SELBY, U.K. - The heavy power lines and narrow roads between the steam-billowing towers of three of England’s biggest power plants traverse an energy industry in upheaval. Shuttered coal mines are flanked by emerald pastures. Towering wind turbines and solar arrays have taken root in windblown cereal fields. In the middle of the transition is the Drax Power Station — Western Europe’s largest coal power plant, as big and powerful as many nuclear stations. The 4-gigawatt facility was built in the 1970s and ‘80s in this bucolic Yorkshire parish to burn the fruits of a local coal-mining boom. Droves of miners arrived in double-decker bus loads at a region known as Megawatt Valley. “We used to sit on the doorstep — me and the kids — singing, ‘Hi ho, hi ho,’” said Pamela Ross, a former mine administrative worker and union rep. In the dining room of a converted farmhouse between castle remnants and two village thoroughfares, where she has lived since 1988, she rifled through yellowing government documents and photos of mine groundbreakings, lamenting the wheezing of what once was a strapping local industry. “We have hundreds of years of coal still underground,” she said. “But it’s likely to stay there.” Nostalgia about the coal sector’s misfortune is far from universal. The cheap black rock that powered the Industrial Revolution is the dirtiest of the fossil fuels. As the world cracks down on climate pollution and deadly air pollution, it’s scrambling to deploy cleaner energy alternatives. The European Union has led the world in passing stringent climate laws — and urging the rest of the world to follow. In England and across Europe, the most popular source of renewable energy is wood. But chopping down trees — many of them in the U.S. — and burning the wood heats the planet more quickly than burning coal. Yet plants like Drax receive financial support to switch from coal to wood. That’s because of an entrenched loophole in the EU’s climate rules. That loophole treats electricity generated by burning wood as a “carbon neutral” or “zero emissions” energy source — the same as solar panels or wind turbines. When power plants in major European countries burn wood, the only carbon dioxide pollution they report is from the burning of fossil fuels needed to manufacture and transport the woody fuel. European law assumes climate pollution released directly by burning fuel made from trees doesn’t matter, because it will be re-absorbed by trees that grow to replace them. The assumption is convenient, but wrong. Climate science has been rejecting it for more than 20 years. It ignores the decades it can take for a replacement forest to grow to be as big as one that was chopped down for energy— or the possibility that it won’t regrow at all. The assumption also ignores the loss of a tree’s ability to absorb carbon dioxide after it gets cut down, pelletized and vaporized. The accounting trick allows the energy industry to pump tens of millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the air every year and pretend it doesn’t exist. Analysis of Drax data reveals that its boilers release 15 to 20 percent more carbon dioxide when they burn wood than when they burn coal. That doesn’t even factor in the loss of a forest’s ability to absorb carbon dioxide after it’s cut down and used for electricity, nor does it account for pollution from drying and transporting the wood. Drax isn’t the only power plant switching to wood from coal, but it’s the biggest. It’s importing more wood pellets than any other as it pioneers a new biomass energy supply chain. (Biomass energy refers to the burning of organic matter to produce power, heat or electricity.) With the last active coal pit in Selby about to be boarded up, nearly half of Drax’s electricity is now coming from biomass — mostly from wood pellets. Wood has quietly become the largest source of what counts as “renewable” energy in the EU. Wood burning in Europe produced as much energy as burning 620 million barrels of oil last year (both in power plants and for home heating). That accounted for nearly half of all Europe’s renewable energy. That’s helping nations meet the requirements of EU climate laws on paper, if not in spirit. While Europe is ground zero for coal-to-wood power plant conversions, the impacts aren’t being contained inside its borders. To feed the growing appetite of power plants now burning wood, forests of the U.S. Southeast are being cut down, pelletized and shipped across the ocean. And now Asia is joining the trend, accelerating the wood pellet sector’s growth — and worsening its toll on the climate. The utilities and other companies producing Europe’s renewable energy are receiving big, publicly funded payouts that virtually guarantee profits. Because wood counts as a renewable source of electricity, power plants that burn it are receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in climate subsidies. They’re also avoiding tens of millions more in fees normally levied on climate polluters. Those subsidies mean wood energy is projected to continue to grow steeply in Europe, hastening climate change as global warming’s effects become more profound. Average global temperatures have risen more than 1.5°F since the Industrial Revolution. Seas have risen more than half a foot. Global warming appears to have contributed to the drought that inflamed warfare in Syria, and it’smaking the drought worse in California. Earth models warn of bleak futures unless climate pollution is radically reduced. Incinerating trees for electricity is exacerbating those dangers, say scientists. “For mitigating climate change,” said Stephen Mitchell, a Duke University researcher who led research a few years ago that modeled the climate effects of using forests for energy, “it makes much more sense to just continue to let them grow.” In 2011, the science committee of the EU’s environment agency warned that the “bioenergy accounting error” had “immense” potential consequences for the planet’s forests and climate. Attempts to introduce sustainability standards that could curtail the use of harmful wood energy across the EU have so far been blocked by Finland and Sweden. Those countries are poor in fossil fuel reserves but home to vast forests, which they harvest and burn for heating and electricity. About 100 wood pellet plants operate in those two countries alone.
“A forest isn’t instantaneously renewable,” said Oregon State University professor Mark Harmon, an advisor to the EPA on measuring climate pollution from wood fuel. “It renews over a time horizon that’s quite long. If people go out and start burning wood from an area that hasn’t been harvested for that purpose, it won’t be carbon neutral.” Harmon helped Mitchell design landscape modeling experiments. They simulated how much fossil fuel use was avoided when trees were used as fuel; how much climate pollution the wood burning put into the atmosphere; and how much pollution forests sucked back out of the air.
