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We need to get serious about global warming and energy generation, but wood burning biomass plants are a false solution, which will worsen our problems, not help to solve them.
While the word “biomass” conjures up pleasant images, the promotion of this old caveman incinerator technology as “green” is a colossal “greenwash” by the timber and trash industries attempting to cash in on lucrative public clean energy subsidies.
One can become quite cynical to learn that our “green” energy subsidies are promoting the cutting of forests and burning them in dirty biomass plants instead of promoting the truly clean energy solutions such as solar, geothermal, appropriately scaled and located wind and hydro, and most importantly conservation and efficiency.
A Biomass Reality Check
Contrary to industry claims, biomass energy does not reduce carbon dioxide emissions, it increases them.
Biomass energy produces 50 percent more carbon dioxide per megawatt hour of energy than coal. That is not a typo, and is based on numbers from the proponents' own reports. Since burning wood is so inefficient, burning living trees is actually worse than burning coal. Biomass burning releases about 3,300 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt, while coal releases 2,100 pounds. Gas-fired plants release even less, about 1,300 pounds.
Not only is burning trees worse than coal for carbon dioxide emissions, but it produces similar levels of other pollutants such as carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide, volatile organic compounds, sulfur dioxide and particulates. The McNeil biomass plant near Burlington, Vt., touted by biomass proponents, is the number one pollution source in the entire state, emitting 79 classified pollutants, according to planethazard.com.
Massachusetts’ current proposals would build 190 megawatts of biomass energy that would require burning 2.5 million tons of wood each year. This is massive considering that the average total timber harvest in Massachusetts is about 500,000 tons. This means that at a historical logging intensity of 19 tons per acre, 100,000 acres of forest would need to be logged every year in Massachusetts for biomass alone. At this rate, all Western and Central Massachusetts forests could be logged in 16 years. Even our state public forests and parks are targeted for a 1,082 percent increase over historical logging levels to fuel the power plants.
Burning all this forest would only increase Massachusetts power generating capacity 1 percent, yet al- ternative, economic conservation and efficiency measures, which cost a third of new energy, could reduce our energy use by 30 percent.
At this time of ecological and economic crisis, there is no reasonable argument for forcing taxpayers to subsidize new pollution, carbon dioxide emissions, forest devastation, and carbon-based fuels for minimal amounts of power. These policies will worsen air pollution, increase greenhouse gas emissions, deplete forests and drain our public coffers, the exact opposite of what we need to be doing right now. These taxpayer subsidies and other incentives should be redirected toward truly green technologies to produce clean, non-carbon emitting energy, and local jobs.
Chris Matera is the founder of Massachusetts Forest Watch, a citizen watchdog group formed to defend Massachusetts state forests against commercial exploitation. Learn more at www.maforests.org.
Thank you to the Worcester Business Journal for stimulating this important discussion about biomass.
The point of Chris Matera's main concern is that we not adopt energy policies that would have us running madly into the woods, chopping down our forests, burning the wood, and feeling proud of ourselves. Any such policy severely undervalues what our forests do already to reduce global warming, and what trees and forests mean to society in general. There are actually grim foresters out there who think that clearcuts and other forms of land desecration are "beautiful."
Some of the traditional loggers claims are credible in climate terms. If a tree becomes a wood product used in buildings or other long-term uses, the carbon is sequestered, and new trees can be grown in the forest. So my complaint is not with the wood products industry that has provided wood products to build houses many of us live in (as I do). My complaint is with the new entrepreneurs who think the best use for trees is to burn them and release carbon dioxide into the air. Chris has been attempting to highlight the disastrous policy implications of this "Burn the Forests" policy.
ARTSOLAR fails to explain that burning the forests takes away a vital source for absorbing CO2. For decades the forest land must struggle to recover from the typical clear-cuts. These clear-cuts need quite a bit of careful management and thinning to recreate a desirable forest that is not composed of shrub growth and what foresters call "junk trees." Any claim that conventional forest policies magically recreate forests just as we remember them and wish them to be is pure non-sense.
