The fuel pellet industry is thriving. Supporters see it as a climate-friendly source of rural jobs. For others, it’s a polluter and destroyer of nature.
The pellets are used for fuel.
Excerpt from this New York Times story:
The story of industrial wood pellets in places like Northampton County begins in climate policy made an ocean away. In 2009, European officials decided to declare biomass energy — basically, the burning of wood or other plants, rather than fossil fuels — to be carbon neutral. The idea is that regrowing plants, over time, would ultimately reabsorb the carbon dioxide released by the burning.
Britain and other countries set ambitious climate targets and began subsidizing electrical utilities to build biomass plants or retrofit coal plants to burn wood. The largest power plant in Britain, Drax, which is based in Selby, in the north of England, now produces 2.6 gigawatts of electricity from biomass, versus just 1.3 gigawatts from coal. (One gigawatt is enough to power a medium-sized city.)
Drax buys pellets from Enviva — a company based in Bethesda, Md., that bills itself as the world’s largest pellet producer — and others. It also operates its own pellet mills in Gulf Coast states.
Bioenergy has in recent years accounted for some 14 percent of Britain’s total electricity generation. Denmark, Belgium and the Netherlands have also invested heavily.
Many scientists have long been skeptical of biomass’s climate benefits. Wood releases more carbon dioxide per unit of electricity produced than coal or gas, and a newly planted tree can take decades to reabsorb the carbon dioxide emitted by burning. “Wood is a sucky fuel,” said Tim Searchinger, a researcher at Princeton.
In 2009, a group led by Mr. Searchinger wrote in the journal Science protesting what they called a “critical climate accounting error.” They argued that certain major international climate policies and legislation designed to reduce countries’ greenhouse gas emissions allow nations to burn biomass and discount their smokestack emissions but fail to account for the carbon losses caused by cutting down trees to burn them.
“It’s just cheating,” Mr. Searchinger said.
Despite scientists’ misgivings, policymakers barreled ahead. While wood burning dates back millenniums and pellet stoves have long warmed homes in places like New England, Europe’s renewable-energy directive opened up a new, industrial-scale market.
The biggest supplier of that market quickly became the rural United States Southeast, a patchwork of mostly privately owned, lightly regulated hardwood forests, swamps, farms, small towns and pine trees. Lots and lots of pine trees.