Inside the computer model, some natural forests and plantation forests were left to grow. Others were clear-cut every few decades to provide fuel for power plants. It took centuries before using older natural forests for wood energy provided climate benefits, compared with leaving them to grow. Plantation forests took decades to centuries.1 Other studies have shown similar results; it takes decades, or even centuries, before burning trees for electricity can be considered carbon neutral. From a climate perspective, wood energy is unlike most other renewables. Wind turbines, solar panels and hydropower suck energy out of the environment to produce electricity. Wood must be burned to release its energy, which also releases its climate-changing carbon. Pound for pound, burning wood releases less energy but more carbon than a fossil fuel. And burning wood releases an immediate pulse of carbon dioxide. It takes a long time for a forest to begin to recover, and then to absorb an equivalent amount of pollution as it regrows — if it ever does. SOUTHAMPTON COUNTY, Va. - A truck laden with tree trunks pulled into an unloading zone at a dusty mill. The driver stepped out, into the sapping Southern heat. In a single sweep, a crane hoisted the load off his trailer, depositing it atop a much larger stack of trunks. As he drove off for his next load, another truck pulled in behind him, ready to repeat the industrial ritual. This scene plays out all through the day here, day after day. In satellite pictures, the towering mounds of leafless trees — all of them destined to become wood pellets — resemble thousands and thousands of sepia-toned pick-up sticks. An American company named Enviva, the world’s biggest producer of wood pellets for power plants, built this mill near Virginia’s border with North Carolina in 2012. It’s a noisy amalgam of metal equipment that billows steam over a 120-acre site, which was carved from thick forest. Bulldozers move massive piles of woodchips. Convoys of trucks deliver logs and chips from nearby logging sites. A separate convoy hauls the finished pellets off to a port, to set sail to be burned in foreign lands. The mill eats through a million tons of wood every year. Mills like it began popping up in rural areas like this in Virginia and North Carolina between 2006 and 2010, spurring logging during an economic downturn. This one opened just outside the city limits of a forlorn town that’s home to a modest forest-based industry and a long strip of chain stores. Nearly a quarter of the 8,500 residents of that town, Franklin, Va., live in poverty — double the state average. But Enviva’s young business is thriving. It is now operating, building or acquiring four pellet ports and seven pellet mills, from Virginia to Florida, across to Mississippi and Alabama. The industry’s expanding footprint this year reached Louisiana, where a British power company began operating a pellet mill and a wood pellet port. Currently, there are 27 wood pellet mills scattered across the Southeast producing pellets for European power plants, and at least 25 more mills are being planned. The wood at Enviva’s mills, and at all the mills like it, is ground down, heated up, dried out and pressed into hard pellets one to two inches long. So much moisture is baked out of the wood that a ton of tree trunks produces only half a ton of pellets. The wood pellets are trucked from mills to ports along the Eastern seaboard and Gulf Coast, then shipped across the Atlantic Ocean to the U.K., Belgium, the Netherlands and other nations, where they’re burned for electricity, pouring carbon dioxide into an overheating atmosphere. As the world struggles to cope with the flooding, drought, and heat-wave disasters that climate change is amplifying, producing these finger-sized pellets in America and burning them in Europe isthrowing fuel on a global climate crisis. The power plants are based in Europe, but it’s American forests that are doing the most to feed their boilers. “The consequences are very serious,” said Tim Searchinger, a research scholar at Princeton University whose work focuses on bioenergy. He is a prominent critic of the use of wood energy. “It takes a massive amount of trees to make a very small amount of energy.” Burning wood pellets to produce a megawatt hour of electricity produces 15 to 20 percent more climate-changing carbon dioxide pollution than burning coal, analysis of Drax data shows. And that’s just the CO2 pouring out of the smokestack. Add in pollution from the fuel needed to grind, heat and dry the wood, plus transportation of the pellets, and the climate impacts are even worse. According to Enviva, that adds another 20 percent worth of climate pollution for that one megawatt hour. Felling the trees needed to produce those pellets contributes to climate-changing deforestation. Most of the trees are being cut down in American states where forests lack environmental protections. This is particularly true in the Southeast, one of the planet’s most biologically diverse and heavily logged regions. Scientists and environmentalists agree that wood energy can sometimes help the environment. The main factors that determine whether it could help save the planet — or help destroy it — are the scale of the operation and the source of the wood. Using sawdust and mill leftovers to heat and power a school in a Pacific Northwest timber town may help. Cutting down forests to fuel an international energy market will not. “You do biomass wrong, and you’re going to have big carbon impacts, big ecosystem impacts, big public health impacts,” saidNathanael Greene, director of the renewable energy policy at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an American nonprofit that campaigns against the use of wood pellets in power plants. “It can be every bit as damaging as burning coal.” The U.S. pellet industry quickly grew too big to rely on logging and sawmill waste. The American logging industry’s ups and downs are rooted in construction sector trends — and experts say it wouldn’t be feasible for Europe’s power plants to depend on an undependable flow of its trash wood. “I can’t see the energy industry having its feedstock affected by a housing cycle,” said Robert Abt, a forestry professor at North Carolina State University. “You just can’t build a significant energy sector from picking up the slash from a cyclical lumber industry.” The wood pellet mills are paying for trees to be cut down — trees that could be used by other industries, or left to grow and absorb carbon dioxide. And the mills are being bankrolled by climate subsidies in Europe, where wood pellets are replacing coal at a growing number of power plants. The subsidies are being spent on wood energy because of an entrenched loophole in European Union energy rules. That loophole treats all wood energy as clean energy, as though it releases no climate pollution. That artifice is rooted in the fact that trees can regrow, meaning wood energy is considered renewable. Treating wood energy as zero-carbon is an accounting sleight-of-hand, however, that’s plainly rejected by more than 20 years of climate science. “The potential consequences of this bioenergy accounting error are immense,” a European Union science committee warned in a reportin 2011, noting that “more realistic expectations for bioenergy potential are necessary.” Exports of U.S. wood pellets have more than doubled since then. European nations are exploiting the regulatory weak link, sinking hundreds of millions of dollars worth of public subsidies into coal-to-wood conversions at privately owned power plants. That’s helping them comply with European climate laws while preserving expensive coal infrastructure — without reducing climate pollution to required levels. Without the loophole, the pellet mills — which are expanding rapidly south and west of the sector’s initial hub in the Southeast — would never have been built. While the growth it’s fueling delights many in the forestry industry, it’s threatening natural forests in the U.S.
