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Pacific Northwest Research Station
Portland Forestry Sciences Lab 620 SW Main St., Suite 400
Portland, OR 97205

(503) 808-2000

Fuel Reduction Cost Simulator

Overview

FRCS, the Fuel Reduction Cost Simulator, uses simulation to estimate the cost of forest operations that are undertaken to reduce forest fuel loads by cutting and removing trees for solid wood products or chips. It can also be used to estimate the cost of collecting and chipping forest residues. The resulting “dirty chips” might be used as feedstock for electrical power generation or for the production of biofuels or other bio-based products.

FRCS is a spreadsheet application developed with Microsoft® Excel® 2002. Its compatibility with spreadsheet software other than Microsoft Excel has not been tested. FRCS has, however, been tested successfully with Excel 1997-2003 and with Excel 2007.

System and Software Requirements

Microsoft Windows 2000, XP, Vista, or Windows 7
Microsoft Excel 2002, 2003, or 2007

Downloads

1. FRCS VARIANTS FOR DIFFERENT PARTS OF THE UNITED STATES (each is a single Microsoft® Excel® workbook file; they vary in size from 1.54-1.66 MB). Note: These variants of FRCS were last updated on 26 March 2010. If you are currently using an older version of FRCS, we suggest that you download and use one of these latest versions.

	FRCS-North	Intended for use in the Northeast and North-Central regions: Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Wisconsin, and West Virginia
	FRCS-South	Intended for use in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia
	FRCS-West	Intended for use in Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming

2. DOCUMENTATION FOR FRCS

Documentation downloads are listed in the table below. Please note the following:

Excel 2007 has some important security features that differ from previous versions of Excel, and if you are using that version you should read the Excel 2007 information sheet.
If you want to use FRCS in batch processing mode, please be sure to read the batch processing information sheet because the data formats have changed from earlier versions of FRCS.
You may wish to update the cost data used internally by FRCS. The download versions have costs that were current as of December 2007. The information note on updating costs tells you where cost data are located within FRCS and provides suggestions on how to update the different elements. The two subsidiary files on labor cost provide additional information on logging wages.

Download Item		File Type	File Size
Users Guide for FRCS		Adobe® PDF	1,225.2 KB
ReadMe File		Microsoft® Word® DOC	25.0 KB
Information for Users of Excel 2007		Adobe® PDF	1,360.7 KB
Instructions on Batch Processing with FRCS		Adobe® PDF	105.6 KB
Updating Equipment, Labor, and Fuel Costs in FRCS		Adobe® PDF	18.7 KB
	2001-2007 Logging Wage Data Spreadsheet	Microsoft® Excel® XLS	187.0 KB
	Logging Wage Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics	Adobe® PDF	42.9 KB

Single archive with all documentation files except the User's Guide		ZIP archive	1,532.8 KB

For questions or assistance with FRCS, contact Jamie Barbour: jbarbour01 (at) fs.fed.us.

US Forest Service - Pacific Northwest Research Station
Last Modified: Tuesday, 28 December 2010 at 14:21:01 EST