Most commercial woodlands/ forests in Aberdeenshire are cultivated for timber with firewood and garden cover (wood-chip and bark) as by products. The timber is sold for house building materials and frequently for fencing as the local farming businesses provide a ready market for these products.
Recently, because of high fuel-oil costs, there has been considerable interest in and development of the bio-fuel market. Initially this was using compressed wood pellets for use as an easily stored fuel in residential and small business heating systems: More recently there has been an expansion of commercial heating enterprises supplying heat and hot water for large housing estates, business centres and light industry. These larger heating systems use rough woodchip as the fuel, which is readily supplied from local forests, reducing fuel transport costs considerably. As mature forest areas are felled for timber, it is organised that small stacks of tree trunks are left and stored at location and only called upon when needed as the fuel for the biomass heating system: Shredding of the tree trunks into wood-chip takes place at the forest location, meaning that transportation, in regular trucks, can be much simpler than moving full tree-trunks along small country roads.