DESCHUTES COUNTY, ORE. - More than 100 feet beneath the crowns of arrow-straight pines, the forest floor around Peter Caligiuri was overgrown. He pointed at clumps of trees taller than him, but so thin he could have wrapped his hands around their trunks. Before the era of modern firefighting, regular brush fires thinned out woodlands like these. Now, with smaller wildfires kept at bay, small trees can flourish, fueling fiercer blazes when forest fires inevitably arrive. “The understory would have been occupied by a lot more native vegetation; diverse vegetation,” said Caligiuri, a Nature Conservancy forest ecologist working with other groups and the federal government to restore forests around Bend — mostly by thinning them out. “What we’re seeing here in central Oregon is emblematic of a lot of the problems we’re seeing across the Intermountain West.” Instead of leaving them to burn in forest fires, Oregon officials want these skinny pines and other trees cut down and burned in power plants. Wood is an increasingly popular source of energy in Europe, where it’s richly subsidized. But wood energy can accelerate climate change. Living trees absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and burning dead ones releases more carbon dioxide than coal. Oregon officials say burning waste wood and forest thinnings from its large logging industry and forestlands would protect the climate, while improving the natural environment. But their ambitions go beyond that. The governor’s office wants to know whether the last coal plant in the state could be converted to run on wood — a substantially riskier proposition for the atmosphere. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is about to make critical decisions about this kind of energy as it cracks down on power plant pollution. Its decisions will affect how a fuel known as biomass — wood and other organic material burned for energy — can be used by the states to meet new pollution rules. In doing so, the agency will walk a fine line between promoting the use of wood energy that could accelerate deforestation and global warming, and defining the limited sources of wood fuel that could help ease those problems. The European Union makes no such distinction. Through a loophole in its clean energy regulations, all wood energy is treated as if it releases no carbon dioxide. That accounting trick is allowing European national governments and their energy sectors to pump tens of millions of tons of greenhouse gases into the air every year — without accounting for it. That helps them keep that pollution off their books, but not out of the atmosphere. Burning wood only helps the climate in special circumstances, like when waste is used for energy instead of being burned off in a field, or when trees are planted on barren land to eventually produce fuel. The EPA will decide which types of wood energy can count as clean energy on a state-by-state basis. By letting states propose their own rules, the federal government risks allowing Oregon, Virginia and other states with large forestry industries to downplay the climate impacts of wood energy as they devise their plans to reduce climate-warming pollution. The Clean Power Plan — 1,560 pages of electricity rules finalized in August by the EPA — represents an unprecedented effort by the U.S. government to start forcing states to control climate pollution from their power industries. Most states already allow wood burning to count as renewable energy generation. The EPA will allow states to propose increasing their use of wood energy to help meet the new greenhouse gas reduction rules. Wood energy is considered renewable because trees can regrow. But it’s not a clean energy source like wind turbines or solar panels, which convert energy from the environment to electricity. Wood is a fuel, meaning it must be burned to produce electricity, which releases pollution. Analysis of European data suggests that converting a modern coal plant to run on wood pellets increases carbon dioxide pollution by 15 to 20 percent. And for power plants in Europe and parts of Asia that are burning wood pellets (many of which are being produced in the U.S. — all for export) for electricity, carbon pollution can be even greater, because fuels are needed to produce and transport the pellets. If the EPA is too lenient when it rules on plans submitted by Oregon and the other states, that could threaten not only the climate, butAmerica’s forests. Many of the wood pellets being burned for electricity in Europe were made from trees chopped down in the U.S., including from sensitive wetlands in the Southeast. Allowing this practice to grow could compound the threat that it poses to some of the world’s most heavily logged areas. The EPA has already hinted that Oregon’s hopes for burning waste wood and forest thinnings could count toward pollution reductions under the Clean Power Plan. That’s based on advice from a panel of scientists it has convened. But it could be more than a year before states learn whether industrial levels of wood burning are deemed acceptable — and, if so, how. “We would like to see bioenergy play a significant role in our efforts to reduce carbon emissions,” said Margi Hoffman, Oregon Gov. Kate Brown’s energy advisor. “We would like to see smaller-scale projects listed as carbon neutral,” she said — while acknowledging that biomass energy projects “of a certain size and scale” don’t meet that definition. Fears ahead of the upcoming EPA ruling are rooted in more than 20 years of climate research that warns wood energy can’t be used at large industrial scales without harming the climate. Seas have risen more than a half a foot since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Climate change is making heat waves hotter and causing heavier downpours. Pollution from wood energy compounds those problems. “Biomass energy is going to be part of a mix of new forms of energy that gets us off of fossil fuels,” said William Schlesinger, president emeritus at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies whose research frequently deals with climate change. Logging debris can safely be used for energy, he said, and fast-growing grass and some plantation trees will sometimes be “OK.” But Schlesinger said cutting down old trees to fuel power plants — a scenario that’s already playing out in the Southeast, where many of Europe’s wood pellets are being produced — will exacerbate climate change, the very problem for which wood energy is often pitched as a solution. “There need to be some rules and regulations put into place that trace the origin of biomass, so you can’t go out and cut an old-growth forest and pelletize it and say, ‘That’s carbon neutral,’” he said. While forest-rich Oregon sees environmental wonder in burning waste wood to provide