An enormous amount of wood is harvested from forests in the southern US to be burned in Europe as “renewable energy.” Now the industry wants to open more wood-pellet facilities in the Pacific Northwest. In this episode, Rita Frost of NRDC and Brenna Bell of 350 PDX explain why that’s a bad idea and why wood pellets aren’t as renewable as they look.
Text transcript:
David Roberts
Not a lot of people are aware of this, but a) over half of what counts as renewable energy in the European Union is bioenergy, i.e., wood pellets burned for heat or electricity, and b) most of those wood pellets come from North American forests, especially in the Southeastern US and western Canada.
Now the industry is pushing to open new wood pellet facilities in the Pacific Northwest, manufacturing and exporting pellets made from Pacific Northwest wood to the EU and increasingly, Asia.
Climate and forest activists are pushing back. They say the carbon math on wood pellets doesn't add up, poor communities suffer the emissions generated by wood burning, and the industry uses more wood from natural forests than it lets on. To get into the details of this faux climate solution, I am talking to Rita Frost of NRDC, who has been involved in conflicts over wood pellets for a decade, and Brenna Bell of 350 PDX, a forest activist.
We're going to discuss who makes wood pellets, who uses them, what kinds of emissions they produce, and where they want to expand.
All right then, with no further ado, Rita Frost of NRDC and Brenna Bell of 350 PDX, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.
Rita Frost
Thanks so much.
Brenna Bell
Thanks for having us.
David Roberts
I think I first started thinking, "I should do something on wood pellets," back when I was at Grist like ten years ago, and have been steadily procrastinating on it, literally ever since. So, this is ten years of procrastination finally at an end. Rita, I want to start with you. For listeners who are like me and have not paid a ton of attention to this, as it has kind of developed in the corner of our eye, maybe just start with telling us what are wood pellets? How do they make them, and what are they used for?
Rita Frost
Utility wood pellets, which are commonly referred to as wood pellets — even just biomass, sometimes — are a densified biomass fuel that can generate electricity or heating when they're burned, sometimes both. They're small, they're consistent in size. They're wood-derived compressed cylinders. They kind of look like rabbit food. The production, consumption, and trade of wood pellets have really grown substantially since the late two thousands, firmly coming onto the scene in the United States in about the past ten years, all following new policy in the European Union. It was in response to those policies in the past decade that wood pellet production in the US has since grown 500%.
The demand is coming from foreign industrial power plants, where wood pellets are frequently used for co-firing with or replacement of coal. In other words, I am not focusing on wood pellets used to heat domestic wood stoves in Vermont. They are very cozy. But what we're focusing on here is wood pellet production meant for export markets, where they're used in electricity settings. Just to illustrate that point a little bit more finely, let me transport the listener to the north of England, where you will find what used to be the world's largest coal burner, called Drax. Now, today, they are the number one burner of forest-derived wood pellets.
Drax is huge. They have a generating capacity of nearly 4000 MW. It's the country's largest utility and also regularly joins the top ranks as far as carbon emissions in the country. But that's in England. So what does it have to do with us over here in the United States? Well, it's because back on the home front, the US has become ground zero for wood pellet production. It's driven by European and British policy. But, hey, who has a lot of forests? We do in the United States.
David Roberts
So, when you say driven by their policy, I assume that just means they have deemed this renewable. And so, this is now falling under demand for renewable energy, basically?
Rita Frost
Yes, you're hitting the nail on the head. It's from a Renewable Energy Directive. It was first indoctrinated in 2009 for the 2020 period. It has since been re-upped for the 2030 period. And the drivers are all about trying to address climate change. You know, it's about assessing carbon emissions. But biomass, burning wood pellets, has been politically designated as having the emissions of zero, and they are provided financial support.
David Roberts
Yeah, we will. We'll get into both those later. So, you just — basically, you just feed a bunch of wood, or wood products into some kind of pressurizer and it just squeezes them down into tiny little uniform pellets?
Rita Frost
I actually love the nuts and bolts because I think that it really gets into the heart of why some of the industry's arguments are fallible. So, what happens is that trees are extracted from forests, they're put on trucks, they're transported to these wood pelletization plants. We have about 28 in the Southeastern United States — there are a dozen or so more up in Canada. For the roundwood and the tree parts, they are placed into a debarking machine and then cut into chips, which are screened for quality and waste is removed. That's a really important point, because it shows that the standards that are required for wood pelletization are quite high.
It's not like these facilities can just take anything and compress it into a pellet.
David Roberts
Oh, that was my impression, very much so. That you could just kind of throw any sort of waste or scrap or, like, bark or, you know, twigs or anything in there.
Rita Frost
Right. Instead, these pellet facilities really do require clean, uncontaminated chips in order to meet international wood pellet standards. They have expectations and specifications for the wood pellets that go into these utility scale and heat power plants. This includes heat content, moisture, ash, sulfur content, etcetera. And so, because of those very high standards, you can't just scrape the forest floor. No. In fact, what you'll find is that oftentimes, these whole trees, whole logs that are going into pellet plants, is because they have such high specifications. It's a very intensive energy process to create the wood pellet. And then, all in all, at the end of the day, after they go through this huge machine here in the southeastern United States or up in Canada, they are then put onto another vessel, an ocean-going vessel this time, and transported to that power plant — let's use Drax again, or otherwise — to be burned and produce electricity.
David Roberts
It's funny. The one thing I do remember about wood pellets when this came up is I visited Austria. Good lord. I don't even remember why. This would have been more than ten years ago when I worked at Grist. I remember there was a conference at the Sound of Music mansion. The mansion from Sound of Music. I don't know what. That's a random memory, but one thing I remember is seeing wood pellets. They just deliver these big truck fulls of wood pellets, and the houses have these special little doors that basically on the side of the house that open up, and you just dump the wood pellets in, I guess, to the furnace.
