AHOSKIE In the searing August heat, big yellow logging machines
pile up the harvest from 153 acres of sweet gum, red oak and maple
trees.
A roaring log loader grabs the trunks to slice off 16-foot logs
and stack them for one of the sawmills that provide a traditional market
for Eastern North Carolina timber. These logs are worth $20 to $40 a
ton and will be turned into plywood, cabinets and veneer.
In a second woodpile, there’s new money. Limbs and leafy
treetops are stacked alongside trees as big as 16 inches across. They
cannot be sold as saw logs because they’re forked or knotty, crooked or
hollow.
This pile will be fed into a chipper and milled at an Ahoskie
factory that makes 1,000 tons, every day, of a minor American fuel
product suddenly in hot demand on the other side of the Atlantic: wood
pellets.
Two years ago, everything in this second pile would have been
left on the ground to rot, said David Jennette, a Windsor forester who
is managing this timber harvest. Now it brings $2 to $8 a ton.
“When you’re talking about 50 to 75 tons of chips to the acre,
and maybe more, that’s a significant amount of money going back to the
landowner that we weren’t able to get before,” Jennette said.
The wood pellet industry is enjoying a speedy, zero-to-60 growth
surge across the southeastern United States. Hundreds of millions of
dollars are being invested in factories – some of them converted from
old lumber mills – in coastal plain forests from Virginia to Louisiana.
They are serving a market created, almost overnight, by
paradoxical environmental policies that are driving European electric
utilities to burn imported wood in their boilers instead of coal.
Maryland-based
Enviva LP,
the nation’s biggest pellet maker, opened its Ahoskie mill in 2011 and a
second one in Northampton County this year. Together, they produce
865,000 tons of pellets annually to be shipped out of the port at
Chesapeake, Va.
In 2015, Enviva expects to start exporting an additional million
tons from a planned $40 million terminal at the Wilmington port. The
company is scouting sites for two new pellet mills in southeastern North
Carolina, one of them in Sampson County.
At the same time, California-based
International WoodFuels
has said it will produce 285,000 tons a year from a planned pellet mill
in Wilson County and a new export terminal at the Morehead City port.
The pellet industry is founded on a climate-friendly,
carbon-neutral rationale. Our forests use photosynthesis to soak up
carbon dioxide, enough to compensate for 14 percent of all emissions in
the United States. This stored-up carbon is released into the air when
wood pellets are burned, but wood is called a renewable fuel because
that carbon eventually is recaptured by new trees that grow in place of
the old ones.
Conservationists are attacking the pellet industry’s green-energy luster on two fronts.
They worry that the booming market for pellets will encourage
industrial logging and sully the sensitive ecosystems of bottomland
hardwood forests. And they counter European government carbon-cycle
calculations with their own assessment that burning trees is, in the
words of a British environmental group’s campaign, even “
dirtier than coal.”
“It just doesn’t make sense that we’re logging the world’s forest
... burning it into the atmosphere and calling it clean, green,
renewable energy,” said Danna Smith of the Asheville-based
Dogwood Alliance, a network of Southern conservation groups.
A push toward pellets
The European Union and Great Britain have adopted aggressive
targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global
warming. They have created incentives for electric utilities to cut back
on their use of coal and will require renewable sources to provide 20
percent of all energy by 2020. Wind and solar power are expected to meet
only a small share of that demand.
Power companies are looking to close the gap with biomass –
primarily with imported wood pellets. Biomass use in Great Britain, 3
million tons last year, is expected to grow tenfold over the next five
years.
Britain’s biggest carbon emitter is the Drax Group, a Yorkshire
utility that operates the largest power plant in western Europe. Drax is
converting half its plant from coal to wood pellets. Coal is one-third
the price of pellets, but Drax CEO Dorothy Thompson said her company is
responding to renewable-energy credits and a British carbon tax,
introduced this year at $7 a ton, that will grow by 2020 to more than
$60 a ton.
“And that is very substantial,” Thompson told a BBC-TV
interviewer in July. “When we burn biomass, we don’t pay that. Because
biomass is carbon-neutral. When we burn coal, the cost is very high.”
With coastal forests close to its seaports, the South has become
the top pellet source for Drax and other European utilities. Pellet
makers also are taking advantage of declines in the region’s pulp and
paper industry, which uses some of the same low-grade wood. Loggers in
northeastern North Carolina lost their main buyer for hardwood pulpwood a
few years ago when International Paper closed a mill in Franklin, Va.
“We generally fill that void that was historically used by the
pulp and paper industry,” Thomas Meth, Enviva’s executive vice president
and co-founder, said during a tour of the Ahoskie mill. “We generally
site our locations where we’ve had a lot of plant closings, to avoid
most of the competition.”
