The increase of woody biomass for energy has reduced dependence on fossil fuels in the global pul and paper industry, reports the Wood Resource Quarterly. Since 2006, energy generated from biomass has gone up over 50 percent, last year accounting for 18 percent of the total energy consumption by this industry sector.The annual consumption of biomass used for energy generation by the global pulp industry in 2009 was an estimated 75 million tons. While the biggest increases have occurred in Latin America, Asia and Oceania, mills in North America and Europe are still the largest users of biomass material.Not surprisingly, the leading biomass-consuming countries by volume are regions with large areas of forests, including Canada, USA, Brazil and Sweden. Perhaps somewhat unexpectedly, pulp mills in Finland, New Zealand, Australia, France and Germany have consumed fairly small volumes of biomass up until now, as reported in the Wood Resource Quarterly.As a percentage of total energy usage, the share of energy generated from biomass has, on a global basis, increased from 16% in 2006 to 18% in 2009. Norway and Sweden took the lead in biomass usage at 42 and 38 percent, respectively, followed by Canada, Brazil and New Zealand. At the other end of the spectrum are China, Australia, Japan, Spain and Germany, all of which are countries where the pulp mills on average used less than ten percent renewable energy at their plants last year.