So, clearly, this is a big thing in Europe, so give us kind of a global sense of the trade flows here, like, who's making them and where are they going? Is the US the main producer of these things?
Rita Frost
So, I live in the Pacific Northwest now, but I'm a Southerner. That's where I lived and worked for most of my life. During my time there, I was able to see the expanse, the growth of this wood pellet industry. The Southeastern United States is ground zero for wood pellet production. Nearly 99% of the pellets that are created in the Southeastern United States are sent elsewhere.
David Roberts
Oh, wow.
Rita Frost
Again, to illustrate this point of how much the Southeast is supplying other places in the world, the United Kingdom is the number one end user of wood pellets in the world. They feed that facility, Drax, in the north of England. 72% of the US wood pellets go to the UK, and it's a full seven and a half million metric tons.
David Roberts
Wow.
Rita Frost
Now, the whole trade flow of the wood pellet industry is quite wide and varied. The United States is the number one wood pellet producer and exporter. Canada, our northern neighbor, is the number two wood pellet exporter. Many of those do go to the EU, and then some of those actually go —
David Roberts
That's western Canada, right? Like British Columbia.
Rita Frost
British Columbia, for the most part. And they're going, they're feeding Japan and South Korea, then also heading over to Asia. Vietnam is a major wood pellet producer, and Eastern Europe is a major wood pellet producer. Estonia, Romania, Latvia, these are big wood pellet producers of the world. They are mostly focusing on a nexus of facilities in the European Union. The United Kingdom, I'm going to separate out here because of Brexit. But then following that, the next top importers of wood pellets are the Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium, heading back over to Southeast Asia. The biggest importers there are South Korea and Japan, and they are quickly rising to become some of the biggest players.
David Roberts
I was going to say, is this like everything else, where Asian demand is rapidly growing and is going to eventually dominate everything?
Rita Frost
Asian demand is rapidly growing, and it looks like a copy and paste of the policies that started in the European Union and the United Kingdom.
David Roberts
Interesting. So, they're mainly centered, in the North American context, in the Southeast, and way up in the Northwest in British Columbia. But all this expansion of demand is leading to expansion of supply. So, Brenna, maybe you could tell us about what the wood pellet industry is proposing in terms of production facilities here in our beloved Pacific Northwest.
Brenna Bell
Sure. And I'll just say, I always learn so much listening to Rita. I am new to the biomass world. I come from forest protection, forest defense, and that's been my focus for a very long time. And I looked on to all of my coworkers and allies who were trying to stop energy exports on the West Coast, and I was like, "You go, that's amazing." That will never be what I do as a forest activist.
David Roberts
Well, we should pause there just to make sense of that for listeners. Where we're talking about here, Longview, up in Northern Washington, there's been an LNG export terminal proposed and some other — there's been a bunch of different attempts to make that a big energy exporter, all of which, unless I'm mistaken, have failed thus far, am I right? Like there's nothing there yet.
Brenna Bell
Yeah, Longview is actually in southern Washington, it's on the Columbia River, and the Columbia River has long been looked at for energy export. So there have been several different proposals along the Columbia. There was a proposed methane export plant, two LNG export plants. All have been stopped. We call it the thin green line. None shall pass. You know, also, people down in southern Oregon were working to stop the Jordan Cove liquefied natural gas export plant, and all of those stopped. And at the same time, I should say there's been this forest movement in the Northwest that has been very active since the seventies in protecting forests and old growth and is still active.
And it's kind of a chance in some way. As a movement-oriented person, I'm excited about the chance for the two to come together and work. That said, it's not fun to have to put a ton of one's own time and energy into stopping a proposal that makes literally no sense for forests or for climate.
David Roberts
Isn't that the life of most environmentalists? You chose this, Brenna.
Brenna Bell
I know it's true. But, kind of with that context, what we've been looking at is the expansion of the biomass industry into the Pacific Northwest and also into Northern California. The ones I'm most familiar with are the ones in Washington. I work out of Portland, and so they're the closest ones. And the company that Rita talked about, Drax, this large biomass burner in England, is now looking, in their words, "to expand their fiber baskets." They want a new fiber basket. They have identified the Pacific Northwest.
David Roberts
That means forests, right?
Brenna Bell
Exactly. It's just their corporate term for "we need more lumber."
David Roberts
Right.
Brenna Bell
And in British Columbia, they bought a group called Pinnacle Holdings, which was a small-scale producer of wood pellets, and they have made it a large-scale producer. Now, Pinnacle Holdings has come to Longview and is working diligently to start a new production and export facility on the Columbia River in Longview. Their sourcing area, where they would take wood from, is very large. So, that would go over into Oregon, be all throughout the Cascades in Oregon and Washington. There's another plant that's slightly farther along in Hoquiam, which is right on the kind of the south-central coast in Washington that also would have a very large sourcing radius.
So we're looking at these overlapping plants who want to take more of our forests. And as Rita said, this is not a bunch of byproducts. This is not like the scrap, the slash that's left over from logging, the stuff that typically gets burned in an old timber sale. That's not that.
David Roberts
Let's talk about this. Because they say, it is that. Like if you go look at the videos and stuff on their website, this is precisely what they're saying, is that they're going to — and this is a big part of the sustainability claims, I think — is that they're going to use waste products. So, is that just flatly false? Are they also using waste products or are they literally not using waste products and they're just lying about it?
Brenna Bell
Well, I will defer to Rita on that factual question, but I think a thing that most of us have learned about energy companies is that they do lie.
David Roberts
What!?
Brenna Bell
To come as a shock.