Enviva built on the site of a Georgia Pacific sawmill that closed
in 2005. Residents of a nearby Ahoskie neighborhood say they never had
problems with Georgia Pacific, but they are complaining now about noise
and occasional clouds of sawdust wafting from Enviva’s pellet mill.
Anne Williams, a retired hospital aide in her 70s, said she
sweeps her porch once or twice a day to clean off the fine, dark sawdust
that blows from Enviva across a tobacco field to her comfortable
manufactured home. Dust coats cars and clogs air-conditioners in the
neighborhood, she said. She keeps her windows closed.
“They claim it won’t hurt you,” Williams said. “But the way it
sticks to everything out there, you know it’s got to be sticking to your
lungs.”
Meth said Enviva has reduced the dust problem and hopes to eliminate it later this year.
“We have always been within our permitted limits,” Meth said.
“But in order to have a good relationship with the neighbors, we’ll take
an extra step and build some extra dust protection.”
Pellet makers won’t bid against sawmills for valuable timber
that has higher uses, Meth said. He guided visitors through a woodlot
stacked 20 feet high with treetops and whole trees, many with crooked or
diseased trunks that he said make them unsuitable for saw timber.
“We use by-products of the normal harvesting process in wood
fiber,” Meth said. “And residues, in the broadest sense. There’s a lot
misperception as to what we actually use. The value of what we take is
10, 20 percent of the whole harvest.”
Carbon calculations
Enviva gives delivery truck drivers a flier explaining that the
company won’t accept valuable saw logs, and it rejects logs wider than
26 inches at the base.
Critics say the company uses big trees that cannot be considered mere “residue.”
“Their yard was not filled with log waste,” said Debbie Hammel of the
Natural Resources Defense Council,
looking at photos taken by environmentalists at the Enviva site earlier
this year. “It was filled with whole trees. It meant that their
sourcing activity has a bad carbon profile associated with it.”
The carbon calculations are complicated. After the pellets from a
single tree are burned, Hammel and the Dogwood Alliance’s Smith said,
it takes 50 years for a replacement tree to absorb enough carbon to
offset the pollution.
But some economists and foresters look at this differently. They
argue that a healthy demand for lumber encourages woodland owners to
keep planting more trees, which will absorb more carbon from the air. A
landowner unhappy with the economic return from forestry is more likely
to cut down the trees and divert the land to farming or urban
development.
“Losing timberland to agriculture is a worse carbon story than
the cycling of trees that probably would have been harvested anyway,”
said Bob Abt, a forestry professor at N.C. State University.
“The carbon
accounting is messier than saying that the tree is going to take 50
years to replace.”
Enviva said switching from coal to wood pellets reduces carbon emissions by more than 74 percent.
British government standards say that pellet makers must draw
only on environmentally sustainable logging sources. But Abt said he
agrees with environmentalists who say “the wording there is vague.”
Meth
said Enviva meets the sustainable forestry standards set by
professional certification organizations, including the Forest
Stewardship Council.
British officials say they are taking a closer look at their
pellet policies. Ed Davey, the British energy secretary, recently called
biomass an interim solution.
“Making electricity from biomass based on imported wood is not a long-term answer to our energy needs,” Davey told the BBC.
Jennette, the Windsor forester, said the new pellet market brings
both economic and environmental benefits. Enviva accepts more of the
logging leftovers than the hardwood paper mills did in the old days, he
said.
“The whole tree goes to Enviva,” Jennette said. “And the tonnage
goes way up when you start doing tops and limbs and everything else.”
It can be enough money to make a difference in the profitability,
and the timing, of a timber sale.
Jennette’s Hertford County client
expects to clear about $1,000 an acre – most of it from valuable saw
timber, but somewhere between $150 and $300 for those chips.
Replanting will be easier, too, he said.
“As clean as this site will be, we’re able to reforest for less
money,” Jennette said. “As long as we reforest what we cut and we do a
good job of the sustainability piece of it, we’ll never stop.”
More Information
The pellet economy:
Enviva
estimates the economic impact of its pellet mills in Ahoskie and
Garysburg and its planned export terminal at the Wilmington port:
• Ahoskie:
74 workers, average salary $35,000. Enviva buys timber worth $21
million from North Carolina and Virginia loggers. Produces 365,000 tons
of pellets for $170 a ton.
• Garysburg
(Northampton County): 79 workers, average salary $35,000. Enviva buys
timber worth $35.4 million from North Carolina and Virginia loggers.
Produces 500,000 tons of pellets for $170 a ton.
• Wilmington:
$40 million to build export terminal, to begin operation in 2015 with
23 workers, average salary $37,783. One million tons of pellets to be
exported on 25 to 30 vessels per year.
Not included here: Two mills that will produce pellets for export through Wilmington.
Source: Enviva LP
