Fuel consumption in logging operations in Sweden

ABSTRACT Fuel consumption is an important factor affecting both costs and environmental impact of a logging operation. Traditionally, fuel consumption has been estimated through studies of individual machines, through follow-up studies based on company records or through questionnaires. Using automatically collected data from machine computers, in the form of standardized harvester production (hpr), forwarder production (fpr), and machine operational monitoring (mom) files, offers a new way to estimate fuel consumption. This study aims to estimate fuel consumption in cut-to-length logging operations based on automatically recorded data, and to evaluate whether this data is sufficient on its own or needs to be supplemented with additional data. Average fuel consumption per harvested m3 varied from 1.4 to 3.4 l, depending on machine size, tree size, and transport distance. The study shows that fuel consumption per machine type or logging team can largely be explained using the machine data. Classification of machines into size classes is a challenge, as machine configurations vary between individual machines, but such classification may not be needed. Forwarded volumes are a source of error, since this data is manually fed into the machine computer and, therefore, often deviates from the felled volume in a harvesting block. This will probably cause a slight overestimation of forwarder fuel consumption.