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. 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.
At the green energy political boondoggle level, there seems to be so many parallels between wood pellets and corn-based ethanol. Two industries requiring ever-increasing subsidies to survive and will never survive close carbon math scrutiny.
This will trigger me, as I work in wildfire risk mitigation in the mountain west and our fire adapted forests are not the Enviva pellet mill wastes of the SE. If substack supported images I'd have an easier time sharing what the ground truth on this side of the country looks like because it is not the same and does not have the same sets of concerns. e.g. We will continue to lose towns to wildfire because we have more biomass than we know what to do with (4-billion tons annually in North America - most of this custodial duty is inconveniently difficult to get to, e.g. $4,000 to move 1 ton of biomass 300m through much of the Sierras). The first act of the California legislature was to outlaw fires (native burning) so this is an equity and justice concern but not always in the way one thinks.
There is also a strong grift in the SE wood pellet flow, which is different than the flow west to Japan where wood pellets have replaced the shuttered Fukushima power plants. It turns out this stuff is complicated and nuanced and sometimes we've boxed ourselves into unpleasant consequences for our past actions (e.g. culling 500,000 Barred Owls in order to defend Spotted Owl populations in the PNW). The SE grift is all about the UK company Drax converting Coal to biomass (good for carbon cycles, bad for emissions) in order to claim zero emissions operations (the carbon is billed to the point of origin, which is outside the EU thanks 2007 climate policy authors!) while collecting billions in subsidy. The worst of all possible greenwashing, it is really bad and they went bust because of course they didn't invest for a sustainable future in their operating neighborhoods. Anyway, will give it a listen and try to maintain grace as the NRDC has done good and important work over time. Though if they cite Hanson I may lose it.
If you are interested in western wildfire I recommend:
The state of California has invested $43M in wood innovations some to building out new biomass facilities in the Sierras to provide an outlet for the annual excess biomass generated by those fire adapted forests. Forests aren't for carbon storage (mostly it is in the soil, and today's fire burns that topsoil liberating 1-5,000 year carbon), you always need to consider the lifecycle. The State of Idaho hosts the regional Biomass Resource Hub Initiative via DOE.
The UK Drax story is salacious, but not the story in the mountain west. It was also news we should have done something about 15 years ago, it would be a shame to see the pendulum swing too far the other way now when we have a pressing biomass glut to deal with. And the US has lower mill capacity than at any time in the last 70 years - no capacity to deal with it. Complaints about misunderestimating (sic) removed biomass really downplay the 1.7GT of CO₂ released last year in Canada's wildfires and litany of lost towns. Last month I presented a seminar at MIT on the sheer overwhelming scale of biomass surplus in western forests, so a snapback against Enviva (while understandable) is exactly backwards for the mountain west.
Thanks. Our nearby (Gypsum CO) forest waste-burning plant just went broke and shut down. I think most of the wood fed to it was beetle-killed or from thinning or firebreak projects. I've yet to hear what these projects are now doing with the wood. I suppose piling it to rot or be burned (w/o generating electricity). Maybe some of it will go to the pellet plant in Kremmling though that may have folded also.
While watching the Tour De France footage this year, I saw quite a few little sawmills next to the course in the foothills of the Pyrenees. I kinda feel like we need to figure out how to replicate that here. But I'm not going to hold my breath.
In interior BC you can go through a career without seeing a healthy wild lodgepole pine, nominally the dominant species, due to the mountain pine beetle. Probably an exaggeration, but one they use in the field. In northern USFS region 8 you get hundreds of thousands of acres of beetle kill, all standing dead timber, just waiting for a spark. 1-2 snags per acre are wildlife habitat, 800-1,000 per acres is a deathtrap.
We don't need to deal with biomass to make money; we need to deal with it out of the obligation to provide stewardship for our forests. If we can make a market for bioenergy here we're servicing an obligation rather than getting rich, unless we think richness is predicated on ongoing survival of our forest lands (I do).
I hiked the Tour Du Mont Blanc last year and was struck by how it wasn't forested except in places where sheep couldn't walk (e.g. retreating glacial scree). There is a long legacy of deforestation in Europe that we can think about unwinding because we like forests, but not because we think fossil fuel carbon can be displaced or offset by more forests. We had way more forests in the past than we have no and need to dig out of that deficit before we start worrying about atmospheric carbon balance here.
Thanks for sharing. You work in the Mountain West region, have you heard of a company called Timberage? They are trying to use Ponderosa pine that's not generally suitable for the building industry, turn it into CLT (cross-laminated timber) panels and those into mass-timber buildings. Kind of like super-thick plywood. Mass timber is popular these days but, like wood pellets, can have sourcing issues if not done right.
I'm just wondering if that sounds realistic or like a pipe dream/too small to matter.
We talked to them 2 years ago, great outfit, out of Durango? Mass timber is great, and gets around the regulations forbidding yellow pine for structural use. There are millions of acres of dry pine meant for a packaging market that has been replaced by plastics - leaving us with a crisis of plastic and an epidemic of trees on the dry side of the mountains.
Mass timber is 1/1000th the market size of concrete for construction yet the concrete industry funds google ads spreading fear and doubt around fire safety of mass timber and strength for large buildings. They actively resist zoning updates to support mass timber. While I love mass timber and want to see it succeed, there are a lot of headwinds and I cannot rely on it as a project offtake in the near future. Instead, the piles just sit and decompose after fuels thinning. If the worst happens they become fuel for the next fire, if the second worst happens they decompose into CO₂ and methane.
Ugh. I was sort of afraid that was the answer. I know about the concrete industry push against mass timber and working against zoning and code updates. Mass timber has tried some ways around it, but the headwinds against it in this country are, as you say, really strong. Without use in multifamily I don't think mass timber really could use enough in just single family homes, unless we started exporting that all over the place.
I heard someone built an experimental home out of wood panels using just the thickness to make up the insulation. Walls something like 24 inches thick. Now that'll use some board feet.....
That wall thickness reminds me of a distant relative who built a straw house in Arkansas. It turns out there is more than one way to do that and the European way is... the passivhaus way (they built with raw bales and stucco like a prairie dugout, so not the European way).
don’t know about your forests in California but Australian forests are burning like never before due to not just the climate heating and longer hotter drought conditions last multiple years in a row.
it’s the mismanagement of forests by the state owned forest companies that’s a big driver of forest fire. these public corporations have long been run by ignorant logging sympathisers for generations.
they sell the forest plants to loggers (at a loss to the states in every state bc they pay for the logging roads to be made and all the overheads while the loggers come and clear fell, burn the forest floor and leave). the repeated clear felling and burning of forest floor promotes one or two eucalyptus species which are most commercially viable to that location. they remove the dozens/hundreds of other plant species from the forest. this makes forest basically commercial plantation under state ownership and promotes fire. they’re not supposed to log within N metes of watercourses (maybe ephemeral or maybe be year round creeks or rivers) but they do. in natural bushfires the riparian zone vegetation stops bushfires in its tracks. even in the Black Saturday fires, intact old growth forests would stop bushfires in the gullies bc the riparian zone is so damp, even in summer and the species haven’t evolved to promote fire the way E. species have.
lin Australia logging and “thinning” and industrial scale “bush fire prevention” operations using it burns in cooler months have all been scientifically show beyond a reasonable doubt to promote bushfire, not protect property or the forests themselves. Indigenous fire stick management is a different story, they used animal and bird friendly techniques and they start a fire in a central location and manage the burn (and conditions they’ll light it in) so that it moves no faster than a slow walking pace. the pyromaniacs who do commercial burns drop incendiary from helicopters in one state of Australia (WA) and in others light the fires everywhere so the front is very large and they do so under legal mandates to burn 5% of the states forest a year in Victoria. which means fires often get out of control, one such fire in Wilson’s Promontory National Park burnt most of the park one year, still hasn’t recovered decades later.
i would not assume that burning forests (waste or otherwise) is carbon neutral. leave the timber in the forest for regenerative biology to activate.
in Australia a forest can recover the lost carbon from a bushfire in as little as 18 months in Tasmania and 3 years in other forests simply with regrowth. all forests are different to each other in terms of growth and carbon drawdown of course, depending on age etc.
