Increasing demand for wood pellets leaves Nova Scotians scrambling

HALIFAX – An increasing demand for wood pellets is exceeding local supply and has left some Nova Scotians scrambling this winter.

Vehicles carrying more than 100 people looking for wood pellets lined up around Payzant Home Hardware Building Centre in Lower Sackville, N.S., long before the store opened Tuesday.

“It’s a long wait, but it’s worth it. When you have no pellets around you have to be in the lineup,” said Cheryl Sckkulic, who was the second customer in line after arriving just after 6 a.m.

The demand for pellets is so high that Payzant recently implemented a new way to sell them because things had gotten out of control.

“A few weeks ago we had a truck arrive in the afternoon and it was just chaos for a couple of hours, so we realized then we had to do something different,” said store general manager Matthew Payzant.

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The store sold tickets outside to people who wanted to purchase pellets. Customers then came inside the store to pay, before pulling their vehicle in line. There was a set limit of 10 bags per customer.

“Most people would be taking them 10, 20, 30 bags at a time,” Payzant said. “In fact, most years, we’re delivering pallet-loads with our Moffett truck all season long. We haven’t been able to do that for six weeks or more now.”

“It’s pretty crazy,” said Kim Artz, who added that finding pellets in the Halifax area is nearly impossible. “I’m trying to get about five bags each week and then I run out, so the last two days I’ve been without pellets. We heat up part of our house exclusively with pellets, so it gets pretty grim and you can see the electricity bills going up.”

Artz says he typically uses one bag of wood pellets per day, and has never seen a shortage like this.

“I mean, the way it’s been, never had it this bad, where you don’t have pellets for a couple days a week and your actively searching for them all the time.”

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Around 9 a.m., a flatbed truck carrying 1,600 bags of wood pellets arrived at Payzant Home Hardware. The inventory was sold out before the pellets were unloaded.

Matthew Payzant said he could probably sell four times as many wood pellets with the number of people in need.

“This has been a cold, hard winter that started late, and in prior years, people haven’t had to stock up the way they had to,” he said. “This year it’s just caught everybody off-guard and everybody has been scrambling to keep up.”

Tweet This Click to share quote on Twitter: "This has been a cold, hard winter that started late, and in prior years, people haven't had to stock up the way they had to," he said. "This year it's just caught everybody off-guard and everybody has been scrambling to keep up."

Eastern Embers said 95 per cent of this year’s pellet production from the Nova Scotia plant has remained in Atlantic Canada. The company said inventory levels have been depleted by a long and cold previous winter, which has carried over into another one with extreme conditions.

The company said pellet consumption is outpacing industry production elsewhere too, including central Canada and New England. It said it is continuingto produce pellets 24 hours a day, seven days a week and is looking at ways to address the short-term supply challenges.