The Portland Chip Terminal operates 24 hours a day with more than two million green metric tonnes of hardwood and softwood chip exported each year to China and Japan.
Midway managing director Tony McKenna has a simple philosophy for the way the company sees the timber industry. “We’d like to see more trees in the ground,” he said. Source: Timberbiz
Tony McKenna.
Midway is a leading Australian forestry company with a head office in Geelong, Victoria, founded in 1980. Midway has business units across Australia and is involved in all aspects of forestry, with a lead focus of woodfibre processing and exporting, plantation project management and carbon abatement projects.
“We’re committed to try to grow the estate where it makes sense,” Mr McKenna said.
“And I believe that there is country where it would benefit from having trees in the ground.”
To encourage the development of plantation forestry and expedite sequestration of atmospheric carbon, Midway has developed a Carbon Project Agreement, a commercial offering for Landholders who are keen to support commercial forest production and participate in Australia’s expanding carbon reduction market through the generation of carbon offsets.
Midway sources hardwood plantation and softwood plantation from Victoria and the Green Triangle region in South Australia and Midway Tasmania sources native regrowth and hardwood and softwood plantation across Tasmania.
Plantation Management Partners sources hardwood and softwood plantation from the Tiwi Island Forestry Project on Melville Island in the Northern Territory. Wood is sourced from Responsible Wood, FSC certified suppliers and non-certified suppliers.
Combined the group manages over 90,000 ha of plantation estate.
“The hardwood plantation estate peaked at around 970,000ha in Australia in 2010, and a lot of that was driven by the MIS,” Mr McKenna said.
“A good part of it was in the Green Triangle in Western Victoria more generally. And a lot of that was driven by MIS, but not all of it.”
Since then, the plantings have decreased by 250,000ha with some of the best country reverting to primarily grazing agriculture.
The hardwood timber harvested in Western Victoria goes to paper mills in China and Japan, making renewable recyclable products such as paper products and plastic replacement packaging.
It is currently chipped in field at sites such as Myamyn north of Portland, and in Geelong.
The bulk of the product is exported out of Portland.
“There’s very little being used domestically,” Mr McKenna said.
He said there was some replanting.
“There’s a couple of things happening with the economics around a little bit of improved longer-term demand for the woodchips and the carbon story,” he said.
“Carbon generates another source of income from a plantation and that helps in country that’s really marginal agricultural country.”
Midway doesn’t do any of its own harvesting and haul operations, relying on local contractors.
Logs are generally harvested, cut to length, and then brought into Midway’s static mills.
“Having the infrastructure there makes it cheaper for us to do it that way,” Mr McKenna said.