Thanks for the additional info Geoff. I don't disagree that the western US needs to figure out what to do with its excess biomass given that its not going to let it burn naturally, and I'm not sure anyone on this podcast would disagree with you either? What I took away from the discussion was that Europe set climate policy that heavily subsidizes the wood pellet market, and that said policy is 1) fueling deforestation and 2) potentially not all that great for climate/health either. The concern is that companies say that they're mainly using excess biomass and not good wood, but in reality the ratio is likely flipped. So when these companies want to expand to the PNW, it's not all that illogical to distrust how they'll source the wood. The burden of proof should be on them. Also, it sounds like the policy is extra faulty because the EU requires high-quality wood pellets, so malice doesn't necessarily need to be applied here, these companies are just doing what's unintentionally asked of them.
NRDC clearly states on their website that "there is no way to create bioenergy at scale without harming people and the planet." The scale of biomass we have to manage in western forests absolutely dwarfs any of the scary numbers shared in this podcast. This is very likely to be a piece of disagreement, indeed I find most of the scary numbers here quite modest and not up to the challenge we face in reducing the threat of extreme wildfire (millions of acres, hundreds of millions of tons - annually to keep pace across 2 billion acres of forests in the US and Canada plus the obligation of active stewardship we inherit from those who came before). The complaint about highgrading the biomass is a policy and regulatory outcome, not an immutable fact of bio-energy. They did it because there was no consequence for doing it. These are precisely the areas to improve policy and regulation - we have full power over that behavior by these companies. We should act like it instead of disempowering people from taking control of these outcomes.
On point 2 there are ppm2.5 concerns in bioenergy that build on past equity concerns but that's again a regulatory failure rather than a climate failure. The difference between a biological source and a lithospheric source of carbon is the difference between global warming and... not having global warming. It is kind of a big deal to gloss over this bit. That's not nothing, even if we'd prefer to generate power from solar and wind *if we just needed to generate power* The key here is we *need to deal with the biomass* and since the counterfactual is uncontrolled burning or worse decomposition or worse catastrophic fire using that emission (all alternatives lead to emissions) to generate power is a net positive. It all comes down to one's counterfactuals and boundaries. Today the counterfactual is catastrophic fire when we don't maintain. Just because we haven't seen it for a long time doesn't mean it isn't coming. The story of the turkey and the farmer comes to mind - just because you haven't seen the end of November yet doesn't mean the farmer is your friend. You need to consider the lifecycle and this whole podcast was careful parsing of those boundaries.
Instead of acting against the policy this podcast was about the thing that was used in the service of a subsidy farming operation. Because we focus on the thing, that policy/system will continue to produce these outcomes with the next new thing (the UK claiming emissions reduction via deforestation is bad even when it doesn't happen in the PNW - we should be fighting that bogus accounting gimmick directly instead of against bioenergy generically). The CTA should have been to fix the policy and attach accountability for environmental and community outcomes on both sides of the exchange, because without the policy there is no subsidy and without the subsidy there is no company eager to strip resources from a foreign country, regardless of which foreign forest they have in their sights.
When we activate against the companies we'll always be chasing the game. Enviva, the Drax counterparty in the SE US, went bankrupt already. Not because of pressure on their behavior or as a consequence of their environmental damage, but because they skimped on facilities and operations and their assets degraded out from under them. This is the worst outcome - environmental damage and the state is on the hook to make it better if it can. We always get the outcomes we regulate for - our regulation required this outcome and it is exactly how O&G extraction works. But the speakers aren't asking for oversight. The story here is to stop bioenergy in forests at precisely the time that lack of industry kills our forests just as plainly as clearcutting does.
It is possible for humans to work with more nuance than "hands off vs. clear-cut," it is a shame not to have that conversation. Today's Park Fire livestream from The Lookout goes hard into the consequences of removing a biomass plant on a forest system - 30 years of forest management evolution visualized right in the path of one of the largest fires in California history. Catastrophic fires come when we don't have an outlet for the biomass and we've combined loss of those outlets with a prohibition on fire and policy of fire suppression (some folks are finding that carbon from your burning house isn't really the same as carbon from those trees, after all). To remove this tool from this board puts more of our forests at risk. https://www.youtube.com/live/ud4m0m1jCyk?si=9U2z1nAz-Os6PPls&t=930 Thinning provides a means to get back to fire return intervals that our forests need to remain healthy, but thinning won't happen at sufficient scale without an outlet for all that biomass.
We oughtn't use bioenergy to make money generating power with wood pellets, we should use bioenergy to support more acres of service work to satisfy our obligation to maintain our forests. The normal perspective here is backwards and this podcast presumes / promulgates that backwards thinking. You shouldn't complain on one side about Europeans marching across the continent chopping down all the trees and applying their European models of forestry to North American forests and then turn around and demand the myth of wilderness in response - it also erases the stewardship that created these forests in the first place. So. Yeah, I'm still on tilt here.
While it wasn't the primary focus, I would just like to note that burning wood pellets for home heating is also really, really bad.
While they undoubtedly burn more efficiently than log fires, they still release a huge amount of particulates, carbon monoxide and other dangerous pollutants. In many places, notably including the UK, solid fuel heating is now the single largest source of PM2.5 pollution.
While it would probably be close to a wash in terms of CO2 emissions, to run a heat pump from electricity generated in a pellet-fed plant compared to burning it in a stove, in terms of direct health outcomes it would be far *better* to burn it in the Drax plant. As inadequate as the pollution controls on the plants undoubtedly are, at least they have some. Solid fuel stoves typically have none at all.
fair point. burning timber to hear poorly sealed and poorly insulated houses is normal in Australian rural communities. in some the air moves pollution away quickly, in others it’s trapped in a sink and stays there making for really poor air quality. i guess on farms it’s less of an issue, so long as your stove doors and flues are well sealed as there’s no neighbours. but in towns and cities it’s literally a killer. i read that in NYC they had to ban wood fired pizza ovens because they became so trendy it was noticeably reducing air quality for residents and visitors alike.
David, great piece. Learned a lot. My focus is on how we communicate about climate and in the following, I've used biomass or wood pellets as an example. Here are a few suggestions from a post - Almost All Climate messages Can Be Made Better - Here's How. https://bit.ly/3ZRifLk
Such a treat to see this annoying topic covered so beautifully by David and guests. I know that non-solutions are a drag to talk about, so I really appreciate this. And could you do biofuels (including renewable natural gas) next?
Why do politicians fall hook-line-and-sinker for these fairy tales? This is a rampant problem in Canada also. The most charitable answer I can come up with is that they are surrounded by a bubble of smart lobbyists telling them they can profit AND be net zero at the same time. So, then why don't they also listen to the little army of under-paid NGO staff and their own citizens--and the media---debunking these false solutions? Are they, the politicians, just too smart to listen to a bunch of tree-hugging nerds?
Yeah, it's just the money.
