Fuel prices usher in new coal age

When he found out how high the price of natural gas would be this winter, Scott Rose, of Dorchester, decided that the fuel of choice for 2006 would be the fuel of choice of 1906: Coal.

After picking up an old coal stove last year with an eye to replacing his messy wood stove, Rose decided this winter that it would be worth the hassle of switching to coal and connecting the vent to run out his chimney.

He will still pay KeySpan Energy Delivery New England for gas. But for $330, he willl get 2,000 pounds of coal, to be delivered this week to his condominium, in neat bags on pallets in his driveway.

That delivery should last him two or three months. And, he hopes, it may take up to 80 percent off his December and January gas bills.

''It's just a matter of economics," Rose said. ''I can't afford $500 a month for gas, and that's what we're looking at."

Companies that sell coal and wood stoves and fuel for them say they are seeing lots of people like Rose.

And those people are flocking to alternatives of the 19th-century vintage.

Some businesses report that sales have more than doubled, and in some cases the shops are sold out of stoves, and will be out of stock until January.

Heating oil costs are projected to rise by 30 percent over last winter, and by up to 50 percent for natural gas. The increases are driven by the relentless growth in international energy demand, and by the Gulf hurricane disruptions to energy supplies. Massachusetts homeowners who heat with oil are expected to pay, on average, $400 more this winter than last year, while homeowners using natural gas are expected to spend $800 or more, state officials say.

At Energy Unlimited of New England in Wayland, which sells wood stoves and bags of special sawdust-based pellets that make for neater fuel than split logs, the owner, John Sullivan, said sales are up more than 200 percent since July, compared with a year earlier. ''People are shocked by their oil prices," Sullivan said.

Mike Tavalone, manager of the Vermont Castings Factory Store on Route 9 in Natick, which sells wood stoves made at a foundry in Randolph, Vt., said his store will not even have pellet stoves in stock until the middle of January.

Wood log stoves, Tavalone said, are sold out until December. Overall, business has doubled compared with figures from last year. Wood and pellet stoves typically sell from $800 to $4,000, based on model and installation costs.

Brian Williams, president of Williams Coal & Oil in Braintree, an 86-year-old family business, said in recent months he has heard from dozens of people who bought coal stoves during the energy crises of the 1970s, later mothballed them and are ''now taking their stove out of the barn or out of the garage and saying, 'I'm going to hook it up because of the economics.' "

Williams, who has delivered coal this month as far afield as Topsfield, Medway, and Attleboro, estimated that the total number of coal-stove owners in Greater Boston is in the ''low thousands."

The 2000 federal census found that among Massachusetts's 2.4 million households, 43.9 percent primarily used natural gas heat, 39.4 percent heating oil, 12.4 percent electricity (which includes many unoccupied summer homes), 2.6 percent bottled gas like propane, 0.8 percent wood, and 0.1 percent coal. Other sources -- and unheated homes -- accounted for 0.7 percent.

While only a tiny minority of Bay State households use wood, some consumers have complained about shortages of wood pellets. A ton of pellets costs about $250 to $300 with delivery and can last anywhere from three to eight weeks depending how cold it is.

''The fuel situation is terrible," said Lou Oravec, a Billerica resident who said he called two dozen sold-out suppliers before finally landing a three-ton load of pellets earlier this month.

Darryl Rose, vice president of marketing for Energex Pellet Fuel Inc., which runs factories in Pennsylvania and in Quebec, said pellet companies ''are doing all we can to supply the needs of the consumer, but the key is patience." Rose said Energex is urging people to buy only a one- or two-month supply of pellets, rather than a full winter's worth, to stretch supplies.

A century ago wood and coal stoves or furnaces used to be the sole source of heat for most New England homes.

But as cleaner, cheaper, and more convenient alternatives, such as natural gas and oil, became available, virtually all homeowners switched sources. Today, people with wood and coal stoves most often use them to offset heating oil or gas heat furnace systems.

Another reason stoves fell out of favor was that wood and coal supplies tend to be expensive. But price trends make the resources competitive with oil and gas.

Even if prices are roughly equal, some find they like the direct, intense radiant heat of a stove in their living room.

Eileen Flannery of Arlington, who installed a pellet stove two weeks ago for $4,200, said she thinks she and her husband will save $1,000 on oil this winter, perhaps as much as $2,000. She finds the stove, in the living room of her Cape, is warming all three upstairs bedrooms as much as she needs.

''My oil has not been on," Flannery said. ''The heat is just wonderful."

As far as the hassle factor goes, coal and pellet stove owners note that their fuels, which come in 40-pound bags, are far easier to deal with than firewood.

Stoves have to be fed once or twice a day -- although thermostat devices that automatically feed fuel from a hopper into the stove are available.

Stoves also need to be cleaned of ash anywhere from once a month to once a week, depending on frequency of use.

From an environmental standpoint, Seth Kaplan, a senior attorney with the Conservation Law Foundation, said that if a few thousand New Englanders switch to coal or wood pellets from significantly cleaner-burning gas or oil, it is not likely to have a major impact on air quality.

''It certainly would be a very unfortunate thing if New England started to look like Victorian England, because we know that particulate matter -- soot -- is very dangerous," Kaplan said. But he added: ''The impulse behind what they're doing is very understandable. They're looking for an alternative fuel."

Peter J. Howe can be reached at howe@globe.com.