Rita Frost
Here's the thing. You can dig into either investigative journalism reports by the Wall Street Journal, CNN, BBC, Channel Four in the UK, others globally who have gone into the field with watchdog organizations and found that the industry does source from sensitive habitat, natural forests, in many cases especially well documented in Canada, old growth forests. Or, instead of believing investigative journalists, you can look at industry documents and research that reflect that a majority of wood pellet feedstock comes from trees and tree parts. And a small amount actually comes from forestry residues, aka waste.
The numbers back this up. Almost 90% of wood pellets come from the main stems of trees, mostly of pulpwood quality, or from sawdust otherwise used for wood products. This is why we still see large debris piles left to decay and or be burnt in harvest sites that pellet facilities are sourcing from the Southeast. This is why we still see air quality that is just as bad in burning season after wood pellet plants set up shop in BC as before they were established. We see a very consistent trend in the sourcing regions where the wood pellet industry operates. Logging increases its reach and it gets worse.
Brenna Bell
Yeah, if what they said was true, there would be no slash piles.
David Roberts
Yeah, and I was. I guess what I was going to ask is, is it possible, like if they wanted to, is there enough waste and slash piles to satisfy the kind of quantity of demand we're talking about?
Brenna Bell
No, I mean, the new Longview facility would require a million tons of wood per year. Per year.
David Roberts
And there's just not that much slash.
Brenna Bell
There's not that much. And if there was that much slash, I'd be worried that there was too much logging, right? Like, if we were generating a million tons per year in byproduct slash, that would massively ramp up the amount of logging that was happening. And so, either way you go about it, it's a net loss for our forests. And this is why, as a forest and climate activist, we decided to get involved in these biomass fights, because, you know, we've recently been learning how important forests are as carbon sinks and stores. And the forests of the Northwest are some of the best ecosystems in the world at carbon storing.
And so, the last thing we should be doing is cutting them down and burning them and releasing all that stored carbon into the atmosphere.
David Roberts
And this is. Rita, is this my impression coming from knowing very little about any of those, but my vague impression of the Southeastern forests is that there isn't much original forest left down there, and they're mostly just industrial forests, whereas in the Northwest, original forest is a much more prominent concern. Is that fair?
Rita Frost
It's complicated. Europeans did a really great job of cutting a lot of forests as they moved westward across the United States. Policy did a good job of trying to catch up and protect places before it was too late, I would say, in the Western United States. However, no matter where you look in the United States, we have very little old-growth forests left. Primitive forest, primary forest, forests that have literally never been cut. That's pretty rare across the United States, no matter where you're looking. But the important piece is the wood pellet industry is sourcing from natural forests.
So, what we would call a natural forest would be anything that is going to be naturally regenerated. It wasn't planted. It's not necessarily an industrial pine plantation. Yes, there are a lot of industrial pine plantations in the Southeastern United States, and that is a problem in and of itself. However, the wood pellet biomass industry is still sourcing from a lot of natural forests in the Southeast. In fact, the very first investigative journalism piece ever done on the biomass industry was in Virginia, where the industry was found sourcing from over a 100-year-old wetland forest in Virginia. That was a bottomland hardwood forest.
It's what's considered a natural forest in that area. And then, even up to 2022 or 2023, there was another investigation that Channel Four in the UK came over from the UK to do in the Southern United States and found a similar story of a clear cut of a bottomland hardwood forest in North Carolina that, again, was over 100 years old. So, they're not necessarily primeval, they're not necessarily virgin. That doesn't mean that they're not very critically important for the qualities that we're looking for, which is biodiversity and climate.
David Roberts
Right, right. So, I don't want to get ahead of myself here, but one wonders, like these companies say, "Hey, we're just using farmed forests." And some investigative journalist comes over from the UK, wanders out into the forest and looks and says, "Hey, no, they're not." It seems like someone else ought to be doing that. Is there a governing body here? Is there an enforcing law enforcement agency here? Like, why? Is there anyone, if I'm Drax, that I fear at all looking over my shoulder at all?
Rita Frost
Oh, yeah. And you better believe that the auditors are on their tail. The UK audit committee has looked into Drax and wood pellet sourcing. In fact, policies can change at any time, on any day. In fact, earlier this month, in July 2024, the Netherlands, which, as I mentioned before, is one of the top importers of wood pellets in the world, ended all biomass subsidies for electricity. More restrictions are expected. And this is primarily coming back to the fact that these investigations have time and again proven that it's not like finding a needle in a haystack when you go to the forests of the Southern United States and follow the wood pellet industry.
In fact, they have shown that, despite excessive logging pressure that is already undermining forest resilience, wood is becoming increasingly scarce and precious, and that governmental restrictions on wood burning incentives are really welcome, expected to multiply. Even so, these policies are just policies on paper like any other, and they definitely don't reflect the emissions that are going into the atmosphere, nor do they reflect the picture on the ground of what's happening to forests. So, I would say that it is emerging with these policies being overturned. And on the other side, if I was going to play devil's advocate to my arguments that I'm proposing here, wood pellet, biomass, and biomass in general in the European Union is a full 60% of what they classify as renewable energy.
David Roberts
Yeah, a lot of people don't know that. It's crazy. It's crazy. It's a huge part of the "renewable energy" picture over there.
Rita Frost
Yeah, and that goes into their image on a global level. It goes into their commitments for the Paris Climate Accord.
David Roberts
And they have a declining cap over there. They got the trading system, there's actually policy there. So, just to sort of point out the obvious here, if the EU as a whole were to say tomorrow, "We made a mistake. Wood pellets are not renewable. Wood is not renewable." At a stroke, the amount of renewable energy that the EU is using would fall by 60%, basically. Like, they would look way farther behind in the clean energy race than they are. Like, that's — is that kind of the political situation?