Also, as a comment to folks who are eager to get rid of all those darn trees: take a good hard look at google maps some time and you will realize that it's not from lack of trying that we still have trees. Don't worry, it won't be too much longer that you have to put up with the darned things, and the creatures that live in them.
I try to impress upon my team that none of the stakeholders in forestry trust each other and many are actively working to undermine each other. Forest, mill, stewardship organization, forester, operator, environmental group, tribes, community, others. There for recreation, hunting, wildlife, plant life, ecology, industry, or their own inscrutable purposes. Today's was a perspective we don't often hear; you found an extreme position. Many facts are correct in this talk, but they are deployed as an effort at decision based data analysis, rather than data driven decision making.
Dave, that 44-100 year payback claim represents the *fast* path to carbon mitigation, a natural weathering process will take 500,000 years! Exchanging a 100-1000 year cycle carbon source in place of a 100,000,000 year cycle source (fossil fuels) is an unambiguous win in the fight to limit carbon in the atmosphere. You were so close! All forests are mostly net zero when you get the whole lifecycle for your LCA, you have a sawtooth graph where carbon goes into trees and out into the air and it mostly rides at the same level over long periods of time so long as the forest stays a forest - this is where you lose the plot when you are trying to draw down atmospheric carbon. If the forest cycle was what was happening globally for the last 250 years we'd not have global warming! That's a pretty fundamental thing to let slip by in conversation. More people need to think like geologists, I guess.
Drax is emitting about 3.5x the ppm2.5 due to the switch from coal to wood pellets - because the coal has greater power density than wood so you have to burn a bunch more for the same output. That's super bad! They also spend more on trucking to move the fuel around (more mass and volume), also bad! But on carbon, and radiation because coal power has more radiological pollution than nuclear, the switch is a climate positive. We have no shortage of spare biomass. But one should do work on trees to save the trees, not to undo the fossil fuels blunder! It is a category error, essentially made by everyone selling something.
The forest must burn. For 12,000 years the west has adapted to fire. We have an epidemic of trees on our landscape and the best thing that could happen for our forest health would be for someone to leave the gate unlocked and half the trees to get stolen. Paul Hessburg lives in Wenatchee and did a TED talk on this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6Vayv9FCLM If a Giant Sequoia falls, 10,000 seedlings will sprout in its wake. But fast forward 1,000 years and only 1 tree remains. 9,999 of those trees must die or all the trees will die, the question is who picks the winners and losers and how are they removed. If you 'let nature decide' you end up with everyone losing, because nature never did this on its own. This gets to the absurdity of using forests to mitigate atmospheric carbon, forests are at best a point in time on a looping cycle and at worst a temporary thing soon to degrade into savannah or wasteland. 37% of high severity burn in California has swapped from conifer to grassland, today's fire doesn't care who's land it was or how it was or wasn't managed.
That said, it can also be true that the big wood pellet climate graft out of the EU is bad for forests. How the work is done is important and a group doing it wrong (even at the scale facilitated by total political subsidy capture) doesn't mean the thing itself is wrong to do. This is more commentary on rampant financialization of industries that ought not be driven exclusively by next quarter's profit statement and the impact on shareholders.
Chad Hanson's bad science comes in through the Dogwood Alliance link, of course it is here lurking. His organization raises money by filing lawsuits and has a history of motivated literature reviews. His concept of untrammeled pristine wilderness sans people erases the first nations and their long stewardship of the forests we've now taken as our own. And it is that stewardship obligation that we assume here in the west that militates towards finding *anything* to do with all this biomass coming out of forests. Making money on the wood side of things is very challenging (the subsidy capture is what drives Drax, at one point was 20% of the reported emissions reduction in the UK by itself). We have mill shutdowns all over the place, and from some set of environmental groups the only valid number of operating mills is zero. It is important to recall that the charter for the USFS, a federal agency, is to ensure that future generations of industrialists will have access to trees for industry and that today's industrialists don't consume them all foolishly. Teddy Roosevelt established the national parks too, but for recreation and hunting use and that also militates to getting into the forests and doing the work so you can see through them (if you can't see that buck at 100 yards your forest is too thick, for hunting and for fire resilience). The myth of wilderness is pure fiction.
We lost 1M acres of Fir in the PNW (1.2 of True Fir, and another 800k of Douglas fir) from the 3 days in 2022 corresponding to the heat dome event (also the town of Lytton in BC, to a wildfire that threw off more lightning than Canada typically gets in a whole year). That's about 120 million tons of timber with no economic destination that will rot in place, creating pest and disease threat to the remaining forests as well as ready fuel increasing the risk of catastrophic fire. When fire is catastrophic you lose the topsoil, liberating that carbon and creating debris flows that kill fish and streams. We have a duty to work the land, with fire if we can, to ensure the worst outcomes do not obtain. To do that we must break all belief that doing nothing leads to better outcomes than doing something here.
Japan replaced Fukushima, which was decommissioned due to a massive earthquake and tidal wave! They didn't feel they had the time or climate for that big chunk of missing supply via other paths (Wind and Solar - 13 years ago - not viable replacements). This was a social decision on their part born out of crisis. To criticize remotely from a specific and narrow climate lens does that whole savior sans justice thing we should all be so worried about falling into. Germany as well gave up nuclear and went to methane (2023), that was also a climate loss, bigger than Japan's and leaning into Putin's war; we should try to keep some perspective here.
On the "half of what counts for renewable energy in the EU is bioenergy,"
I think this may under-value wind and solar and hydro by lumping electricity in with heating; the whole "primary energy" accounting problem. Tracing these claims leads to words like "gross" and "final,"
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_the_European_Union, and I'm sure there are more detailed current estimates, "In 2020, renewables provided 23.1% of gross energy consumption in heating and cooling. (FP: I assume wood is the main renewable heating source.)
In electricity, renewables accounted for 37.5% of gross energy consumption, led by wind (36%) and hydro-power (33%), followed by solar (14%), solid biofuels (8%) and other renewable sources (8%)." Clearly in the last four years, wind and solar have increased to a greater degree than biofuels for electricity.
may predate Drax conversion from coal to wood, but shows 75% of biomass energy is for heating and it shows only 4% of biomass for energy is imported to the EU.
But whatever it is, this system may be renewable; but I think everybody's right that this is not carbon-neutral in any time frame that matters. And is a shit show in a bunch of other ways, well described in the interview.
But, the 1000 lb question was not asked. WTF to do with these forests instead. One of the advocates dismissed "thinning." We clearly need forestry of various kinds adapted to communities, forests and climate. The "leave it all alone and let nature take its course" vibe I get from environmentalists just doesn't cut it now.
My understanding is that we have surplus timber because of decreased paper use in newspapers, office paper and packaging, despite an uptick in cardboard use for shipping. Can some of these trees grow a bit more and be used for construction, where the carbon is productively sequestered? Perhaps we should subsidize that. Whether it's chip or wafer board or 2x4s or poles or "mass timber."
For actual forestry waste, I keep seeing claims this will be converted to more valuable liquid biofuels; but I don't see a lot of steel in the ground.
Ensyn, an Ontario-based company, operates a 3 million gallon/year production plant in Renfrew, Ontario. They supply renewable fuel oil to US clients, including Bates College in Maine and St. Lawrence University in upstate New York. Their production apparently meets EPA's Renewable Fuel Standards (RFS2) program requirements. I'm not sure how much they use forest waste vs. standing timber in their production facility, although their marketing talks about "forest residuals.." They're doing a joint venture under the name Castlerock Biofuels to open a 20 million gallon plant near Katahdin in Maine.
