Data for the research was obtained from contractor records.
Very little credible information is available on the value retention, service life and annual use of chipping machinery. In 2017, researchers surveyed the records kept by 50 contractors offering biomass chipping services. The machine fleet and operations in the survey could be taken as representative for most of Europe, where the biomass sector is well established and is facing further expansion.
Data collection included the whole chipping unit, comprised of chipper, carrier and loader. Manually-fed units were excluded from the survey. The equipment surveyed had a service life of up to and exceeding 10,000 hours and 10 years, which addressed any concerns regarding poor durability. The results showed that value retention was good and may exceed that of other mainstream forestry equipment. Engine power was the main consideration to predict purchase price and productivity. Engine power could explain most of the variability (>80%) in the purchase price and productivity information. The results also pointed at the essential equivalence in price and productivity between PTO-driven (i.e., tractor powered) and independent-engine chippers, once differences in engine power are accounted for. However, the distribution of purchase price between different components of the chipping unit was different between the two unit types, with the chipper accounting for a larger proportion of the total investment in independent-engine units. Machine power was also different, with most PTO-driven units being significantly smaller than independent-engine units, due to the limitations of existing tractors. Furthermore, half of the carriers assigned to a PTO-driven unit were subject to flexible use, i.e., they were not solely used for chipping work.
The research was published in Forests 2017, 8(12). The authors were R Spinelli, L Eliasson and N Magagnotti. Source