Friday, 14 May 2021

Burning biomass. Part 2: The forests

 

Britain destroyed most of its forests hundreds of years ago. Alongside a myriad of other uses, countless trees were felled to fuel iron smelters and build battleships. At present only about 13 % of the UK’s land area is wooded, compared to a world average of 31 %.[1] Needless to say, when the UK began to convert coal-burning power plants to biomass, we were never going to be burning British trees. Even if the entire output of the UK’s forestry industry were to be poured into Drax’s maw, this would not be enough to cover its consumption.

In countries blessed with greater forest coverage, canny entrepreneurs have seized the opportunity created by European energy policies and have rapidly built up a massive pellet-producing industry. This is most striking in the south-eastern US, the source of 65 % of Drax’s pellets in 2019. Twenty-three wood pellet mills now operate here, three of them owned by Drax itself. Enviva, the world’s largest producer of wood pellets and Drax’s biggest supplier, has acquired or built nine pellet mills in this area, all of them since the passing of the EU’s Renewable Energy Directive in 2009. Several more mills, with even greater capacity, are at various stages of the planning process.[2]

What exactly goes into these pellet mills? As mentioned in my previous post, Drax claims that its pellets are “largely made up of low-grade wood produced as a by-product of the production and processing of higher value wood products, like lumber and furniture”. Biomass UK, the trade association for the industry, similarly talks about “residues”. This is in fact nonsense: residues from the timber industry such as bark and twigs may be used as fuel in pellet processing, but they do not produce high-quality pellets, and there is ample documentary evidence that wood pellets are mostly or entirely made from whole trees.[3] Impressive aerial photographs of pellet plants show thousands of tree trunks stacked outside, waiting to be processed.[4]

The other major claim made by Drax is that its pellets come from “sustainably managed working forests”. What does this mean? I can imagine two scenarios for sustainably managed forests: one is established, natural forests, from which a small number of trees are selectively felled without any major disturbance to the overall forest environment; the other is pine plantations so vast that the quantity felled is constantly replenished by new trees. In fact neither scenario represents the real situation. The demand for wood pellets, driven by the fashion for “low-carbon” biomass (see my previous post for the truth behind this), is so great and has arisen so suddenly that a careful, one-tree-at-a-time type of forestry has no hope of keeping up, and the output of established plantations has also been outpaced. Instead what has happened, and is still happening, is the clear-felling (or in some countries the increasingly rapacious “selective” felling) of natural, diverse old-growth forests. If these are replaced at all, it is with quick-growing monocultures of pine.

This is a tragedy on a huge scale, which is being played out in numerous locations around the world. In the south-eastern US, substantial tracts of mature hardwood forest, known as “bottomland” forest, have been destroyed to feed the pellet mills. These are deciduous forests in low-lying, frequently flooded land near rivers – imagine tall trees with buttressed trunks, rising out of the still, dark water of wetlands. These forests are complex and immensely valuable ecosystems, home to an enormous variety of plants and animals. Indeed this area, the North American Coastal Plain, has been declared a World Biodiversity Hotspot. Bottomland forest also provides essential “ecosystem services” to humans, reducing the risk of flooding, and improving water quality.[5] It is estimated that 80 % of these forests have disappeared in the last two hundred years. Most of what remains belongs to private landowners, and only 10 % of it is protected. [6]

It is this fragmentation and lack of protection that has allowed Enviva and other pellet manufacturers to prosper. Enviva, like Drax, makes a very persuasive attempt to greenwash its activities. Its stated purpose is to “displace coal, grow more trees, and fight climate change”. “Climate change,” it announces, “is the greatest challenge of our time. Enviva was founded to be part of the solution.” Its website shows an idyllic image of forest-clad hills bathed in sunlight, and its argument is essentially that if Enviva were not there to buy wood, nobody would have any incentive to grow trees. By providing a market for “low-value wood”, and insisting that the landowners “commit to return their land to forest after harvest”, Enviva says it is preventing this land from being converted to other uses. “Keeping forests as forests” is one of its mantras.