Rita Frost
Yeah, I mean, politically, it's very sensitive. However, more important than politics is the fact that our climate is hitting a tipping point. We need to have accurate accounting to be able to provide an accurate picture to the public, as well as other policymakers, about how to right-size this problem. No matter what, I think when it comes to wood pellet biomass, it's not a technology that is becoming more efficient or cheaper. In fact, wind and solar, other renewable energy technologies, are far cheaper. It would go away. It would go away. If those policies were right-sized and they eliminated the perverse incentives, there wouldn't be an industry that could stand alone by itself.
David Roberts
Yeah, that's actually another question I was going to ask, which is, is this an industry that has more or less been created by policy and subsidies, and if the policies and subsidies went away, it couldn't survive freestanding?
Rita Frost
Absolutely. NRDC commissioned a report in 2022 that found that about twelve European countries, we really looked at it holistically, spent more than seven and a half billion dollars in subsidies for biomass electricity generation, combined heat and power, and that was a 27% increase between 2015 and 2020. It's getting more expensive for them to do it. It's not getting cheaper. The UK itself subsidizes the biomass industry to the tune of almost $2 billion a year. It's a cost to energy bill payers that are being told it's emissions-free power when it couldn't be further from the truth.
David Roberts
Well, let's talk about that then. Let's talk about the carbon math. So, the industry story is pretty simple, which is the tree grows, it absorbs carbon dioxide. You cut the tree down, make it into pellets and burn it, you release that carbon dioxide. But meanwhile, you planted a new tree that is growing and absorbing carbon dioxide. So basically, the carbon dioxide you release when you burn these things was absorbed previously. So, it's carbon neutral. That's the story. Like, we're not introducing new carbon to the atmosphere, we're just cycling carbon. That's the zero emissions story. And that is the one that, like, I interviewed Jay Inslee, governor of Washington, on this pod just a couple of weeks ago.
That's the story he tells. That's the story that supportive policymakers tell, which is that this is carbon neutrality, the carbon we're releasing is just carbon that was previously absorbed, et cetera. In reality, things are much more complicated. Maybe, Brenna, as a forest person, you could tell us a little bit about why that math is not as simple as it looks.
Brenna Bell
Sure. I mean, I think all of this is a question of timescale because we could say about fossil fuels, the carbon that they're releasing is just carbon that they absorbed.
David Roberts
Yeah, yeah. Millions of years ago. It's carbon neutral.
Brenna Bell
Right. And so it's carbon neutral.
David Roberts
All carbon is carbon neutral.
Brenna Bell
Exactly. If you extend that argument out, it falls apart really quickly. I think that the big concern, like why we're so worried about the growth of this industry, especially, like, as Rita was saying, all those subsidies, those are subsidies that are not going into technologies that actually are carbon neutral. So they're perpetuating this, like, burning energy economy that is putting these things into the air now. The worry is there's too much carbon in the atmosphere now, right? We're at 421 parts per million. And scientists have said we would have a stable climate at 350 parts per million of carbon.
So, we're way overshot. So, adding any more now, like, we're not talking about the future tree's ability to absorb the carbon that's emitted because we have to look at, there's already too much. So, that's one thing. What we need to do is decrease emissions in the moment because we've already far overshot what we can have for a stable climate. So, that's kind of the first concern about this.
David Roberts
Even if the story was true, the carbon absorbed would come in the future, decades, decades later than the carbon.
Brenna Bell
Exactly.
David Roberts
And there's a time value to carbon here.
Brenna Bell
I guess the time value of carbon is what's really important to look at. Also, there's no guarantee that there will be a tree planted.
David Roberts
Right. That's my thing. Like, we don't know. How do we know? Come on.
Brenna Bell
This story would be true, say, if the company that wanted to emit the carbon now planted trees to absorb it some 50 years ago and they were ready to do the job now. Right. So, there is a way in which this story could be sustainable on a different scale of time. And if we weren't always so worried about the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, but what we're doing again — And not only that, I should say, is we're not only releasing the stored carbon, we're removing that tree's ability to continue sequestering carbon. So, we're taking a large tree full of carbon and we're emitting that in the atmosphere, and then all of that storage capacity is leaving the forest.
We might plant a new tree, and that sapling might sequester carbon at a really quick rate, but it can't store it, right? So, it's just like continuing to sequester, but the carbon's going back into the atmosphere, and we've lost all that storage. So, in many different ways, there is a net loss of carbon on the land and a net gain of carbon in the atmosphere, which is the opposite of what we want right now.
David Roberts
Right? And this is all just assuming that you, like, knock the tree down over and put it directly into a plant, but, like, you gotta go harvest the trees?
Brenna Bell
Right. You have to manufacture the pellets.
David Roberts
Carry the trees, manufacture the pellets, ship it all the way across. Like, that's huge. And then, so, do we know, numbers-wise, how much additional carbon is added just by all the process around it?
Rita Frost
Yes. So first, on the carbon payback period for wood pellet biomass coming from forests, it's going to be a 44 to 100 year carbon payback period. I don't think that we have those sorts of timeframes on our side. And then secondly, when it comes down to comparative emissions, published scientific studies have told us that burning biomass for power emits about 20% more carbon than coal. That is a very, very, very conservative number. And it's three times the amount produced by a natural gas plant per kilowatt of electricity.
David Roberts
Yeah. So, just like putting the accounting aside, putting whatever happened to the tree previously and whatever happened to future trees aside, just burning the stuff is incredibly carbon intensive, more so than fossil fuels.
Brenna Bell
When a bunch of climate activists say, "We'd rather have you burn coal," you know there's a problem there.
Rita Frost
I'll bring us back to Drax in the north of England. They're formerly the largest coal burner in the world, but they've converted all their massive boilers to be burning forest-derived biomass. Still, Drax is the UK's power's single largest carbon dioxide emitter, despite only providing 4% to 6% of the total UK electricity supply.