electricity, Massachusetts sees the dangers of it. In 2012, following the commissioning of a study into the potential climate and forestry impacts of wood energy, Massachusetts adopted rules to limit its use. The different rules in Oregon and Massachusetts reflect their economic, physical and political landscapes. The EPA is comfortable with that diversity. It will allow states to set their own rules under the Clean Power Plan. But it will wield a veto. “It’s complicated,” said Robert Sussman, an energy industry consultant and Yale Law School lecturer who was a senior advisor in the EPA from 2009 to 2013. “On the one hand, the EPA is saying that combustion of biomass could be carbon neutral under certain circumstances. But then it’s turning around and making the path for industry and the states complex.” Under the Clean Power Plan, states that want to use wood energy to meet pollution targets must “adequately demonstrate” that the fuel they use — be it wood chips, wood pellets, mill waste, almond shells or trees killed by beetles, for example — will “appropriately control” increases of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Only wood-burning power plants built after 2012 will be considered eligible. The EPA’s panel of science advisors has agreed that some kinds of waste wood can be burned to produce electricity — and benefit the climate at the same time, said Joe Goffman, an EPA air official who helped draft the new rules. “We’ve opened up the door for states to submit plans that include some kind of biomass component,” Goffman said. “If states include biomass as a component in their plans, they can essentially present the case as to why their approach is appropriate.” Most states have standards in place that require utilities to include renewable energy in their electricity supplies. The standards tend to focus on promoting renewable energy — rather than reducing climate pollution — and wood energy is a renewable alternative under these rules. Under the EPA’s new power plant rules, states will also need to start considering the climate effects of wood burning. Massachusetts already does that out of concern for the climate and its forests, limiting the types of wood that can count as renewable fuel under its standards. Since 2012, its efficiency standards have been so high that a wood-burning power plant would also have to heat buildings to qualify. In Virginia, which is home to a large forestry industry, the rules are looser. Dominion Resources used investment tax credits, available from the federal government, to help it switch three of its small coal plants in Virginia to run on wood chips. It’s allowed to count that energy toward its state renewables requirements. Each of the converted plants produces about 50 megawatts of electricity — a typical size for a U.S. biomass plant, capable of powering thousands of homes. Virginia’s power regulators allowed the company to pass on more than $160 million in costs to its bill-paying customers. Dominion Resources doesn’t expect to convert its larger power plants to run on wood to help meet Clean Power Plan requirements. Without access to the hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies that European governments provide for renewable energy — virtually guaranteeing profits for even the most expensive projects — large-scale wood burning might not be feasible for American power plants. “The cost of converting large pulverized coal units to biomass would be too high to consider,” company spokesman Dan Genest said. The EPA hasn’t said how it will decide whether a proposal to burn wood for electricity would “appropriately control” rises in greenhouse gas pollution. Its rulings will be crucial — both in reducing real-world pollution and in setting an example to counter the destructive one being set by Europe. The agency has so far made two broad statements: it won’t treat all wood burning as carbon neutral, but waste as fuel may be treated as such. In a memo signed last year by senior EPA official Janet McCabe, the agency indicated that it “expects to recognize” the climate benefits of “waste-derived and certain forest-derived industrial byproduct feedstocks.” It also said it may approve state plans that include the burning of what it vaguely described as “sustainably derived agricultural and forest-derived feedstocks.” Those ambiguous statements have triggered consternation among scientists and environmental groups. They wonder what “sustainably derived” will mean. Sustainability can refer to environmental practices that have “little-to-no bearing on the carbon implications of biomass use,” the Cary Institute’s Schlesinger and dozens of other scientists wrote in a letter to McCabe. For some wood fuels, the agency may require states follow a new system for measuring climate impacts. “The EPA needs to set up a factor that they multiply by the smokestack emissions,” said Oregon State University forest ecology professor Mark Harmon, a member of the science panel that’s advising the agency on wood energy’s climate effects. “What really counts? What really is being added to the atmosphere — or maybe taken out of the atmosphere, in some cases?” Even when it helps the climate, wood energy isn’t all forest restoration and atmospheric rainbows. Like fossil fuels, wood energy is dirty energy. Burning wood releases pollution that creates haze and ozone, triggering emphysema and asthma attacks. That’s why some local air quality districts ban residents from using fireplaces on the smoggiest days. Waste wood may also have been treated with pesticides, paint and other poisons, which can be released as air pollution when burned. Wood energy’s pollution, combined with its climate impacts and its potential to contribute to deforestation, has seeded deep opposition to it in the U.S. When Oregon lawmakers were debating a bill that would eventually declare wood energy to be carbon neutral, the Sierra Club’s state chapter testified in opposition. Scientifically, the legislation was “deeply flawed,” the group pointed out, warning it could accelerate climate change and sully the air. Power plant owners can take costly steps to reduce air pollution, but those that burn wood have fewer regulatory requirements than those burning fossil fuels. Among other differences, wood-burning power plants can release more than twice as much pollution as coal or gas plants before they’re affected by federal clean air rules. “There are real public health impacts if you live next to one of these facilities, and the facility isn’t run really well,” said Nathanael Greene, director of renewable energy policy at the Natural Resources Defense Council. The influential American nonprofit campaigns against the overuse of wood energy, such as in Europe. The potential role wood energy could play under the Clean Power Plan won’t become clear until the EPA begins assessing state plans, which are due next year. States could receive extensions for two years beyond that. Meanwhile, the agency is consulting with its panel of scientists and calling for public comment as it tries to hone its approach to regulating pollution from wood energy. The NRDC says the EPA is correct to conclude that wood energy is not always carbon neutral. It says it will pressure the agency to be highly critical of state