I have been following renewable energy in an area of Europe that uses wood chips, often locally sourced, rather than pellets. (The South Tyrol, an Italian province.) Do the objections to pellets also extend to wood chips? It seems to me that they might not--wood chips use more of the tree, don't require as much energy, and are not transported as far. I would welcome feedback!
This is because the US bombed the Russian Gas Pipelines, two, meant for Germany. Then the US exported their own fracked gas to Europe at ultra high prices. If these companies lowered their prices, the need for an alternative would be vastly lowered.
thanks for doing this episode. i was the one who left the very long comment under the pod you did with Governor Jay Inslee where he made the e ignorant claims about biological carbon vs geological carbon being different and that how that made biomass incineration all good. i was surprised you didn’t push back at the time, but i guess your style is pretty warm and that’s why you get great guests including politicians. it’s great that you covered this controversial perspective from Governor Inslee with some expert push back in such timely manner.
i’d agree that most of the other things he express about renewables and climate change that had a factual basis or scientific claims were well informed.
Thank Geoff, I get so tired of writing about this..There are politicians who read this kind of stuff and apply it to the Western US. Also there are certification systems for people worried about appropriate sourcing… as you know forest folks do this kind of thing all the time with FSC and SFI and suchlike.
i wouldn’t be holding FSC as beyond reproach or that their accreditation means a product is ethically sourced. there’s lots of loopholes and even their branding has so many categories that an FSC logo on a product doesn’t mean much. certainly not in Australia where native logging should cease everywhere and switch to plantation that can more than accomodate timber and pulp needs (we chip and export most of the forests we mow down in australia, almost nothing they extract is used for building or furniture products).
The narrative presented here is disturbing, but it's frustrating not to have more numbers to go with it.
In an attempt to partially remedy this, I looked up US wood production and consumption in Table 10.1 of the Monthly Energy Review (https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/monthly/pdf/sec10_3.pdf). It says the difference between production and consumption equals "densified biomass exports", which I assume means wood pellets. For 2023 that difference equals 135 trillion Btu (which is 0.13% of total US energy production). If you burn that to produce electricity at 33% efficiency, you get about 13 TWh. But according to Ember (https://ember-climate.org/data/data-tools/data-explorer/), the UK alone produced 34 TWh of electricity from bioenergy in 2023, and Europe as a whole produced nearly 200 TWh. And this is just electricity, not counting pellets burned for heating. So unless I've made an error somewhere (which is entirely possible), it looks like imported wood pellets from the US supply only a small percentage of the wood being burned as fuel in Europe.
Is this correct, or am I missing something important, or did I make an arithmetic error?
I was put off by some of the comments in this episode. You made fun of the name of one user of this technology, and claimed something I’m used to hearing out of a prominent politician I try not to think about, “everyone doesn’t like this. People are always saying it’s a bad idea.”
How does content like this fir in with your goals?
It made me reconsider what I think about this podcast. It kind of crystallizes what I don’t like about this podcast, and why I listen to it at 1.5 times speed. It’s not particularly content dense.
Similarly, I lost some respect for NRDC, which I had thought was more serious. I was sifting through for arguments for why this is a bad idea and getting just a lot of “I mean, c’mon, right?”
If the energy demands are so high for shipping and drying, say how high they are. “X% of the energy gained goes to drying.” Shouldn’t be that hard to figure out. Shipping on the ocean is not particularly energy intensive—the ocean is very flat.
I also noted that methane was noted as prevented from export… and then it was later said that the guests wished methane was burned instead. Which is it?
biomass and extracted methane aren’t used in similar ways in the power grid and certainly once a grid is at 50% wind and solar methane will only be used from then on to 100% RE as a peaking generation fuel. and at 100% RE it’s obviously the point at which it’s no longer needed, other than for reserve power until we know we’ll never ever need it even in an emergency.
whereas if you look at the biomass output in Germany in the power grid in every state is a flat dispatch line, constantly being burnt, even more constant than coal power plants which tend to slowly ramp a bit and close units for this or that reason for periods. gas might be burnt in the USA like that because it’s cheaper than coal in US but as i said, once wind and solar hit 40-50% of the power mix then you only use gas to fill the gaps because it’s a) more costly and b) emissions intense (more so than coal even thought the combustion CO₂ is approximately half, the methane that gets vented and leaks easily makes up for the difference and then some, see Howarth, A Bridge to Nowhere and several other papers in the 2009-2015 period).
it’s funny how all the pro-logging lobbyists come out of the woodwork saying they don’t like the show whenever these issues are discussed. if you don’t like the pod don’t listen to it. i think it’s one of the best energy podcasts going around. i don’t really learn much in a technical sense from it because I’ve studied these topics for ten years but i still find interesting to here the new things people are doing in these spaces.
I mainly do social science statistics, never had any relationship with lobbying firm nor logging. Nor is this my first comment on this pod, which is very easy to verify.
And yeah, point well taken about not listening. Since this episode I am browsing for a new energy transition podcasts and am listening to Energy Gang, which I’ve found informative.
I’m just looking for information on the latest in the area, so if you have other suggestions, I’d be open to hearing them.
The bill passed almost unanimously; only 3 conservative senators voted against it in the floor vote. The environmental organizations in the state did not oppose it, probably because they saw this as a foregone conclusion. The bill information page has all the documentation. https://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary?BillNumber=2528&Year=2019&Initiative=false
The brief description from the final bill report: “Changing the expiration date for the sales and use tax exemption of hog fuel to comply with the 2045 deadline for fossil fuel-free electrical generation in Washington state and to protect jobs with health care and retirement benefits in economically distressed communities.”
Industry testimony during committee hearings emphasized keeping jobs and that hog fuel is a “renewable energy source”. It experienced virtually no opposition, with the exception of one courageous advocate in the Senate Ways & Means hearing, who can be heard at the 1 hour 32 minute point in this recording. https://tvw.org/video/senate-ways-means-2023031442/?eventID=2023031442
Perhaps she made a difference. Although HB 1018 also passed unanimously in the House floor vote, 12 senators voted against it in that floor vote.
Since I'm all over this one... If anyone is nearby (Bellevue WA) on Thursday I'll be hosting my monthly climate and forests meet up at Cascadia Pizza from 4:30-7pm (on the back patio enjoying the sun). Please stop by and show me how I'm wrong about forests, or catch up with other people dreading the impending start of smoke season (we had an orange tint in the sky on Sunday before the rain, from Oregon fire smoke carrying high to the north).
At the green energy political boondoggle level, there seems to be so many parallels between wood pellets and corn-based ethanol. Two industries requiring ever-increasing subsidies to survive and will never survive close carbon math scrutiny.
This will trigger me, as I work in wildfire risk mitigation in the mountain west and our fire adapted forests are not the Enviva pellet mill wastes of the SE. If substack supported images I'd have an easier time sharing what the ground truth on this side of the country looks like because it is not the same and does not have the same sets of concerns. e.g. We will continue to lose towns to wildfire because we have more biomass than we know what to do with (4-billion tons annually in North America - most of this custodial duty is inconveniently difficult to get to, e.g. $4,000 to move 1 ton of biomass 300m through much of the Sierras). The first act of the California legislature was to outlaw fires (native burning) so this is an equity and justice concern but not always in the way one thinks.
