The Biden administration has selected Oregon and Washington as a regional hub for mass timber, which could unlock millions of dollars in federal support for the industry.

The Pacific Northwest Mass Timber Tech Hub was one of 31 technology and innovation hubs recently designated by the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration to create jobs and strengthen the nation’s economy.

Mass timber refers to construction materials in commercial buildings made out of wood, rather than steel or concrete. An example is cross-laminated timber, or CLT, made by gluing lumber into structural panels up to 20 inches thick.

The first CLT buildings were constructed in Europe in the 1990s. The world’s tallest mass timber building was finished last year in Milwaukee, Wis., a 25-story luxury apartment high-rise assembled by Timberlab, part of Swinerton Builders in Portland.

Oregon State University will lead the hub, and is now eligible to apply for $500 million in grants from the CHIPS and Science Act for specific projects.

Iain Macdonald, director of the TallWood Design Institute — a partnership between OSU and the University of Oregon dedicated to mass timber research and development — said he envisions the region will become a global industry leader in 10 years.

“We’re kind of the granddaddies of mass timber in the U.S.,” Macdonald told the Capital Press. “We have a lot of those players.”

Success stories

The hub is just the latest success story for mass timber in the Northwest. Last year, the Oregon Mass Timber Coalition, which includes the TallWood Design Institute, secured $41.4 million from the federal “Build Back Better Regional Challenge.”

Part of that funding is being used to build a factory at the Port of Portland’s Terminal 2 that will specialize in creating mass timber panels for modular homes to address the city’s affordable housing crisis.

Another $24 million is set aside for the TallWood Design Institute to continue testing the structural, seismic and energy performance of mass timber buildings.

Macdonald said the institute also received $1 million from the National Science Foundation to consult with mass timber manufacturers and building contractors, and come up with a plan for addressing the biggest challenges they face.

“For many, they are starting out with their first mass timber project. It’s a little bit of a scary thing,” Macdonald said. “They go searching for data, and it’s not as readily available as it is for those other materials.”

One company, Freres Engineered Wood in Lyons, Ore., branched out into mass timber due to increasing competition from imported plywood. The company patented its own value-added product, known as mass plywood, used in construction projects including the 9-acre mass timber roof under installation at Portland International Airport.

Rob Freres, the company’s president, said they support OSU’s pursuit of funding to propel the industry.

“We recently provided the Mass Ply panels to construct the tallest wood building in the Western U.S. with less labor and floors completed in less than a week,” Freres said. “Soon our Mass Ply panels will be used in the tallest wood building in the world. This carbon-storing building material is the future, and the future has arrived.”

Mass timber benefits

According to a study published in 2019, replacing concrete and steel with CLT in building construction has the potential to reduce global warming potential by 26.5%.

Because mass timber products can be made using smaller diameter trees that otherwise wouldn’t be valuable to sawmills, Macdonald said the industry can help accelerate forest thinning projects to reduce wildfire risk by providing a market for the wood.

Those projects, in turn, can replace lost jobs in historically timber-dependent rural communities while adding new housing and development in growing urban areas, Macdonald added.

“There’s a lot of innovation that can still happen in this space,” he said.

Officials in Oregon and Washington praised the hub, with Washington Gov. Jay Inslee calling it “a well-deserved recognition of our region’s efforts to bridge our legacy timber industries with our innovative sustainable building materials sector.”

U.S. Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., said mass timber is key to a low-carbon, sustainable future.

”The Pacific Northwest is poised to play a critical role in the development of sustainable building materials,” Blumenauer said. “This will further reinforce our progress and our prospects for the future.”

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