proposals to count electricity from waste wood as zero carbon under the Clean Power Plan. “If you’re going to say that it’s zero carbon, it doesn’t just have to control carbon a little bit — it’s got to control it all the way down to being equal to wind power or solar power,” Greene said. “It’s unclear from the final regulations how the EPA will determine if that standard has been met.” By potentially deferring to the judgment of Oregon, Virginia and other states, the federal government risks allowing harmful types of wood energy to be counted as clean. Momentum toward tackling global warming is growing stronger around the world, led in part by the U.S., which is striving to be a leader on climate action. Any mistakes now by the EPA threaten to entrench the European approach and entice other countries to follow, undermining global efforts to tackle climate change.SELBY, U.K. - The heavy power lines and narrow roads between the steam-billowing towers of three of England’s biggest power plants traverse an energy industry in upheaval. Shuttered coal mines are flanked by emerald pastures. Towering wind turbines and solar arrays have taken root in windblown cereal fields. In the middle of the transition is the Drax Power Station — Western Europe’s largest coal power plant, as big and powerful as many nuclear stations. The 4-gigawatt facility was built in the 1970s and ‘80s in this bucolic Yorkshire parish to burn the fruits of a local coal-mining boom. Droves of miners arrived in double-decker bus loads at a region known as Megawatt Valley. “We used to sit on the doorstep — me and the kids — singing, ‘Hi ho, hi ho,’” said Pamela Ross, a former mine administrative worker and union rep. In the dining room of a converted farmhouse between castle remnants and two village thoroughfares, where she has lived since 1988, she rifled through yellowing government documents and photos of mine groundbreakings, lamenting the wheezing of what once was a strapping local industry. “We have hundreds of years of coal still underground,” she said. “But it’s likely to stay there.” Nostalgia about the coal sector’s misfortune is far from universal. The cheap black rock that powered the Industrial Revolution is the dirtiest of the fossil fuels. As the world cracks down on climate pollution and deadly air pollution, it’s scrambling to deploy cleaner energy alternatives. The European Union has led the world in passing stringent climate laws — and urging the rest of the world to follow. In England and across Europe, the most popular source of renewable energy is wood. But chopping down trees — many of them in the U.S. — and burning the wood heats the planet more quickly than burning coal. Yet plants like Drax receive financial support to switch from coal to wood. That’s because of an entrenched loophole in the EU’s climate rules. That loophole treats electricity generated by burning wood as a “carbon neutral” or “zero emissions” energy source — the same as solar panels or wind turbines. When power plants in major European countries burn wood, the only carbon dioxide pollution they report is from the burning of fossil fuels needed to manufacture and transport the woody fuel. European law assumes climate pollution released directly by burning fuel made from trees doesn’t matter, because it will be re-absorbed by trees that grow to replace them. The assumption is convenient, but wrong. Climate science has been rejecting it for more than 20 years. It ignores the decades it can take for a replacement forest to grow to be as big as one that was chopped down for energy— or the possibility that it won’t regrow at all. The assumption also ignores the loss of a tree’s ability to absorb carbon dioxide after it gets cut down, pelletized and vaporized. The accounting trick allows the energy industry to pump tens of millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the air every year and pretend it doesn’t exist. Analysis of Drax data reveals that its boilers release 15 to 20 percent more carbon dioxide when they burn wood than when they burn coal. That doesn’t even factor in the loss of a forest’s ability to absorb carbon dioxide after it’s cut down and used for electricity, nor does it account for pollution from drying and transporting the wood. Drax isn’t the only power plant switching to wood from coal, but it’s the biggest. It’s importing more wood pellets than any other as it pioneers a new biomass energy supply chain. (Biomass energy refers to the burning of organic matter to produce power, heat or electricity.) With the last active coal pit in Selby about to be boarded up, nearly half of Drax’s electricity is now coming from biomass — mostly from wood pellets. Wood has quietly become the largest source of what counts as “renewable” energy in the EU. Wood burning in Europe produced as much energy as burning 620 million barrels of oil last year (both in power plants and for home heating). That accounted for nearly half of all Europe’s renewable energy. That’s helping nations meet the requirements of EU climate laws on paper, if not in spirit. While Europe is ground zero for coal-to-wood power plant conversions, the impacts aren’t being contained inside its borders. To feed the growing appetite of power plants now burning wood, forests of the U.S. Southeast are being cut down, pelletized and shipped across the ocean. And now Asia is joining the trend, accelerating the wood pellet sector’s growth — and worsening its toll on the climate. The utilities and other companies producing Europe’s renewable energy are receiving big, publicly funded payouts that virtually guarantee profits. Because wood counts as a renewable source of electricity, power plants that burn it are receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in climate subsidies. They’re also avoiding tens of millions more in fees normally levied on climate polluters. Those subsidies mean wood energy is projected to continue to grow steeply in Europe, hastening climate change as global warming’s effects become more profound. Average global temperatures have risen more than 1.5°F since the Industrial Revolution. Seas have risen more than half a foot. Global warming appears to have contributed to the drought that inflamed warfare in Syria, and it’smaking the drought worse in California. Earth models warn of bleak futures unless climate pollution is radically reduced. Incinerating trees for electricity is exacerbating those dangers, say scientists. “For mitigating climate change,” said Stephen Mitchell, a Duke University researcher who led research a few years ago that modeled the climate effects of using forests for energy, “it makes much more sense to just continue to let them grow.” In 2011, the science committee of the EU’s environment agency warned that the “bioenergy accounting error” had “immense” potential consequences for the planet’s forests and climate. Attempts to introduce sustainability standards that could curtail the use of harmful wood energy across the EU have so far been blocked by Finland and Sweden. Those countries are poor in fossil fuel reserves but home to vast forests, which they harvest and burn for heating and electricity. About 100 wood pellet plants operate in those two countries alone.