David Roberts
Oh, wow. So, do they get dinged for that in the EU's trading system, or is it all getting counted as carbon neutral?
Rita Frost
All of it gets counted as a big whopping zero.
David Roberts
It's crazy.
Rita Frost
Yes, they have to count the emissions from the transport, but when it comes to actually burning it at the smokestack, that looks like a zero on the UK's accounting books.
David Roberts
Are there more and less dirty ways to burn them, just in terms of the actual burning and power production? Like, are there more and less clean plants, or is a wood-burning plant a wood-burning plant, more or less?
Rita Frost
I would say that a wood-burning plant is a wood-burning plant on the whole. One of the things that I will say is that when it comes to bioenergy, there are other emissions here besides just carbon that are incredibly concerning for communities.
David Roberts
I mean, carbon's like, I guess, our main thing we're worried about here, the carbon math. The carbon, and it's sort of the faulty carbon math that is sustaining this entire industry. But obviously, when you burn these things, more than just carbon is produced. So, tell us a little bit about what those other sort of air and water impacts are, and importantly, who is suffering those other impacts.
Rita Frost
So, I will focus mostly on pellet mills in the United States because that is what I'm familiar with and that's what I've worked on for almost ten years. But I'll also say that the emissions that are coming out of bioenergy facilities are so bad that the American Lung Association is vocally opposed to woody biomass production and combustion because of their amount of emissions. I mean, ask anybody who lives in the Central Valley of California, where there are 18 bioenergy facilities, they have some of the worst air quality in the world, and it is coming from those bioenergy facilities themselves. But placing us back with the pellet mills, where pellets are created again, exported elsewhere to be used.
They are disproportionately harming vulnerable communities that are already suffering from other environmental injustices, and they emit harmful levels of air pollutants. That includes nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, and volatile organic compounds.
David Roberts
Wait, this is the manufacturing part, the making of them. Where is that? Where is all that coming from when the wood just gets squished together? I guess I'm wondering where all that other stuff comes from.
Brenna Bell
Yes, yes. Wood has a lot of toxic compounds in it that come out during the very energy-intensive process of creating the pellets themselves. They are so dirty that these plants are repeatedly exceeding air pollution limits. To give you two examples, in the very environmentally friendly states of Louisiana and Mississippi, those states have given fines to Drax, which manufactures wood pellets. They're at the tune of $2.5 million, $3.2 million in Louisiana for breaking the Clean Air Act and polluting the air of small rural towns. This is not really unique in the United States either.
Rita Frost
There was a report that was released two months ago this year in May, that found that Drax's pellet mills in Canada violated Canada's environmental law 189 times. Infringements included polluting rivers, lakes with industrial waste, and destroying wetlands. But the vast majority of the violations, over 180 of them, consisted of non-compliance with air permit rules.
David Roberts
So, that's the production side, then, is filthy in terms of particulate pollution, nitrogen oxides, things like that. What about the burning side? Is the burning side more or less polluting than the manufacturing side?
Rita Frost
The burning side is also very dirty. I'm not as familiar with it because I haven't worked with those communities in those foreign contexts as much. But I do know that in the United Kingdom, there have been air pollution concerns around Drax's facility in the north of England. It's a complicated matter because it's a small community. A lot of the jobs are with the Drax facility. However, it's been bad enough that I know that there have been lawsuits that have gone after Drax, and workers have been willing to raise their voices about the air pollution concerns that they have in working in the facility.
David Roberts
And that's environmental justice on that side too, since I am assuming there, as here, these big power plants will tend to be in poor communities. One of the things that is part of the debate over doing this in the Pacific Northwest, one of the claims I actually saw, I mean, we kind of touched on this earlier, but one of the claims I saw is that they are going to help prevent forest fires because they are going to gather up all this waste wood and snags and all this stuff that's been left by insufficient forest clearing in previous years. Is there anything to that, Brenna? Is that just nonsense or is there a basis for that?
Brenna Bell
I think that comes back to the earlier question of where biomass is sourced from. As Rita pointed out, as far as we can tell, most of the wood in biomass production comes from the trunk of the tree. It comes from the stem. That's been shown in the Southeast where they've done it up in Canada. The BBC found that Drax is logging actual native old growth forests and then leaving behind the slash piles that they're burning. And so, in order to get to the argument that they're helping take the slash and the byproducts that otherwise might lead to a higher degree of fire, I think that's pretty much countered by what their practices are and the fact that they're taking full trees.
I know that in Oregon, one of our federal senators, Senator Merkley, who's a climate champion, kind of like Jay Inslee, is very pro-biomass for this fire reason. And I mean, there's also a lot of science around the fact that logging and fuels reduction and opening up the canopy might actually not have the result that they want in case of fire. So there's a lot going on there around whether or not logging generally helps reduce the risk of fire, catastrophic fire. But what we know is this industry is not going to be our savior around that.
We know that they will come and they will be doing more large-scale clear cuts and cutting both plantations and native forests. And definitely, that will not help with the increase in fire that we're seeing as a result of a changing climate.
David Roberts
Everybody I talk to, and of course, you know, I live in my bubble, just like everybody lives in their bubble. So, of course, like most people, I know are against this. Like everybody I've asked about it is against it. And this includes just like sort of normies. I threw this out on Twitter earlier for questions about it. And everybody, I think, whether you really are familiar with the details of the industry or not, everybody's just like, "No, no, don't do that." It's just "Obviously, no, obviously that's bad." And it seems to be that the science on the carbon doesn't hold up very well.