There is also a strong grift in the SE wood pellet flow, which is different than the flow west to Japan where wood pellets have replaced the shuttered Fukushima power plants. It turns out this stuff is complicated and nuanced and sometimes we've boxed ourselves into unpleasant consequences for our past actions (e.g. culling 500,000 Barred Owls in order to defend Spotted Owl populations in the PNW). The SE grift is all about the UK company Drax converting Coal to biomass (good for carbon cycles, bad for emissions) in order to claim zero emissions operations (the carbon is billed to the point of origin, which is outside the EU thanks 2007 climate policy authors!) while collecting billions in subsidy. The worst of all possible greenwashing, it is really bad and they went bust because of course they didn't invest for a sustainable future in their operating neighborhoods. Anyway, will give it a listen and try to maintain grace as the NRDC has done good and important work over time. Though if they cite Hanson I may lose it.
If you are interested in western wildfire I recommend:
https://the-lookout.org/
https://forestpolicypub.com/
https://wildfiretaskforce.org/
https://www.energy.gov/eere/bioenergy/regional-biomass-resource-hub-initiative
The state of California has invested $43M in wood innovations some to building out new biomass facilities in the Sierras to provide an outlet for the annual excess biomass generated by those fire adapted forests. Forests aren't for carbon storage (mostly it is in the soil, and today's fire burns that topsoil liberating 1-5,000 year carbon), you always need to consider the lifecycle. The State of Idaho hosts the regional Biomass Resource Hub Initiative via DOE.
The UK Drax story is salacious, but not the story in the mountain west. It was also news we should have done something about 15 years ago, it would be a shame to see the pendulum swing too far the other way now when we have a pressing biomass glut to deal with. And the US has lower mill capacity than at any time in the last 70 years - no capacity to deal with it. Complaints about misunderestimating (sic) removed biomass really downplay the 1.7GT of CO₂ released last year in Canada's wildfires and litany of lost towns. Last month I presented a seminar at MIT on the sheer overwhelming scale of biomass surplus in western forests, so a snapback against Enviva (while understandable) is exactly backwards for the mountain west.
Thanks. Our nearby (Gypsum CO) forest waste-burning plant just went broke and shut down. I think most of the wood fed to it was beetle-killed or from thinning or firebreak projects. I've yet to hear what these projects are now doing with the wood. I suppose piling it to rot or be burned (w/o generating electricity). Maybe some of it will go to the pellet plant in Kremmling though that may have folded also.
While watching the Tour De France footage this year, I saw quite a few little sawmills next to the course in the foothills of the Pyrenees. I kinda feel like we need to figure out how to replicate that here. But I'm not going to hold my breath.
In interior BC you can go through a career without seeing a healthy wild lodgepole pine, nominally the dominant species, due to the mountain pine beetle. Probably an exaggeration, but one they use in the field. In northern USFS region 8 you get hundreds of thousands of acres of beetle kill, all standing dead timber, just waiting for a spark. 1-2 snags per acre are wildlife habitat, 800-1,000 per acres is a deathtrap.
We don't need to deal with biomass to make money; we need to deal with it out of the obligation to provide stewardship for our forests. If we can make a market for bioenergy here we're servicing an obligation rather than getting rich, unless we think richness is predicated on ongoing survival of our forest lands (I do).
I hiked the Tour Du Mont Blanc last year and was struck by how it wasn't forested except in places where sheep couldn't walk (e.g. retreating glacial scree). There is a long legacy of deforestation in Europe that we can think about unwinding because we like forests, but not because we think fossil fuel carbon can be displaced or offset by more forests. We had way more forests in the past than we have no and need to dig out of that deficit before we start worrying about atmospheric carbon balance here.
I think horizonal blades on smaller windmills is the ticket, and if placed close together, they accelerate more.
Thanks for sharing. You work in the Mountain West region, have you heard of a company called Timberage? They are trying to use Ponderosa pine that's not generally suitable for the building industry, turn it into CLT (cross-laminated timber) panels and those into mass-timber buildings. Kind of like super-thick plywood. Mass timber is popular these days but, like wood pellets, can have sourcing issues if not done right.
I'm just wondering if that sounds realistic or like a pipe dream/too small to matter.
We talked to them 2 years ago, great outfit, out of Durango? Mass timber is great, and gets around the regulations forbidding yellow pine for structural use. There are millions of acres of dry pine meant for a packaging market that has been replaced by plastics - leaving us with a crisis of plastic and an epidemic of trees on the dry side of the mountains.
Mass timber is 1/1000th the market size of concrete for construction yet the concrete industry funds google ads spreading fear and doubt around fire safety of mass timber and strength for large buildings. They actively resist zoning updates to support mass timber. While I love mass timber and want to see it succeed, there are a lot of headwinds and I cannot rely on it as a project offtake in the near future. Instead, the piles just sit and decompose after fuels thinning. If the worst happens they become fuel for the next fire, if the second worst happens they decompose into CO₂ and methane.
Ugh. I was sort of afraid that was the answer. I know about the concrete industry push against mass timber and working against zoning and code updates. Mass timber has tried some ways around it, but the headwinds against it in this country are, as you say, really strong. Without use in multifamily I don't think mass timber really could use enough in just single family homes, unless we started exporting that all over the place.
I heard someone built an experimental home out of wood panels using just the thickness to make up the insulation. Walls something like 24 inches thick. Now that'll use some board feet.....
That wall thickness reminds me of a distant relative who built a straw house in Arkansas. It turns out there is more than one way to do that and the European way is... the passivhaus way (they built with raw bales and stucco like a prairie dugout, so not the European way).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtdedAGB-_M
Hard to get windows/parts in the US. Many benefits, not as kooky as the Earth-ship stuff.
don’t know about your forests in California but Australian forests are burning like never before due to not just the climate heating and longer hotter drought conditions last multiple years in a row.
it’s the mismanagement of forests by the state owned forest companies that’s a big driver of forest fire. these public corporations have long been run by ignorant logging sympathisers for generations.
they sell the forest plants to loggers (at a loss to the states in every state bc they pay for the logging roads to be made and all the overheads while the loggers come and clear fell, burn the forest floor and leave). the repeated clear felling and burning of forest floor promotes one or two eucalyptus species which are most commercially viable to that location. they remove the dozens/hundreds of other plant species from the forest. this makes forest basically commercial plantation under state ownership and promotes fire. they’re not supposed to log within N metes of watercourses (maybe ephemeral or maybe be year round creeks or rivers) but they do. in natural bushfires the riparian zone vegetation stops bushfires in its tracks. even in the Black Saturday fires, intact old growth forests would stop bushfires in the gullies bc the riparian zone is so damp, even in summer and the species haven’t evolved to promote fire the way E. species have.
lin Australia logging and “thinning” and industrial scale “bush fire prevention” operations using it burns in cooler months have all been scientifically show beyond a reasonable doubt to promote bushfire, not protect property or the forests themselves. Indigenous fire stick management is a different story, they used animal and bird friendly techniques and they start a fire in a central location and manage the burn (and conditions they’ll light it in) so that it moves no faster than a slow walking pace. the pyromaniacs who do commercial burns drop incendiary from helicopters in one state of Australia (WA) and in others light the fires everywhere so the front is very large and they do so under legal mandates to burn 5% of the states forest a year in Victoria. which means fires often get out of control, one such fire in Wilson’s Promontory National Park burnt most of the park one year, still hasn’t recovered decades later.
i would not assume that burning forests (waste or otherwise) is carbon neutral. leave the timber in the forest for regenerative biology to activate.
in Australia a forest can recover the lost carbon from a bushfire in as little as 18 months in Tasmania and 3 years in other forests simply with regrowth. all forests are different to each other in terms of growth and carbon drawdown of course, depending on age etc.