“A forest isn’t instantaneously renewable,” said Oregon State University professor Mark Harmon, an advisor to the EPA on measuring climate pollution from wood fuel. “It renews over a time horizon that’s quite long. If people go out and start burning wood from an area that hasn’t been harvested for that purpose, it won’t be carbon neutral.” Harmon helped Mitchell design landscape modeling experiments. They simulated how much fossil fuel use was avoided when trees were used as fuel; how much climate pollution the wood burning put into the atmosphere; and how much pollution forests sucked back out of the air.
Inside the computer model, some natural forests and plantation forests were left to grow. Others were clear-cut every few decades to provide fuel for power plants. It took centuries before using older natural forests for wood energy provided climate benefits, compared with leaving them to grow. Plantation forests took decades to centuries.1 Other studies have shown similar results; it takes decades, or even centuries, before burning trees for electricity can be considered carbon neutral. From a climate perspective, wood energy is unlike most other renewables. Wind turbines, solar panels and hydropower suck energy out of the environment to produce electricity. Wood must be burned to release its energy, which also releases its climate-changing carbon. Pound for pound, burning wood releases less energy but more carbon than a fossil fuel. And burning wood releases an immediate pulse of carbon dioxide. It takes a long time for a forest to begin to recover, and then to absorb an equivalent amount of pollution as it regrows — if it ever does. SOUTHAMPTON COUNTY, Va. - A truck laden with tree trunks pulled into an unloading zone at a dusty mill. The driver stepped out, into the sapping Southern heat. In a single sweep, a crane hoisted the load off his trailer, depositing it atop a much larger stack of trunks. As he drove off for his next load, another truck pulled in behind him, ready to repeat the industrial ritual. This scene plays out all through the day here, day after day. In satellite pictures, the towering mounds of leafless trees — all of them destined to become wood pellets — resemble thousands and thousands of sepia-toned pick-up sticks. An American company named Enviva, the world’s biggest producer of wood pellets for power plants, built this mill near Virginia’s border with North Carolina in 2012. It’s a noisy amalgam of metal equipment that billows steam over a 120-acre site, which was carved from thick forest. Bulldozers move massive piles of woodchips. Convoys of trucks deliver logs and chips from nearby logging sites. A separate convoy hauls the finished pellets off to a port, to set sail to be burned in foreign lands. The mill eats through a million tons of wood every year. Mills like it began popping up in rural areas like this in Virginia and North Carolina between 2006 and 2010, spurring logging during an economic downturn. This one opened just outside the city limits of a forlorn town that’s home to a modest forest-based industry and a long strip of chain stores. Nearly a quarter of the 8,500 residents of that town, Franklin, Va., live in poverty — double the state average. But Enviva’s young business is thriving. It is now operating, building or acquiring four pellet ports and seven pellet mills, from Virginia to Florida, across to Mississippi and Alabama. The industry’s expanding footprint this year reached Louisiana, where a British power company began operating a pellet mill and a wood pellet port. Currently, there are 27 wood pellet mills scattered across the Southeast producing pellets for European power plants, and at least 25 more mills are being planned. The wood at Enviva’s mills, and at all the mills like it, is ground down, heated up, dried out and pressed into hard pellets one to two inches long. So much moisture is baked out of the wood that a ton of tree trunks produces only half a ton of pellets. The wood pellets are trucked from mills to ports along the Eastern seaboard and Gulf Coast, then shipped across the Atlantic Ocean to the U.K., Belgium, the Netherlands and other nations, where they’re burned for electricity, pouring carbon dioxide into an overheating atmosphere. As the world struggles to cope with the flooding, drought, and heat-wave disasters that climate change is amplifying, producing these finger-sized pellets in America and burning them in Europe isthrowing fuel on a global climate crisis. The power plants are based in Europe, but it’s American forests that are doing the most to feed their boilers. “The consequences are very serious,” said Tim Searchinger, a research scholar at Princeton University whose work focuses on bioenergy. He is a prominent critic of the use of wood energy. “It takes a massive amount of trees to make a very small amount of energy.” Burning wood pellets to produce a megawatt hour of electricity produces 15 to 20 percent more climate-changing carbon dioxide pollution than burning coal, analysis of Drax data shows. And that’s just the CO2 pouring out of the smokestack. Add in pollution from the fuel needed to grind, heat and dry the wood, plus transportation of the pellets, and the climate impacts are even worse. According to Enviva, that adds another 20 percent worth of climate pollution for that one megawatt hour. Felling the trees needed to produce those pellets contributes to climate-changing deforestation. Most of the trees are being cut down in American states where forests lack environmental protections. This is particularly true in the Southeast, one of the planet’s most biologically diverse and heavily logged regions. Scientists and environmentalists agree that wood energy can sometimes help the environment. The main factors that determine whether it could help save the planet — or help destroy it — are the scale of the operation and the source of the wood. Using sawdust and mill leftovers to heat and power a school in a Pacific Northwest timber town may help. Cutting down forests to fuel an international energy market will not. “You do biomass wrong, and you’re going to have big carbon impacts, big ecosystem impacts, big public health impacts,” saidNathanael Greene, director of the renewable energy policy at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an American nonprofit that campaigns against the use of wood pellets in power plants. “It can be every bit as damaging as burning coal.” The U.S. pellet industry quickly grew too big to rely on logging and sawmill waste. The American logging industry’s ups and downs are rooted in construction sector trends — and experts say it wouldn’t be feasible for Europe’s power plants to depend on an undependable flow of its trash wood. “I can’t see the energy industry having its feedstock affected by a housing cycle,” said Robert Abt, a forestry professor at North Carolina State University. “You just can’t build a significant energy sector from picking up the slash from a cyclical lumber industry.” The wood pellet mills are paying for trees to be cut down — trees that could be used by other industries, or left to grow and absorb carbon dioxide. And the mills are being bankrolled by climate subsidies in Europe, where wood pellets are replacing coal at a growing number of power plants. The subsidies are being spent