There's all these pollution issues. There's all these justice, environmental justice issues, who's suffering this pollution. And this is an industry that's not like, it's not like they're as big as coal or fossil fuels. It's not like they're a giant industry. I guess I'm just wondering, like, how is it that this industry has these otherwise excellent politicians in their pocket and they've got this whole thing, they've got this whole giant industry up and running and growing based on pretty provable false claims? Just like, how are they pulling this off? I guess is my question. Like, the industry does not seem big and powerful enough that it ought to be able to be pulling off a scam of this scale.
So like, what am I missing in terms of the political economy here?
Brenna Bell
Well, I'll start and then pass it to Rita, because as I said, I am also new to this. So, one of the things I've done over the past almost year is a lot of public education, both for myself, the organization that I work for, our volunteers, none of us really knew much about biomass. And what we found, David, is very similar to what you're finding. So, we relied a lot on resources from the Southeast, from the Dogwood Alliance especially, who is just deep in this work. And we showed their movie, "BURNED: Are Trees the New Coal?" which is fantastic, and started getting the word out.
And every time we talk to someone, they're like, "Are you kidding? Like, how is this a thing? How is this something that is a thing? And growing like that?" Same kind of cognitive disconnect.
David Roberts
Yeah.
Brenna Bell
I have not yet talked to anyone and, granted, it might be a self-selecting crew who's like, "Oh, yeah, this is what we need to solve climate change. We need to cut down, ship them overseas, and burn them for energy." And as to your query, like, I think honestly, in terms of the Northwest senators, and I'd like Rita to speak more broadly politically, but here I think what we're seeing is the result of years of the timber industry really holding sway.
David Roberts
Right?
Brenna Bell
And they love this story.
David Roberts
Of course they do. I mean, it's like a breath of, I mean, it's like a whole new lease on life.
Brenna Bell
I know it's kind of like they love the "Log it so it doesn't burn" narrative. What I'm hoping, because I might still have a tiny bit of delusional optimism, is that what's happening with people like Senator Merkley and Governor Inslee is they don't yet understand this scale shift that's happening. We've had small-scale biomass burning in Oregon as long as there's been a timber industry. People have been co-firing with wood waste and seeing that as a positive thing. This idea that there are byproducts from logging that could be used locally to generate energy. Like, that is an okay story.
That's not what we're talking about.
David Roberts
We should say here that if you're just burning wood pellets for heat, it is better than logs. Right? Or like charcoal or whatever, it is better than some of the heating alternatives.
Rita Frost
Yeah.
Brenna Bell
And we're just, it's a question of scale. I think perhaps they haven't caught up to. We're not talking about using byproduct of a thinning, like a restoration thinning project, to use locally in like a cogen plant. Senator Merkley loves that.
David Roberts
Yeah, we do love cogen plants here on Versus.
Brenna Bell
Right. But what we're talking about is this large-scale, export-based industry and we're trying to educate them. I mean, we've had several meetings with their staff and are saying, "Hey, hey, do you see this? Do you see that this is a different thing than the thing that you've been behind? And it has real, severe climate impacts and community impacts and forest impacts." As of yet, they're not there. And I think that there is a moment now to really do a lot of political education and pressure to move them because the industry does not have a foothold in the Northwest yet.
It does not have a foothold in Northern California. And we need, from what we've learned from our friends in the Southeast, we need to keep it out because once it's here, it will be much, much harder.
David Roberts
Rita, expand on that a little bit. What's the political economy? I guess in the Southeast, it makes more sense to me since forestry goes way back there. Environmental concern maybe is not as deep-rooted, but just like, is there political controversy over it in the Southeast?
Rita Frost
Yeah. So when we're talking about the political controversy, it's interesting for me because is, it's not so much explicit as it is implicit. These are policy and cultural environments in the United States that for the most part are pretty okay with logging. There aren't that many restrictions on what logging can go for if that makes sense. We don't put restrictions on that, and we especially don't put restrictions on folks in the Southeast, where 90% of the forests are owned by private landowners. The real policy disconnect is what's happening in Europe and the UK and South Korea and Japan.
David Roberts
The political economy in Europe is somewhat mysterious to me. On the one hand, I get that, as you say, it's 60% of renewable energy there. And so in some sense, the entire global reputation of the EU as a progressive jurisdiction on climate, that kind of depends on this. So I can see that kind of pressure. But on the other hand, they also seem to sincerely care about climate, and this isn't that. So, like, it's a little mysterious to me there, too. What's going on there?
Rita Frost
There's one more piece about that, right, which is that let's look at Drax yet again. My favorite example of this conversation.
David Roberts
I love that they have a name that sounds so evil. It sounds like an evil organization in James Bond or something.
Rita Frost
Yeah, like a Disney villain or something like that, you know. But who is the world's biggest end user of biomass? Drax, the world's largest former coal operator. Drax has a lot of money. So when Drax, when other players that are coal utilities in Europe saw these policies coming down the pike, saw that they could convert, make very minor technological switches to their facilities to keep their coal facilities online, this is a lifeline to coal companies.
David Roberts
Yeah. It's like the smallest possible change you could make right, in the name of climate.
Rita Frost
With very wealthy, very rich, very resourced players. They have been around for a long time, they have a lot of political capital. Drax is in the pocket of a lot of UK policymakers. Coal executives everywhere in the world are in the pockets of a lot of policymakers. So, that is the political calculation here that we're really talking about. And the interesting thing, as we touched on previously in this conversation, is that it shouldn't be a transition fuel, it shouldn't be a lifeline to coal facilities. Every dollar that goes to burning biomass is a dollar that could be going to truly emission-free sources that are actually tackling the problem of climate change.
So, this is a reckoning, just like anything else that the world is doing in trying to tackle climate change. This is a reckoning about transparency, accountability, and being really honest with ourselves about how we're going to protect communities. At the end of the day, the communities that are having their forests extracted from them, the communities that are having air pollution in their own air systems over in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, are also the world that is facing more climate change-induced disasters.