The effects of clear-cutting are much more widespread than the industry admits to. Foresters use euphemisms like "shelterwood" or "thinning" to imply that only a fraction of the trees are being removed. Meanwhile the reality in places like Savoy State Forest means a shelterwood cut is really a clear-cut with a few straggly trees left standing. Msny foresters are guilty of offering or accepting gross misrepresentation.
Chris Matera's pollution emission numbers for coal and biomass seem to be correct. But how is it possible that a wood burning plant can let out more carbon dioxide than a coal plant? The explanation appears to be in the abysmal efficiency of biomass generating plants, which never exceed 25 percent in efficiency and can be as low as 15 percent.
The cause for this poor efficiency is the high water content of the wood. Anyone burning wood in a fireplace is told to dry the green wood first, and keep it out of the rain and snow. Wet wood produces cold, smoky combustion. We know that, and we have seen it in our lives.
But where are the biomass advocates? They are all for huge biomass plants that burn green wood and do not even build sheds to protect the wood piles from the rain.
I fear that the bozos have taken over. We know much about the most famous biomass plant in the state, the generating plant proposed on the banks of the Westfield River in the little town of Russell. The plant is be woefully inefficient. There was no attempt to recover waste heat. There was no shed to protect the wood piles from rain, snow and ice. Even though an active railroad track passed right by the site, the developers insisted on supplying the plant by truck. All of the loaded and unloaded trucks would go right through the middle of the town of Russell. They could have reduced the noise from the trucks by banning Jake Brakes, but would they consider that? No.
They went to court to try to deny a nearby resident access to her house (and making her property landlocked), but the Land Court Judge determined that the developers did not own all the land. The threatened resident owned part of it.
Chris did not have the space in his article to discuss the outrageous profits and low prices paid to landowners for wood. In their state environmental report, the Russell developers said that the cost of the wood fuel at the plant gate would be $20 a ton -- $19 would be cutting, chipping and transporting the wood, while only ONE DOLLAR a ton would be paid to the landowner. I would call that daylight robbery. Meanwhile the developers were projecting $1.2 billion in profits over 30 years, all for themselves.
With advocates like this in charge, is it any wonder that biomass is controversial in Massachusetts?
Stephen H. Kaiser, PhD
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Not long ago, there was national outrage at the appropriations process which drained our public coffers. A similarly outrageous scam involves biomass subsidies, state and federal tax credits. What's worse, our quality of life is being sacrificed, health threats are increasing, green spaces, parks, watersheds and forests are being used as "renewable energy". This MUST change! This is the equivalent of being told we must resort to burning our homes to keep warm.
I believe it is more accurate to compare biomass to other forms of green energy in the renewable portfolio standard, since this is how biomass gets its funding from us, the taxpayers. Coal is not in the renewable portfolio and does not receive renewable energy credits. It is inarguably dirty energy not deserving of renewable tax credits. Why not compare biomass to solar or geothermal or wind and then let's talk emissions and toxins! If you are really concerned about carbon dioxide, which is classified as a pollutant by the EPA, why not keep the mature forests as the incredible carbon sequestering sink that they are and eliminate burning altogether. Finally, the Pine Tree Plant does burn garbage from what I've heard. Conservation Law Foundation examined one of their "paper cubes" and found a golf ball - hardly paper and straight out of the trash can if you ask me! So how can we trust the facts and figures coming from the biomass industry if they are claiming to burn no trash when they are?
The writer (Chris Matera) is right on! It's also important to note that the Massachusetts Medical Society which represents over 20,000 physicians in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts have come on-line to formally oppose these three plants (Greenfield, Russell, and Springfield) for the unacceptable health threat to the 800,000 residents of the Pioneer Valley.
The logging intensity figures may be right, but the author's claims about biomass emitting more CO2 than coal and gas are extremely misleading.
Coal is old biomass that in the process of becoming coal gave up a lot of its CO2 to anaerobic digestion millions of years ago, and what it did not give up it sequestered in the ground for millions of years.
When new biomass (trees) die and decay, they give up their CO2 to be recycled into new trees that will live and die and only to be recycled again.
But coal being burned today is giving up new, additional CO2 that is happily trapped in the ground while biomass is merely recycling existing CO2.
Also, when trees decay, some of it is converted to methane which is 22 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than CO2, so at least when biomass is converted to energy, we are avoiding methane generation.