Biomass - Green Energy, or More Bio-mess?

By Sandy Lonsdale on January 10, 2010 From Renewable Energy campaign

When the Oregon State Biomass Working Group met over the course of a year during 2004-5, there were two of what you would call “environmentalists” on committee.  We were amazed at the growing interest among all the big timber folks, their lobby and political champions, in this stuff called biomass.  We worked through some big issues and found some agreements, but mostly it was the timber industry calling the shots like usual. 
Biomass looked like a new profitable use of the material left after logging forests. Plus there was new emphasis on renewable energy to create jobs and supply growing electricity demand with fewer emissions from local sources. 
I was there representing a renewable energy proposal we were working on in LaPine, OR, to build a power plant to burn forest residuals, slash, brush and small trees choking the land for 50 miles surrounding the recreational playground (and former timber industry base) of central Oregon. 
The company making the proposal, Vulcan Power Company [full disclosure: at the time, Vulcan Power was owned by TENTHMIL founder Steve Munson] already had the utility contract for leases at Newberry Volcano east of LaPine, and we could deliver either geothermal or biomass energy since both are over 90% efficient and run 24/7—known as base-load, they can compete with the fossil fuels on price and performance and are much cleaner and homemade. I was the environmental planner and a 30-year resident and had ten years of experience in forest issues in Oregon. 

Thin or Burn

It was a stretch for me to be advocating for cutting trees and clearing brush primarily on public National Forest, but even I agreed that we were either going to thin the forest land left after the timber industry was through logging the older forests, or watch it burn up.  The fire regime was way out of balance and forest succession and health was suffering on the majority of these cut and grazed over lands. Nobody would bid on the timber sales that would also pay to do the restorative work, and the remaining old forest that I had spent a decade fighting to protect was now at risk of burning too. 
LaPine was a rural area facing extreme wildfire danger, with little industry remaining and high unemployment.  The proposed biomass power plant would be centrally located, and provide 12-15 MW of electricity.  This seemed like a compromise we all could get behind if we did it with an ecological and restorative touch, which we showed we could.
In the course of two years, both energy projects fell apart due to business reasons.  There is still no geothermal development at Newberry, a new company now proposes a biomass facility in LaPine, and along with many other forest advocates, I have become an opponent of this new energy source called biomass.

Biomass Has Run Amok

The timber industry has long championed forests as America’s renewable resource.  Problem is when we manage forests for timber production we lose some species and other benefits of wild forests, we lose biological diversity, we lose the very nature of wilderness.  Trees are renewable, forest evolve over millennia and contain far more than trees.  Forests truly are the lungs of the earth. Take them away, and the Earth dies.
Today nearly every thing that isn’t recyclable is being lumped together and called biomass, to obtain the federal and state subsidies and renewable energy credits to power more than 200 new electrical generation facilities nationwide, including perhaps a dozen in Oregon.  These plants would burn all kinds of “bio-materials,” including agricultural waste, forest residues, and mill wastes.  But they are not carbon neutral since the regenerated forest takes the better part of a century to resequester the carbon it was sequestering before the first tree was cut. 
Biomass now accounts for 50% of the new renewable energy generation output proposed near term to ease our dependence on imported fossil fuels and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. 
Meanwhile the US EPA has finally admitted that CO2 is a pollutant and primary greenhouse gas source, and promised to cut back on the amount of human generated carbon emissions with regulations.  The race is on for the energy industry to put biomass plants on line before anyone starts counting their CO2 emissions, because they are roughly equal to the CO2 emissions from Coal-fired power plants.  Those 200 plus biomass plants proposed will emit a reported 700 million tons of CO2 each year along with millions of tons of new particulates and other toxins that are harmful to humans and degrade our environment.
Utility contracts are generally 10-20 years.  A power plant needs upgrading after about 20 years of operation.  Once stationary plants are built they require a steady stream of material over decades.  So forest thinning and logging operations, agricultural wastes and biomass diversions from landfills must continue for at least 20 years.  What happens when these materials become scarce or raw material costs escalate beyond reason due to competition?  Trees grow at a fixed rate, and globally we have already consumed or converted 60% of our forestland.  How can consuming more forests to create another vital product be good at all?

The Human Cost

New environmental justice complaints have emerged from existing biomass facilities, both municipal solid waste (MSW) incinerators and wood burning biomass plants, due to their toxic emissions and the fine particulate matter that escapes the plant and falls on surrounding, mostly poor, rural neighborhoods.  These particulates lodge in the lungs, ears, noses, clothes, houses and businesses surrounding the plant and often cannot be filtered or screened out by any affordable means. Human health costs rise as a result but are not counted as costs to the plant but rather are paid for by the community.
Siting these facilities near rural population centers makes sense for several reasons:  land is affordable, workers are available, the waste is generated nearby, and in western states these are the areas that need restorative thinning to avoid catastrophic losses from wildfires.  Also, trucking long distance only adds to the costs and to the emissions and other impacts.
Woody biomass is not carbon neutral when you count the CO2 emissions, because when forests are not cut they store carbon while emitting oxygen and only a fraction of forests burn each year.  Burning forest material releases carbon into the atmosphere and eliminates the natural carbon absorption of the trees in the forests. 
The carbon equation is blown only when you add the human element.  Forests have been burning and re-growing for millennia, forests need fire to remain healthy, but we have cut down most of our native forests and added billions of tons of carbon to the atmosphere with our power plants and our cars and our wasteful habits.  Our forests are much more fire-prone and less healthy due to our past management. 
Eventually, with all this new hunger for wood to fuel power plants raw material costs will rise, we will be cutting larger and larger trees, going farther out into the back country to obtain new sources, and clearing more forest understory of the biomass material the forest needs to create the soil to nourish the next generation of forest.  Our goal must finally be to treat forests with the care they deserve.  They are the lungs of the earth and provide us with so many other benefits than just wood products.

The Human Solution
Large-scale biomass power plants can only lead to problems, but that doesn’t mean biomass isn’t a viable energy source.
Schools and other public buildings can be retrofitted (or if new construction can be built in) with small biomass combustion units for heating in winter. They’re installing just such a system now in a school in Sisters, OR. With projects like this,  locally-produced biomass chips or pelleted wood from ecological restoration projects to thin overstocked forests can be used locally to heat buildings and reduce energy cost and consumption.
Properly sited and sized biomass to energy plants can be viable and even beneficial in many areas if done right.  Finding a moderate balance with ecological restoration as the guide can, at least temporarily, provide new sources of energy while creating jobs and healthier, more resilient forests for the future.  As with most things, the qualifier is scale. With tax credits to encourage small projects like these, we can address the needs of the forests and the need for energy, without the risk that comes from big corporate-scale projects.

 

This was Biomass - Green Energy, or More Bio-mess?, an entry in our Renewable Energy Campaign from January 10, 2010. It was filed under Biomass

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