David Roberts
But in terms of the communities, though, I should just say, like, I'm sure there is a lot of community-based opposition to this stuff, but I also suspect that there's a lot of community support for it. Just because it's a lot of money, a lot of industry.
Rita Frost
You'd be hard-pressed to find it. After working with these communities for about nine years, the truth usually comes to the fore, which is that the industry — I'm talking about wood pellet manufacturing, let me be frank about my experience, right — but they promise wealth, they promise jobs. It's all snake oil. The only thing that the facilities are sure to deliver is poisoned air, increased traffic to cut down forests here to pollute eventually in power plants halfway across the world. The economic development numbers don't pan out. In fact, one of the communities in North Carolina that has had a wood pellet facility for the longest is one of the original communities that has had a wood pellet facility.
Their poverty rate has actually increased since the wood pellet manufacturing facility opened its doors. These aren't facilities or industries that bring about enough economic development or jobs that are going to change a community's outcome.
David Roberts
Interesting. So, this is not that kind of dilemma, because we do face that kind of dilemma. And a lot of places, like with coal communities, you know, like coal's dirty, coal's killing them, they're in poverty, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. But they still rally around their coal plants because there's just nothing much else. So, you're saying it's not as dug in as that, maybe is the way to put it.
Rita Frost
It's not as dug in, even though they would like to become politically entrenched.
David Roberts
I wonder, you said the Netherlands recently sort of woke up, let's say, to this, or got serious about this, and decided, "We can't go on with this farce, that biomass is carbon neutral." Is that the tip of a spear? Is that a sign of things to come? Like, do you have, which way, do you see the wind blowing in Europe?
Rita Frost
Yeah, that's what we're looking for. You know, one of the other top importers that I named was Denmark. The Netherlands and Denmark are sister countries of sorts. They follow each other's leads. I think that this is going to send a very strong signal to Denmark. And then, the other important political change to note is that we have a new government in the United Kingdom.
David Roberts
Yes, I was going to bring that up. Things have changed in the UK recently.
Rita Frost
Things have changed in the UK. Furthermore, there are two very important decisions in the policy sphere around biomass going forward. One is around subsidies post-2027 in the UK context, and then one is for subsidies for bioenergy carbon capture storage, otherwise known as BECCS.
David Roberts
BECCS, yes.
Rita Frost
That is firmly in the hands of the new Labour government. The tides have shifted. We will see if this spells ruin for the bioenergy industry.
David Roberts
Is there any BECCS? There's no BECCS, is there? There's no — Is there an actual BECCS in the world?
Rita Frost
It's a bit of a unicorn, huh?
David Roberts
Yeah, I mean, I hear about it and, boy, there's a ton of it in models. If you look at the models, there's just like gigatons, gigawatts.
Rita Frost
Yeah, you'll find it all over the papers. Right.
David Roberts
Are any wood pellet burning facilities capturing their carbon and sequestering it, to your knowledge?
Rita Frost
Gosh, not that I know of yet. I know that Drax would like to develop one. Drax also has proposals to do that here in the United States. So, they are trying to pit the UK government versus the US government to see where they can find a more favorable policy environment to build a BECCS facility. But here's the thing: Even assuming that all of the combustion emissions could be captured at the power plant, which is very overly optimistic, forest-dried BECCS cannot capture a large proportion of the carbon that is emitted before the wood pellet fuel reaches a power plant.
Right. This is something we've already talked about in this conversation. Producing wood pellets for power plants requires cutting down trees, transport, drying the wood, turning the wood into pellets, and transporting the pellets.
David Roberts
Drying the wood is worth calling out here, just a little bit like drying the wood. It's not something I knew before looking into this, but drying the wood is actually quite an energy-intensive piece of this.
Rita Frost
Very energy-intensive, and they're frequently either burning fossil fuels or they're burning wood.
David Roberts
It's burning fossil fuels to dry wood. To have renewable energy is just a chef's kiss of a loop there. Brenna, the Forest Service recently put out an assessment of old growth or something like that, which is, from my understanding, biomass sympathetic. More so than you might want from the Forest Service. What's going on there?
Brenna Bell
Yeah, the Forest Service is actually in the midst of evaluating, amending all the forest plans for all national forests in the country to protect old growth, which stems from President Biden's executive order on old growth asking this rulemaking to happen. And it's something that's been watched with a lot of cautious optimism. The Forest Service is not well known for making good decisions for the environment. That's, as someone who's beat my head against them for a very long time. But we thought, you know, the direction is pretty clear. Like the president's executive order recognized old growth forests are essential for climate resilience, for carbon storage, and are important habitat.
They're important for water. So we said, "What's going to come out of this?" And the draft environmental impact statement that came out, their proposed approach left a lot to be desired because there are still, as we say, loopholes large enough to drive logging trucks through because it sets it up, says, "Well, we're going to protect old growth unless..." Unless it's necessary to log it for forest health, unless it's necessary to log it for fuels reduction.
David Roberts
And as we've demonstrated, they're always claiming that it's for that.
Brenna Bell
I mean, they really are. And, you know, we could talk at length about the different euphemisms that the Forest Service makes to justify logging. And so, yeah, they're like, "Well, maybe logging, it could end up being a good thing because then we could use the byproduct for biomass," and just kind of, you know, it wasn't even necessary because, like Rita said, there's not usually control over where logged trees go. So they didn't need to talk about that as one of the places that anything that comes out of the forest would be. But it's just getting woven into these narratives.
David Roberts
Not to be a Debbie Downer here, but I guess we should at least say that this is under a Biden Forest Service, which is like, in our crap world we live in, the best we could probably hope for. And should just say that it's very likely that if Trump wins and is in charge of the Forest Service, that any restraint on these matters will go out the window.