This is an unbelievably cynical claim. Much of the hardwood forest now being clear-felled to feed Enviva’s mills consists of pockets of woodland that have been left standing by generations of farmers, on the low-lying edges of their farms, because the land is not viable for agricultural use. So in many cases there is little danger of it being cleared to grow crops. Nor are these remote tracts of swampland desirable real estate for shopping malls and golf courses. In other words, if it weren’t for the pellet industry there is every chance that these trees would remain standing, as they have for many decades.

Furthermore, Enviva’s claims about “keeping forests as forests” are based on the assumption that any kind of forest cover is equally valuable. This is simply not the case. A mixed-species, self-regenerating natural forest that has been growing for many decades or centuries cannot be “replaced” in any meaningful way by a single-species plantation which will be felled as soon as it is viable, after as little as fifteen years.[7] The range of plant life that thrives in a natural forest – the moss, ferns, flowers and creepers – need many years of undisturbed existence to develop. Fungi, insects, birds and mammals need a range of shelter types and food sources that only an established forest can provide – including dead and decaying trees. A tree farm is not a forest – or at best it’s a “fake forest”.[8]  

Quite apart from the loss of irreplaceable forest habitats, the wood pellet industry causes severe local pollution. This is hardly surprising given the processes involved. The tree trunks are delivered to the plant by heavy logging trucks, then debarked and shredded in hammermills, a noisy process that goes on around the clock. The next step is to dry the wood, using heat produced by burning wood and bark. This combustion generates greenhouse gases, while the wood chips emit harmful VOCs (volatile organic compounds) as they dry, as well as at other stages in the process. A report in 2018 found that “The 21 wood pellet mills exporting to Europe emit a total of 16,000 tons of health-threatening air pollutants per year, including more than 2,500 tons of particulate matter (soot), 3,200 tons of nitrogen oxides, 2,100 tons of carbon monoxide, and 7,000 tons of volatile organic compounds. These plants also emit 3.1 million tons of greenhouse gases annually”.[9]

People living near the mills are affected by noise and dust pollution, are unable to sit on their own front porches without wearing face masks,[10] and suffer from an increase in respiratory diseases.[11] The presence of the mills exacerbates existing social inequalities: most are located in poor communities with a high proportion of minority ethnic groups, and their operations – while purporting to bring jobs and prosperity – in fact diminish the quality of life of these communities.[12] A number of grassroots organizations have sprung up to combat this polluting industry, and in partnership with larger NGOs they have won some victories. In 2019, for example, Enviva was forced to install equipment to reduce air pollution in its wood pellet plant in Richmond County, North Carolina. In February 2021 Drax was fined 2.5 million US dollars for major environmental violations at its pellet plant in Mississippi. This is an encouraging result, but the fine has been aptly described as “a drop in the bucket compared to the 2 million [GBP] per day the UK government hands the company in the form of biomass subsidies”.[13]

Campaigners on both sides of the Atlantic are working tirelessly to try to stop this madness. Key players in the US are Dogwood Alliance, the Southern Environmental Law Center, and the Natural Resources Defense Council. In the UK, the campaign group most strongly focused on this issue is Biofuelwatch. These UK and US organizations have joined forces in the campaign Cut Carbon Not Forests, which urges the public to “stop the UK from harming our planet’s forests” by calling for a end to biomass electricity subsidies. Such efforts to raise public awareness can bear fruit: in 2020 an opinion poll in the Netherlands showed that 98 % of citizens favoured ending subsidies for biomass, and in February 2021, the Dutch government agreed to reject future subsidies.[14] Could this happen in the UK too?

Existing natural forests and wetlands are not renewable; they are irreplaceable. Not only are they vital for the protection of biodiversity, they are also our first line of defence against climate change. Burning them in the name of sustainability makes no sense at all. We should certainly be planting new trees – both to supply our other timber needs (more on this another time!) and to increase permanent forest cover – but we shouldn’t kid ourselves that this will make up for destroying mature trees and all the life that depends on them. A fundamentally good intention – that of weaning ourselves off fossil fuels and nuclear power – has led to horrifying consequences. The mass production and consumption of wood pellets is bad for local communities and environments, bad for biodiversity, and disastrous from a climate change perspective. It has to stop.

 

Neil Wellons on Flickr, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/legalcode

Wndy on Flickr, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/legalcode


Special thanks to Jack Spruill, who first drew my attention to this issue and has given me an insight into the situation in North Carolina, as well as making helpful suggestions on this and my previous post.

 


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