Thanks for the additional info Geoff. I don't disagree that the western US needs to figure out what to do with its excess biomass given that its not going to let it burn naturally, and I'm not sure anyone on this podcast would disagree with you either? What I took away from the discussion was that Europe set climate policy that heavily subsidizes the wood pellet market, and that said policy is 1) fueling deforestation and 2) potentially not all that great for climate/health either. The concern is that companies say that they're mainly using excess biomass and not good wood, but in reality the ratio is likely flipped. So when these companies want to expand to the PNW, it's not all that illogical to distrust how they'll source the wood. The burden of proof should be on them. Also, it sounds like the policy is extra faulty because the EU requires high-quality wood pellets, so malice doesn't necessarily need to be applied here, these companies are just doing what's unintentionally asked of them.
NRDC clearly states on their website that "there is no way to create bioenergy at scale without harming people and the planet." The scale of biomass we have to manage in western forests absolutely dwarfs any of the scary numbers shared in this podcast. This is very likely to be a piece of disagreement, indeed I find most of the scary numbers here quite modest and not up to the challenge we face in reducing the threat of extreme wildfire (millions of acres, hundreds of millions of tons - annually to keep pace across 2 billion acres of forests in the US and Canada plus the obligation of active stewardship we inherit from those who came before). The complaint about highgrading the biomass is a policy and regulatory outcome, not an immutable fact of bio-energy. They did it because there was no consequence for doing it. These are precisely the areas to improve policy and regulation - we have full power over that behavior by these companies. We should act like it instead of disempowering people from taking control of these outcomes.
On point 2 there are ppm2.5 concerns in bioenergy that build on past equity concerns but that's again a regulatory failure rather than a climate failure. The difference between a biological source and a lithospheric source of carbon is the difference between global warming and... not having global warming. It is kind of a big deal to gloss over this bit. That's not nothing, even if we'd prefer to generate power from solar and wind *if we just needed to generate power* The key here is we *need to deal with the biomass* and since the counterfactual is uncontrolled burning or worse decomposition or worse catastrophic fire using that emission (all alternatives lead to emissions) to generate power is a net positive. It all comes down to one's counterfactuals and boundaries. Today the counterfactual is catastrophic fire when we don't maintain. Just because we haven't seen it for a long time doesn't mean it isn't coming. The story of the turkey and the farmer comes to mind - just because you haven't seen the end of November yet doesn't mean the farmer is your friend. You need to consider the lifecycle and this whole podcast was careful parsing of those boundaries.
Instead of acting against the policy this podcast was about the thing that was used in the service of a subsidy farming operation. Because we focus on the thing, that policy/system will continue to produce these outcomes with the next new thing (the UK claiming emissions reduction via deforestation is bad even when it doesn't happen in the PNW - we should be fighting that bogus accounting gimmick directly instead of against bioenergy generically). The CTA should have been to fix the policy and attach accountability for environmental and community outcomes on both sides of the exchange, because without the policy there is no subsidy and without the subsidy there is no company eager to strip resources from a foreign country, regardless of which foreign forest they have in their sights.
When we activate against the companies we'll always be chasing the game. Enviva, the Drax counterparty in the SE US, went bankrupt already. Not because of pressure on their behavior or as a consequence of their environmental damage, but because they skimped on facilities and operations and their assets degraded out from under them. This is the worst outcome - environmental damage and the state is on the hook to make it better if it can. We always get the outcomes we regulate for - our regulation required this outcome and it is exactly how O&G extraction works. But the speakers aren't asking for oversight. The story here is to stop bioenergy in forests at precisely the time that lack of industry kills our forests just as plainly as clearcutting does.
It is possible for humans to work with more nuance than "hands off vs. clear-cut," it is a shame not to have that conversation. Today's Park Fire livestream from The Lookout goes hard into the consequences of removing a biomass plant on a forest system - 30 years of forest management evolution visualized right in the path of one of the largest fires in California history. Catastrophic fires come when we don't have an outlet for the biomass and we've combined loss of those outlets with a prohibition on fire and policy of fire suppression (some folks are finding that carbon from your burning house isn't really the same as carbon from those trees, after all). To remove this tool from this board puts more of our forests at risk. https://www.youtube.com/live/ud4m0m1jCyk?si=9U2z1nAz-Os6PPls&t=930 Thinning provides a means to get back to fire return intervals that our forests need to remain healthy, but thinning won't happen at sufficient scale without an outlet for all that biomass.
We oughtn't use bioenergy to make money generating power with wood pellets, we should use bioenergy to support more acres of service work to satisfy our obligation to maintain our forests. The normal perspective here is backwards and this podcast presumes / promulgates that backwards thinking. You shouldn't complain on one side about Europeans marching across the continent chopping down all the trees and applying their European models of forestry to North American forests and then turn around and demand the myth of wilderness in response - it also erases the stewardship that created these forests in the first place. So. Yeah, I'm still on tilt here.
I'd love to hear what place the participants in this podcast see for humans in the forest. I don't think you can have a North American forest without humans working the land. https://www.sapiens.org/culture/pristine-wilderness-conservation/
While it wasn't the primary focus, I would just like to note that burning wood pellets for home heating is also really, really bad.
While they undoubtedly burn more efficiently than log fires, they still release a huge amount of particulates, carbon monoxide and other dangerous pollutants. In many places, notably including the UK, solid fuel heating is now the single largest source of PM2.5 pollution.
While it would probably be close to a wash in terms of CO2 emissions, to run a heat pump from electricity generated in a pellet-fed plant compared to burning it in a stove, in terms of direct health outcomes it would be far *better* to burn it in the Drax plant. As inadequate as the pollution controls on the plants undoubtedly are, at least they have some. Solid fuel stoves typically have none at all.
fair point. burning timber to hear poorly sealed and poorly insulated houses is normal in Australian rural communities. in some the air moves pollution away quickly, in others it’s trapped in a sink and stays there making for really poor air quality. i guess on farms it’s less of an issue, so long as your stove doors and flues are well sealed as there’s no neighbours. but in towns and cities it’s literally a killer. i read that in NYC they had to ban wood fired pizza ovens because they became so trendy it was noticeably reducing air quality for residents and visitors alike.
David, great piece. Learned a lot. My focus is on how we communicate about climate and in the following, I've used biomass or wood pellets as an example. Here are a few suggestions from a post - Almost All Climate messages Can Be Made Better - Here's How. https://bit.ly/3ZRifLk
Thanks for what you do.
-Hobie Stocking
Such a treat to see this annoying topic covered so beautifully by David and guests. I know that non-solutions are a drag to talk about, so I really appreciate this. And could you do biofuels (including renewable natural gas) next?
Why do politicians fall hook-line-and-sinker for these fairy tales? This is a rampant problem in Canada also. The most charitable answer I can come up with is that they are surrounded by a bubble of smart lobbyists telling them they can profit AND be net zero at the same time. So, then why don't they also listen to the little army of under-paid NGO staff and their own citizens--and the media---debunking these false solutions? Are they, the politicians, just too smart to listen to a bunch of tree-hugging nerds?
Yeah, it's just the money.
Also, as a comment to folks who are eager to get rid of all those darn trees: take a good hard look at google maps some time and you will realize that it's not from lack of trying that we still have trees. Don't worry, it won't be too much longer that you have to put up with the darned things, and the creatures that live in them.
Gaming the system: The truth about salvage logging. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUElSPw__Nk.
