Key Takeaway: The burning of biomass, trees, plants and animal poop, was once seen as a renewable fuel and answer to the climate crisis. It’s now getting serious pushback.
Burning wood pellets, crops, animal waste other materials falling under the “biomass” label, are touted as renewable, environmentally friendly sources of energy, and the U.K. is among governments that have embraced the fuel.
But don’t be fooled, environmentalists warn.
While developed nations moved to coal during the Industrial Revolution, in much of the world the burning of wood for heat has never gone away. Worse, biomass is seeing a resurgence as policy makers search for replacements for fossil fuels, especially in the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, Britain.
Biomass use increased after the European Union set a target in 2009 that renewable sources would account for 20% of energy in 2020, and included biomass on the renewables list. Last year, the bloc agreed to an updated version of the directive with members pledging to source at least 32% of energy from renewables in 2030, when the EU promised to cut greenhouse emissions by 40%.
Scientists argue that biomass should never have been on the list, due to the long time trees need to grow and the deforestation resulting from harvesting.
“The European Union made a critically flawed assumption in its Renewable Energy Directive: That since trees grow back, biomass is carbon neutral,” Sami Yassa, a scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council, told Karma. “So, biomass can be treated as carbon neutral in EU renewables policy, which resulted in lavish subsidies.”
The EU targets have spurred a wide range of projects, including the push that made Germany the world’s fourth-biggest producer of electricity from solar and the inauguration of the world’s biggest offshore wind project off the English coast in August. Environmentalists have cheered many projects but not the conversion of old coal plants to burn biomass alone or in combination with other fuels. For instance, The Drax power station, the U.K.’s biggest, has been converted from coal to burning both biomass and coal.
Renewables were responsible for 17.5% of the region’s energy consumption in 2017, up from 8.5% in 2005. Biomass accounts for about 60% of the bloc’s renewable use, according to the European Commission. In the U.K., biomass was responsible for 11% of total energy consumption last year.
A U.K. Channel 4 program called “Dispatches” last year found that Drax’s switch from coal to wood was responsible for the loss of hardwood forests in the southeastern U.S. and cost British energy consumers more than $865 million each year through a surcharge on their electricity bills. The company’s annual report showed that more than 60% of the pellet feedstock in 2018 came from the U.S.
U.S. Forests
It’s the clear cutting of woodlands in the southeastern U.S. to supply power plants in Europe with wood pellets that has angered environmentalists. Forests are also being felled in the Carpathians and the Baltic states to produce pellets for the same plants.
North Carolina exports more wood pellets than any U.S. state, helping make the timber industry that state’s third-biggest source of carbon emissions, according to a study earlier this month by two environmental groups. The logs are sent to plants where they are ground, heated, dehydrated and formed into pellets that are one or two inches long. The pellets are then trucked to ports, and then loaded on ships for their journey to Europe’s power plants.
“There’s a giant sucking sound across the Atlantic now, as pellet manufacturers, primarily in the Southeast built giant pellet plants to supply European utilities.” Yassa said. “The dirty, polluting manufacturing plants are largely located in poor, disadvantaged communities of color.”
Enviva Partners, LLP, the world’s biggest wood pellet producer, didn’t return calls for comment. The company has seven plants in the Southeastern U.S. that produce more than three million metric tons of pellets a year. The pellets burned in European power plants that used to use coal will enable them to cut their lifetime carbon footprint by almost 80%, according to Enviva’s website.
The EU’s practice of treating biomass as carbon neutral followed a similar mistake from the 1990s, when the Kyoto Protocol was signed in 1997. The protocol considered the practice carbon neutral because trees grow back, and following treaties accepted that explanation.
“The dirty, polluting manufacturing plants are largely located in poor, disadvantaged communities of color.”
The EU’s practice of treating biomass as carbon neutral followed a similar mistake from the 1990s, when the Kyoto Protocol was signed in 1997. The protocol considered the practice carbon neutral because trees grow back, and following treaties accepted that explanation.
Most scientists believe that this is a faulty assumption.
The harvesting of trees to make pellets for burning almost always produces more emissions than using fossil fuel, because trees won’t sequester carbon while growing and the carbon held in the soil is lost when trees are cut, according to Chatham House, a U.K. think tank. The report also states that because wood is less dense and holds more moisture than fossil fuels, it usually emits more greenhouse gases when used for energy.
“There’s less energy content in biomass than in coal or oil, so you have to burn a lot more of it,” William Schlesinger, president emeritus of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies and an EPA Science Advisory Board member, told Karma. “The forest needs between 40 and 100 years before it can absorb the same amount of carbon that’s released when you cut trees to burn. You‘ve incurred a carbon debt that has a payback period that lasts decades.”
Also, he added, “When you ship it across the ocean from the U.S. you use a lot of fuel oil, which adds a lot of carbon to the atmosphere.”
Carbon Neutral
Scientists agree that biomass can be carbon neutral in certain cases. For instance, when a Scandanavian paper plant or sawmill burns waste that would soon decompose, instead of using fuel oil. This isn’t the case when a forest is felled to make pellets.
Replacing old-growth forests with fast-growing plantations results in higher carbon emissions and has a negative impact on biodiversity. The native forests of the Southeastern U.S. are full of hardwood trees, especially oaks and hickories.The clear-cut forests are usually replaced by plantations of loblolly pines.
A group of European and U.S. plaintiffs took the EU to court in March to challenge the bloc’s use of biomass from forests in its renewable energy directive. The plaintiffs claim that the EU has failed to take into account scientific evidence showing that the harvesting and burning of forest biomass exacerbates climate change.
Biomass use hasn’t taken off in the U.S. Biomass and waste fuel burning accounted for about 2% of electricity generated in the country, and only a third of that came from wood solids, according to the Energy Information Administration. The Environmental Protection Agency announced in April that it would start counting the burning of “forest biomass” as carbon neutral. If the U.S. were to enact a plan to curb carbon emissions, this change could lead to a surge in biomass, along with solar and wind.
Schlesinger doesn’t see any such plan coming under President Trump.
“This is probably the only reason we haven’t seen growth in biomass here,” Schlesinger said.