on wood energy because of an entrenched loophole in European Union energy rules. That loophole treats all wood energy as clean energy, as though it releases no climate pollution. That artifice is rooted in the fact that trees can regrow, meaning wood energy is considered renewable. Treating wood energy as zero-carbon is an accounting sleight-of-hand, however, that’s plainly rejected by more than 20 years of climate science. “The potential consequences of this bioenergy accounting error are immense,” a European Union science committee warned in a reportin 2011, noting that “more realistic expectations for bioenergy potential are necessary.” Exports of U.S. wood pellets have more than doubled since then. European nations are exploiting the regulatory weak link, sinking hundreds of millions of dollars worth of public subsidies into coal-to-wood conversions at privately owned power plants. That’s helping them comply with European climate laws while preserving expensive coal infrastructure — without reducing climate pollution to required levels. Without the loophole, the pellet mills — which are expanding rapidly south and west of the sector’s initial hub in the Southeast — would never have been built. While the growth it’s fueling delights many in the forestry industry, it’s threatening natural forests in the U.S.
DESCHUTES COUNTY, ORE. - More than 100 feet beneath the crowns of arrow-straight pines, the forest floor around Peter Caligiuri was overgrown. He pointed at clumps of trees taller than him, but so thin he could have wrapped his hands around their trunks. Before the era of modern firefighting, regular brush fires thinned out woodlands like these. Now, with smaller wildfires kept at bay, small trees can flourish, fueling fiercer blazes when forest fires inevitably arrive. “The understory would have been occupied by a lot more native vegetation; diverse vegetation,” said Caligiuri, a Nature Conservancy forest ecologist working with other groups and the federal government to restore forests around Bend — mostly by thinning them out. “What we’re seeing here in central Oregon is emblematic of a lot of the problems we’re seeing across the Intermountain West.” Instead of leaving them to burn in forest fires, Oregon officials want these skinny pines and other trees cut down and burned in power plants. Wood is an increasingly popular source of energy in Europe, where it’s richly subsidized. But wood energy can accelerate climate change. Living trees absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and burning dead ones releases more carbon dioxide than coal. Oregon officials say burning waste wood and forest thinnings from its large logging industry and forestlands would protect the climate, while improving the natural environment. But their ambitions go beyond that. The governor’s office wants to know whether the last coal plant in the state could be converted to run on wood — a substantially riskier proposition for the atmosphere. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is about to make critical decisions about this kind of energy as it cracks down on power plant pollution. Its decisions will affect how a fuel known as biomass — wood and other organic material burned for energy — can be used by the states to meet new pollution rules. In doing so, the agency will walk a fine line between promoting the use of wood energy that could accelerate deforestation and global warming, and defining the limited sources of wood fuel that could help ease those problems. The European Union makes no such distinction. Through a loophole in its clean energy regulations, all wood energy is treated as if it releases no carbon dioxide. That accounting trick is allowing European national governments and their energy sectors to pump tens of millions of tons of greenhouse gases into the air every year — without accounting for it. That helps them keep that pollution off their books, but not out of the atmosphere. Burning wood only helps the climate in special circumstances, like when waste is used for energy instead of being burned off in a field, or when trees are planted on barren land to eventually produce fuel. The EPA will decide which types of wood energy can count as clean energy on a state-by-state basis. By letting states propose their own rules, the federal government risks allowing Oregon, Virginia and other states with large forestry industries to downplay the climate impacts of wood energy as they devise their plans to reduce climate-warming pollution. The Clean Power Plan — 1,560 pages of electricity rules finalized in August by the EPA — represents an unprecedented effort by the U.S. government to start forcing states to control climate pollution from their power industries. Most states already allow wood burning to count as renewable energy generation. The EPA will allow states to propose increasing their use of wood energy to help meet the new greenhouse gas reduction rules. Wood energy is considered renewable because trees can regrow. But it’s not a clean energy source like wind turbines or solar panels, which convert energy from the environment to electricity. Wood is a fuel, meaning it must be burned to produce electricity, which releases pollution. Analysis of European data suggests that converting a modern coal plant to run on wood pellets increases carbon dioxide pollution by 15 to 20 percent. And for power plants in Europe and parts of Asia that are burning wood pellets (many of which are being produced in the U.S. — all for export) for electricity, carbon pollution can be even greater, because fuels are needed to produce and transport the pellets. If the EPA is too lenient when it rules on plans submitted by Oregon and the other states, that could threaten not only the climate, butAmerica’s forests. Many of the wood pellets being burned for electricity in Europe were made from trees chopped down in the U.S., including from sensitive wetlands in the Southeast. Allowing this practice to grow could compound the threat that it poses to some of the world’s most heavily logged areas. The EPA has already hinted that Oregon’s hopes for burning waste wood and forest thinnings could count toward pollution reductions under the Clean Power Plan. That’s based on advice from a panel of scientists it has convened. But it could be more than a year before states learn whether industrial levels of wood burning are deemed acceptable — and, if so, how. “We would like to see bioenergy play a significant role in our efforts to reduce carbon emissions,” said Margi Hoffman, Oregon Gov. Kate Brown’s energy advisor. “We would like to see smaller-scale projects listed as carbon neutral,” she said — while acknowledging that biomass energy projects “of a certain size and scale” don’t meet that definition. Fears ahead of the upcoming EPA ruling are rooted in more than 20 years of climate research that warns wood energy can’t be used at large industrial scales without harming the climate. Seas have risen more than a half a foot since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Climate change is making heat waves hotter and causing heavier downpours. Pollution from wood energy compounds those problems. “Biomass energy is going to be part of a mix of new forms of energy that gets us off of fossil