Hugo Drax is the villain of "Moonraker". 😄
I try to impress upon my team that none of the stakeholders in forestry trust each other and many are actively working to undermine each other. Forest, mill, stewardship organization, forester, operator, environmental group, tribes, community, others. There for recreation, hunting, wildlife, plant life, ecology, industry, or their own inscrutable purposes. Today's was a perspective we don't often hear; you found an extreme position. Many facts are correct in this talk, but they are deployed as an effort at decision based data analysis, rather than data driven decision making.
Dave, that 44-100 year payback claim represents the *fast* path to carbon mitigation, a natural weathering process will take 500,000 years! Exchanging a 100-1000 year cycle carbon source in place of a 100,000,000 year cycle source (fossil fuels) is an unambiguous win in the fight to limit carbon in the atmosphere. You were so close! All forests are mostly net zero when you get the whole lifecycle for your LCA, you have a sawtooth graph where carbon goes into trees and out into the air and it mostly rides at the same level over long periods of time so long as the forest stays a forest - this is where you lose the plot when you are trying to draw down atmospheric carbon. If the forest cycle was what was happening globally for the last 250 years we'd not have global warming! That's a pretty fundamental thing to let slip by in conversation. More people need to think like geologists, I guess.
Drax is emitting about 3.5x the ppm2.5 due to the switch from coal to wood pellets - because the coal has greater power density than wood so you have to burn a bunch more for the same output. That's super bad! They also spend more on trucking to move the fuel around (more mass and volume), also bad! But on carbon, and radiation because coal power has more radiological pollution than nuclear, the switch is a climate positive. We have no shortage of spare biomass. But one should do work on trees to save the trees, not to undo the fossil fuels blunder! It is a category error, essentially made by everyone selling something.
The forest must burn. For 12,000 years the west has adapted to fire. We have an epidemic of trees on our landscape and the best thing that could happen for our forest health would be for someone to leave the gate unlocked and half the trees to get stolen. Paul Hessburg lives in Wenatchee and did a TED talk on this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6Vayv9FCLM If a Giant Sequoia falls, 10,000 seedlings will sprout in its wake. But fast forward 1,000 years and only 1 tree remains. 9,999 of those trees must die or all the trees will die, the question is who picks the winners and losers and how are they removed. If you 'let nature decide' you end up with everyone losing, because nature never did this on its own. This gets to the absurdity of using forests to mitigate atmospheric carbon, forests are at best a point in time on a looping cycle and at worst a temporary thing soon to degrade into savannah or wasteland. 37% of high severity burn in California has swapped from conifer to grassland, today's fire doesn't care who's land it was or how it was or wasn't managed.
That said, it can also be true that the big wood pellet climate graft out of the EU is bad for forests. How the work is done is important and a group doing it wrong (even at the scale facilitated by total political subsidy capture) doesn't mean the thing itself is wrong to do. This is more commentary on rampant financialization of industries that ought not be driven exclusively by next quarter's profit statement and the impact on shareholders.
Chad Hanson's bad science comes in through the Dogwood Alliance link, of course it is here lurking. His organization raises money by filing lawsuits and has a history of motivated literature reviews. His concept of untrammeled pristine wilderness sans people erases the first nations and their long stewardship of the forests we've now taken as our own. And it is that stewardship obligation that we assume here in the west that militates towards finding *anything* to do with all this biomass coming out of forests. Making money on the wood side of things is very challenging (the subsidy capture is what drives Drax, at one point was 20% of the reported emissions reduction in the UK by itself). We have mill shutdowns all over the place, and from some set of environmental groups the only valid number of operating mills is zero. It is important to recall that the charter for the USFS, a federal agency, is to ensure that future generations of industrialists will have access to trees for industry and that today's industrialists don't consume them all foolishly. Teddy Roosevelt established the national parks too, but for recreation and hunting use and that also militates to getting into the forests and doing the work so you can see through them (if you can't see that buck at 100 yards your forest is too thick, for hunting and for fire resilience). The myth of wilderness is pure fiction.
We lost 1M acres of Fir in the PNW (1.2 of True Fir, and another 800k of Douglas fir) from the 3 days in 2022 corresponding to the heat dome event (also the town of Lytton in BC, to a wildfire that threw off more lightning than Canada typically gets in a whole year). That's about 120 million tons of timber with no economic destination that will rot in place, creating pest and disease threat to the remaining forests as well as ready fuel increasing the risk of catastrophic fire. When fire is catastrophic you lose the topsoil, liberating that carbon and creating debris flows that kill fish and streams. We have a duty to work the land, with fire if we can, to ensure the worst outcomes do not obtain. To do that we must break all belief that doing nothing leads to better outcomes than doing something here.
Japan replaced Fukushima, which was decommissioned due to a massive earthquake and tidal wave! They didn't feel they had the time or climate for that big chunk of missing supply via other paths (Wind and Solar - 13 years ago - not viable replacements). This was a social decision on their part born out of crisis. To criticize remotely from a specific and narrow climate lens does that whole savior sans justice thing we should all be so worried about falling into. Germany as well gave up nuclear and went to methane (2023), that was also a climate loss, bigger than Japan's and leaning into Putin's war; we should try to keep some perspective here.
On the "half of what counts for renewable energy in the EU is bioenergy,"
I think this may under-value wind and solar and hydro by lumping electricity in with heating; the whole "primary energy" accounting problem. Tracing these claims leads to words like "gross" and "final,"
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_the_European_Union, and I'm sure there are more detailed current estimates, "In 2020, renewables provided 23.1% of gross energy consumption in heating and cooling. (FP: I assume wood is the main renewable heating source.)
In electricity, renewables accounted for 37.5% of gross energy consumption, led by wind (36%) and hydro-power (33%), followed by solar (14%), solid biofuels (8%) and other renewable sources (8%)." Clearly in the last four years, wind and solar have increased to a greater degree than biofuels for electricity.
https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/7931acc2-1ec5-11e9-8d04-01aa75ed71a1/language-en
may predate Drax conversion from coal to wood, but shows 75% of biomass energy is for heating and it shows only 4% of biomass for energy is imported to the EU.
But whatever it is, this system may be renewable; but I think everybody's right that this is not carbon-neutral in any time frame that matters. And is a shit show in a bunch of other ways, well described in the interview.
But, the 1000 lb question was not asked. WTF to do with these forests instead. One of the advocates dismissed "thinning." We clearly need forestry of various kinds adapted to communities, forests and climate. The "leave it all alone and let nature take its course" vibe I get from environmentalists just doesn't cut it now.
My understanding is that we have surplus timber because of decreased paper use in newspapers, office paper and packaging, despite an uptick in cardboard use for shipping. Can some of these trees grow a bit more and be used for construction, where the carbon is productively sequestered? Perhaps we should subsidize that. Whether it's chip or wafer board or 2x4s or poles or "mass timber."
For actual forestry waste, I keep seeing claims this will be converted to more valuable liquid biofuels; but I don't see a lot of steel in the ground.
Ensyn, an Ontario-based company, operates a 3 million gallon/year production plant in Renfrew, Ontario. They supply renewable fuel oil to US clients, including Bates College in Maine and St. Lawrence University in upstate New York. Their production apparently meets EPA's Renewable Fuel Standards (RFS2) program requirements. I'm not sure how much they use forest waste vs. standing timber in their production facility, although their marketing talks about "forest residuals.." They're doing a joint venture under the name Castlerock Biofuels to open a 20 million gallon plant near Katahdin in Maine.