Brenna Bell
Most of them don't pay much attention to it, and the Forest Service is still dominated by timber targets and the industry. But honestly, most of the logs, like in the Southeast, almost exclusively in the Northwest, still, the majority of our logs do come from private land that is far less regulated than our federal and state forests. Right. And so, I honestly don't think that even if we get these biomass plants in the Northwest, they're going to be doing old growth logging. They're just, those trees are too valuable to be being shipped to burn. But I do think we're going to see an uptick in clear cutting on private lands where there's far less regulation than there is now.
And that has its own impact on the communities and the climate.
David Roberts
And quickly, the EPA is doing something right now, some sort of review of something. What am I thinking about?
Rita Frost
Is it in relation to wood pellets?
David Roberts
Yes.
Rita Frost
Okay.
David Roberts
Well, I mean, obviously they're doing lots of things, but on this subject.
Rita Frost
Yes. So, I mean, I think one of the interesting things here, we've talked about all the violations of air permits. We talked about the environmental justice impacts. Well, the US EPA is responding. The US EPA is moving forward on a study of the impacts of the wood pellet industry, including scrutinizing the state permitting and enforcement processes because they have been so poor. Because at any given time, you can look at wood pellet facilities across the United States and about a third of them are in non-compliance. They are looking at an epidemiological study. This is really important to the communities that live with wood pellet facilities because of all those air pollution impacts that I've mentioned.
Furthermore, it's not just the EPA. It's not just the administrative side of our government. There has been policy introduced in both the Senate and the House of Congress that is meant to both direct the EPA to assess the lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions associated with forest biomass, as well as study the impact of the industry on communities. That's called the Forest Biomass Emissions Act of 2024.
David Roberts
Has the EPA never done a real comprehensive study of the carbon cycle involved in wood pellets?
Rita Frost
When it comes to the emissions associated with forest biomass as well as combustion, that is within the EPA's purview. But every single year, every single congressional session, what we see is the industry asks the US EPA to deem that biomass is carbon neutral. Very similar language to what's in the EU and the UK. And so because of that, this act that was introduced is supposed to be just affirming what already is the case, which is that that authority lies with the EPA. We do not want Congress to be mandating whether biomass is carbon neutral or not.
We've seen how deleterious that is from the EU and the UK.
David Roberts
But now, we don't want courts to do it either since our courts are all screwed up. There's no one left. There's no one left to do it. So, it sounds like, in terms of political economy, it sort of sounds like on the one hand, the industry is expanding and has big plans for expansion, but on the other hand, it sounds like it is kind of standing on a thin branch of policy that does not seem super sturdy and predictable. Like, it does seem like it wouldn't take much good policy for this industry to just go away. Like, it really seems like anything could happen here.
This is not a juggernaut. Like it's, you know what I mean? It's more vulnerable I guess, than I had gotten the impression going in.
Brenna Bell
It definitely feels like the forests in the US could be really, really heavily impacted by the decisions in the UK.
David Roberts
Yeah.
Brenna Bell
And there are a lot of people in the UK who are working on this, and the Southeast has made alliances. I know they've been sending people back and forth for a long time now. We in the Northwest are starting to get to know them and starting to all work together globally. To think the point of production and the point of burning are in different places, but we're all impacted by it and our governments are all supporting it right now. And so, trying to build a bit more of a cohesive international movement, or rather I should say there has been, we in the Northwest are newcomers to this international movement to stop this and I don't want it to stop.
Just like if we keep these plants out of Longview, out of Hoquiam, out of northern California, I think I want to stay in the fight because this, you know, false climate solutions are kind of the next frontier that we as climate justice activists need to look at because capitalism is not going to go down easy and it's going to keep thinking, "How can I just make a tweak and keep making money at the expense of communities?"
David Roberts
But as a running dog capitalist sympathizer, let me just say that an industry that exists entirely by virtue of supportive regulation and subsidies is not really the textbook definition of capitalism. This is something that public policy created in a lot of ways, which means, I guess if you want to look at it in the optimistic sense, that public policy could just as easily uncreate it, do away with it. So, final question then, flat out then, if I'm in Japan, say, or one of these sort of because I think the places where these wood pellets are going are places that feel constrained in terms of their other renewable energy choices.
And I guess if like I'm living next to a coal plant in Japan that's making coal power, is wood pellets better than coal? I mean I know that's such an incredibly, incredibly low bar for anything to clear, but just like at the very base level, is this at least better than coal?
Rita Frost
I would say that there are other options and I almost feel like that's a false dilemma. It's a false choice. I think that when it comes to the immediacy of the climate crisis, that demands a rapid pivot away from using anything that increases emissions. And what we have shown and what scientists are very much crying out and saying is that using wood as fuel increases emissions. It also means that we have foregone sequestration when we lose our forests on the landscape. And then furthermore, communities where the energy is produced or the wood pellet is produced, they're harmed.
So, when it comes down to it, you know, biomass burning for electricity fails the land test, it fails any meaningful standards for lessening greenhouse gas emissions, and it's sacrificing our communities.
David Roberts
Well, that sounds like a great way to wrap up this grim subject. I'm so glad I finally did this. I'm so glad you two came on to help me through this. Thank you both for your expertise and for your work.
Brenna Bell
Thank you for having us.
Rita Frost
Thank you so much.
David Roberts
Thank you for listening to Volts. It takes a village to make this podcast work. Shout out, especially to my super producer, Kyle McDonald, who makes my guests and I sound smart every week. And it is all supported entirely by listeners like you. So, if you value conversations like this, please consider joining our community of paid subscribers at volts.wtf. Or leaving a nice review, or telling a friend about Volts. Or all three. Thanks so much and I'll see you next time.
What's the deal with burning wood pellets for energy?