fuels,” said William Schlesinger, president emeritus at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies whose research frequently deals with climate change. Logging debris can safely be used for energy, he said, and fast-growing grass and some plantation trees will sometimes be “OK.” But Schlesinger said cutting down old trees to fuel power plants — a scenario that’s already playing out in the Southeast, where many of Europe’s wood pellets are being produced — will exacerbate climate change, the very problem for which wood energy is often pitched as a solution. “There need to be some rules and regulations put into place that trace the origin of biomass, so you can’t go out and cut an old-growth forest and pelletize it and say, ‘That’s carbon neutral,’” he said. While forest-rich Oregon sees environmental wonder in burning waste wood to provide electricity, Massachusetts sees the dangers of it. In 2012, following the commissioning of a study into the potential climate and forestry impacts of wood energy, Massachusetts adopted rules to limit its use. The different rules in Oregon and Massachusetts reflect their economic, physical and political landscapes. The EPA is comfortable with that diversity. It will allow states to set their own rules under the Clean Power Plan. But it will wield a veto. “It’s complicated,” said Robert Sussman, an energy industry consultant and Yale Law School lecturer who was a senior advisor in the EPA from 2009 to 2013. “On the one hand, the EPA is saying that combustion of biomass could be carbon neutral under certain circumstances. But then it’s turning around and making the path for industry and the states complex.” Under the Clean Power Plan, states that want to use wood energy to meet pollution targets must “adequately demonstrate” that the fuel they use — be it wood chips, wood pellets, mill waste, almond shells or trees killed by beetles, for example — will “appropriately control” increases of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Only wood-burning power plants built after 2012 will be considered eligible. The EPA’s panel of science advisors has agreed that some kinds of waste wood can be burned to produce electricity — and benefit the climate at the same time, said Joe Goffman, an EPA air official who helped draft the new rules. “We’ve opened up the door for states to submit plans that include some kind of biomass component,” Goffman said. “If states include biomass as a component in their plans, they can essentially present the case as to why their approach is appropriate.” Most states have standards in place that require utilities to include renewable energy in their electricity supplies. The standards tend to focus on promoting renewable energy — rather than reducing climate pollution — and wood energy is a renewable alternative under these rules. Under the EPA’s new power plant rules, states will also need to start considering the climate effects of wood burning. Massachusetts already does that out of concern for the climate and its forests, limiting the types of wood that can count as renewable fuel under its standards. Since 2012, its efficiency standards have been so high that a wood-burning power plant would also have to heat buildings to qualify. In Virginia, which is home to a large forestry industry, the rules are looser. Dominion Resources used investment tax credits, available from the federal government, to help it switch three of its small coal plants in Virginia to run on wood chips. It’s allowed to count that energy toward its state renewables requirements. Each of the converted plants produces about 50 megawatts of electricity — a typical size for a U.S. biomass plant, capable of powering thousands of homes. Virginia’s power regulators allowed the company to pass on more than $160 million in costs to its bill-paying customers. Dominion Resources doesn’t expect to convert its larger power plants to run on wood to help meet Clean Power Plan requirements. Without access to the hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies that European governments provide for renewable energy — virtually guaranteeing profits for even the most expensive projects — large-scale wood burning might not be feasible for American power plants. “The cost of converting large pulverized coal units to biomass would be too high to consider,” company spokesman Dan Genest said. The EPA hasn’t said how it will decide whether a proposal to burn wood for electricity would “appropriately control” rises in greenhouse gas pollution. Its rulings will be crucial — both in reducing real-world pollution and in setting an example to counter the destructive one being set by Europe. The agency has so far made two broad statements: it won’t treat all wood burning as carbon neutral, but waste as fuel may be treated as such. In a memo signed last year by senior EPA official Janet McCabe, the agency indicated that it “expects to recognize” the climate benefits of “waste-derived and certain forest-derived industrial byproduct feedstocks.” It also said it may approve state plans that include the burning of what it vaguely described as “sustainably derived agricultural and forest-derived feedstocks.” Those ambiguous statements have triggered consternation among scientists and environmental groups. They wonder what “sustainably derived” will mean. Sustainability can refer to environmental practices that have “little-to-no bearing on the carbon implications of biomass use,” the Cary Institute’s Schlesinger and dozens of other scientists wrote in a letter to McCabe. For some wood fuels, the agency may require states follow a new system for measuring climate impacts. “The EPA needs to set up a factor that they multiply by the smokestack emissions,” said Oregon State University forest ecology professor Mark Harmon, a member of the science panel that’s advising the agency on wood energy’s climate effects. “What really counts? What really is being added to the atmosphere — or maybe taken out of the atmosphere, in some cases?” Even when it helps the climate, wood energy isn’t all forest restoration and atmospheric rainbows. Like fossil fuels, wood energy is dirty energy. Burning wood releases pollution that creates haze and ozone, triggering emphysema and asthma attacks. That’s why some local air quality districts ban residents from using fireplaces on the smoggiest days. Waste wood may also have been treated with pesticides, paint and other poisons, which can be released as air pollution when burned. Wood energy’s pollution, combined with its climate impacts and its potential to contribute to deforestation, has seeded deep opposition to it in the U.S. When Oregon lawmakers were debating a bill that would eventually declare wood energy to be carbon neutral, the Sierra Club’s state chapter testified in opposition. Scientifically, the legislation was “deeply flawed,” the group pointed out, warning it could accelerate climate change and sully the air. Power plant owners can take costly steps to reduce air pollution, but those that burn wood have fewer regulatory requirements than those burning fossil fuels. Among other differences, wood-burning power plants can release more than twice as much pollution as coal or gas plants before they’re affected by federal clean air