I have been following renewable energy in an area of Europe that uses wood chips, often locally sourced, rather than pellets. (The South Tyrol, an Italian province.) Do the objections to pellets also extend to wood chips? It seems to me that they might not--wood chips use more of the tree, don't require as much energy, and are not transported as far. I would welcome feedback!
This is because the US bombed the Russian Gas Pipelines, two, meant for Germany. Then the US exported their own fracked gas to Europe at ultra high prices. If these companies lowered their prices, the need for an alternative would be vastly lowered.
hi Dave
thanks for doing this episode. i was the one who left the very long comment under the pod you did with Governor Jay Inslee where he made the e ignorant claims about biological carbon vs geological carbon being different and that how that made biomass incineration all good. i was surprised you didn’t push back at the time, but i guess your style is pretty warm and that’s why you get great guests including politicians. it’s great that you covered this controversial perspective from Governor Inslee with some expert push back in such timely manner.
i’d agree that most of the other things he express about renewables and climate change that had a factual basis or scientific claims were well informed.
Thank Geoff, I get so tired of writing about this..There are politicians who read this kind of stuff and apply it to the Western US. Also there are certification systems for people worried about appropriate sourcing… as you know forest folks do this kind of thing all the time with FSC and SFI and suchlike.
As for Hanson, check this out..https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/aug/01/us-forest-service-old-growth-trees-deforestation-logging
i wouldn’t be holding FSC as beyond reproach or that their accreditation means a product is ethically sourced. there’s lots of loopholes and even their branding has so many categories that an FSC logo on a product doesn’t mean much. certainly not in Australia where native logging should cease everywhere and switch to plantation that can more than accomodate timber and pulp needs (we chip and export most of the forests we mow down in australia, almost nothing they extract is used for building or furniture products).
The narrative presented here is disturbing, but it's frustrating not to have more numbers to go with it.
In an attempt to partially remedy this, I looked up US wood production and consumption in Table 10.1 of the Monthly Energy Review (https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/monthly/pdf/sec10_3.pdf). It says the difference between production and consumption equals "densified biomass exports", which I assume means wood pellets. For 2023 that difference equals 135 trillion Btu (which is 0.13% of total US energy production). If you burn that to produce electricity at 33% efficiency, you get about 13 TWh. But according to Ember (https://ember-climate.org/data/data-tools/data-explorer/), the UK alone produced 34 TWh of electricity from bioenergy in 2023, and Europe as a whole produced nearly 200 TWh. And this is just electricity, not counting pellets burned for heating. So unless I've made an error somewhere (which is entirely possible), it looks like imported wood pellets from the US supply only a small percentage of the wood being burned as fuel in Europe.
Is this correct, or am I missing something important, or did I make an arithmetic error?
I was put off by some of the comments in this episode. You made fun of the name of one user of this technology, and claimed something I’m used to hearing out of a prominent politician I try not to think about, “everyone doesn’t like this. People are always saying it’s a bad idea.”
How does content like this fir in with your goals?
It made me reconsider what I think about this podcast. It kind of crystallizes what I don’t like about this podcast, and why I listen to it at 1.5 times speed. It’s not particularly content dense.
Similarly, I lost some respect for NRDC, which I had thought was more serious. I was sifting through for arguments for why this is a bad idea and getting just a lot of “I mean, c’mon, right?”
If the energy demands are so high for shipping and drying, say how high they are. “X% of the energy gained goes to drying.” Shouldn’t be that hard to figure out. Shipping on the ocean is not particularly energy intensive—the ocean is very flat.
I also noted that methane was noted as prevented from export… and then it was later said that the guests wished methane was burned instead. Which is it?
biomass and extracted methane aren’t used in similar ways in the power grid and certainly once a grid is at 50% wind and solar methane will only be used from then on to 100% RE as a peaking generation fuel. and at 100% RE it’s obviously the point at which it’s no longer needed, other than for reserve power until we know we’ll never ever need it even in an emergency.
whereas if you look at the biomass output in Germany in the power grid in every state is a flat dispatch line, constantly being burnt, even more constant than coal power plants which tend to slowly ramp a bit and close units for this or that reason for periods. gas might be burnt in the USA like that because it’s cheaper than coal in US but as i said, once wind and solar hit 40-50% of the power mix then you only use gas to fill the gaps because it’s a) more costly and b) emissions intense (more so than coal even thought the combustion CO₂ is approximately half, the methane that gets vented and leaks easily makes up for the difference and then some, see Howarth, A Bridge to Nowhere and several other papers in the 2009-2015 period).
it’s funny how all the pro-logging lobbyists come out of the woodwork saying they don’t like the show whenever these issues are discussed. if you don’t like the pod don’t listen to it. i think it’s one of the best energy podcasts going around. i don’t really learn much in a technical sense from it because I’ve studied these topics for ten years but i still find interesting to here the new things people are doing in these spaces.
Well, then we’re both not learning much.
I mainly do social science statistics, never had any relationship with lobbying firm nor logging. Nor is this my first comment on this pod, which is very easy to verify.
And yeah, point well taken about not listening. Since this episode I am browsing for a new energy transition podcasts and am listening to Energy Gang, which I’ve found informative.
I’m just looking for information on the latest in the area, so if you have other suggestions, I’d be open to hearing them.
The Washington state legislature makes some unfortunate policy decisions, especially when it comes to timber.
In 2020 the Washington Legislature passed HB 2528 that declares forest products, hence logging, as “part of the state's global climate response.” https://lawfilesext.leg.wa.gov/biennium/2019-20/Pdf/Bill%20Reports/House/2528-S2.E%20HBR%20FBR%2020.pdf?q=20240725084217
From the staff summary of the final bill: “It is stated as the policy of the state to support the complete forest products sector, which includes landowners, mills, bioenergy, pulp and paper, and the related harvesting and transportation infrastructure.” https://lawfilesext.leg.wa.gov/biennium/2019-20/Pdf/Bill%20Reports/House/2528-S2.E%20HBR%20PL%2020.pdf?q=20240725084217
The bill passed almost unanimously; only 3 conservative senators voted against it in the floor vote. The environmental organizations in the state did not oppose it, probably because they saw this as a foregone conclusion. The bill information page has all the documentation. https://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary?BillNumber=2528&Year=2019&Initiative=false
As another example, Washington provides a tax exemption for industry to burn hog fuel (waste wood) to generate electricity. The exemption was renewed in 2023 via HB 1018. https://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary?BillNumber=1018&Year=2023&Initiative=false
The brief description from the final bill report: “Changing the expiration date for the sales and use tax exemption of hog fuel to comply with the 2045 deadline for fossil fuel-free electrical generation in Washington state and to protect jobs with health care and retirement benefits in economically distressed communities.”
Industry testimony during committee hearings emphasized keeping jobs and that hog fuel is a “renewable energy source”. It experienced virtually no opposition, with the exception of one courageous advocate in the Senate Ways & Means hearing, who can be heard at the 1 hour 32 minute point in this recording. https://tvw.org/video/senate-ways-means-2023031442/?eventID=2023031442
Perhaps she made a difference. Although HB 1018 also passed unanimously in the House floor vote, 12 senators voted against it in that floor vote.
Since I'm all over this one... If anyone is nearby (Bellevue WA) on Thursday I'll be hosting my monthly climate and forests meet up at Cascadia Pizza from 4:30-7pm (on the back patio enjoying the sun). Please stop by and show me how I'm wrong about forests, or catch up with other people dreading the impending start of smoke season (we had an orange tint in the sky on Sunday before the rain, from Oregon fire smoke carrying high to the north).
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7219943950185287680/