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Pellet Problem: Biomass & Climate
03.16.2016 / BY
Aleszu Bajak
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A
new report sent yesterday to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission argues that those labels are misleading — not just to governments seeking to meet carbon reduction commitments, but to investors in companies that produce woody biomass.
The report, drafted by the non-profit environmental groups
Partnership for Policy Integrityand
Dogwood Alliance, takes specific aim at biomass giant
Enviva Partners, which owns six wood pellet manufacturing facilities in the southern United States and is one of the country’s largest exporters to power plants in Europe. The report claims that Enviva “is misrepresenting actual emissions from burning wood pellets as fuel by widely representing their product as ‘reducing’ carbon emissions compared to burning coal without providing necessary context for understanding the limitations of that claim.”
The report takes issue with two major assumptions on biomass: 1) That burning wood for electricity production reduces planet warming emissions compared to coal, and 2) So long as new trees are planted to replace the biomass that’s being burned, net emissions from biomass power are basically zero.
But those claims are too simplistic, some scientists say.
“To say that biomass is carbon neutral is really trying to hide the ball from the public and decision makers,” said Sami Yassa, a senior scientist with the National Resource Defense Council who recently analyzed Enviva’s wood pellets. “My
study … flatly disproves that claim. We show that biomass produces emissions that greatly exceed coal and those emissions persist in the atmosphere for decades and decades.”
William Schlesinger, a biogeochemist and president emeritus of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, agreed, pointing out that “the CO2 from the combustion of wood is released almost instantly, whereas the growth and regrowth of wood takes decades.”
Biomass proponents argue that good forest management — including planting new trees that will grow and trap the carbon being released when woody material is burned — is the answer. This can be technically true, some scientists say, but both the math and the implementation are complicated, in part owing to the timescales needed to regrow forests, and also because the types of trees and woody material being harvested really matters. Harvesting old-growth forests for pellets, for example, would have vastly different consequences than using construction debris, lumber mill waste, or even invasive weeds like switchgrass.
Burning grasses or young trees, Schlesinger said, “can be helpful in reducing anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Burning mature and old-growth trees is not.”
We have no idea where the wood pellets produced by Enviva are derived,” he added, “and some direct evidence [suggests] that they are coming from large, old trees.”
Kent Jenkins Jr., a spokesman for Enviva, disputed that point in an email message.
“The composition of our wood pellets varies, depending on the types of wood available to our six different plants,” Jenkins said. “What does not vary is our overall sourcing policy. We use low-grade or leftover wood that cannot be milled into high-value products such as lumber or furniture. This includes pulpwood; diseased, crooked, rotten or undersized trees; limbs, tops and branches; wood chips; and sawdust. “
Jenkins also dismissed the current report on Enviva as a publicity stunt, and in a prepared statement the company countered most of the group’s core allegations, pointing to what Enviva considers a
solid scientific basis for using
carefully harvested biomass.
(The company’s full statement is
here.)
Over the last few years,
several major studies have concluded that burning biomass, under certain circumstances, can produce even more carbon dioxide than burning coal. And last August, the Environmental Protection Agency
bucked industry pressure and established that
not all biomass was carbon neutral (page 225), stating that “carbon neutrality is not an appropriate a priori assumption.”
....****in retards...they all need a bullet in the head!
