the East Coast population centers, have reopened, although they are not yet operating at full capacity, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.