Beijing Shougang LanzaTech New Energy Science & Technology Company Earns Roundtable on Sustainable Biomaterials (RSB) Certification

http://www.einnews.com/pr_news/175535517/beijing-shougang-lanzatech-new-energy-science-technology-company-earns-roundtable-on-sustainable-biomaterials-rsb-certification

LanzaTech's Joint Venture With Shougang Jingtang Iron and Steel United Company and the Tang Ming Group, Earns First-Ever RSB Certification for Waste-Gas to Biofuel Process

WASHINGTON, DC and BEIJING, CHINA -- (Marketwired) -- 11/05/13 -- Beijing Shougang LanzaTech New Energy Science & Technology Co., Ltd. and the Roundtable on Sustainable Biomaterials Services Foundation, the implementing entity of the RSB, announced today that Beijing Shougang LanzaTech New Energy Science & Technology Co., Ltd. has earned RSB's sustainability certification for the joint venture's facility that converts waste steel mill gases to sustainable biofuels.

The RSB is a global sustainability standard and certification system for biofuels and biomaterials production. The facility, which utilizes LanzaTech technology, is the first RSB-certified biofuel plant in China, and the first of its kind anywhere to receive this key certification for industrial carbon capture and utilization.

"The joint venture uses a process that creates a sustainable biofuel and does so by efficiently reusing greenhouse gases that would have otherwise been released into the atmosphere," said Peter Ryus, RSB Services' CEO. "This solution, which does not impact the food chain or land use, meets the RSB principles and practices and serves as an example of how continued innovation in the industry will lead to sustainable biofuels in the future. We are honored to be working with LanzaTech and their joint venture partners on greenhouse gas reduction and global sustainability improvements."

RSB certification shows the joint venture's commitment to environmental improvements through a novel biological approach that converts waste carbon emissions from steelmaking into biofuels and chemicals. Using the RSB methodology and assumptions based on commercial production, it is estimated that ethanol from the process may reduce life cycle greenhouse gas emissions by 60 percent compared to petroleum fuels.

In addition, the joint venture partners anticipate that the process will improve local air quality by materially reducing nitrogen oxide (NOx) and particulate emissions. The technology has the potential of making a significant global impact by reusing up to 150 million tonnes of CO2 from the global steel industry alone.

The use of novel gas fermentation technology to convert industrial waste gases into biofuels is aligned perfectly with the RSB Principles and Criteria, which go beyond greenhouse gas emissions reductions to focus on economic and social sustainability. By using a widely available waste resource located in areas typically unsuitable for agriculture, LanzaTech's process reduces overall emissions without negatively impacting the food chain or causing land use changes. By enabling the production of fuels from available steelmaking waste, Beijing Shougang LanzaTech New Energy Science & Technology Co., Ltd. will help China balance economic growth with sustainability, as well as increase its supply of domestic biofuels.

RSB certification provides assurance that biofuels and biomaterials deliver on their promise of sustainability. Beijing Shougang LanzaTech New Energy Science & Technology Co., Ltd. chose to work with RSB because of its rigorous sustainability standard, auditing approach, and its broad acceptance. The RSB standard provides a comprehensive approach that incorporates the standard with other operational, management and physical standards such as ISO risk management and environmental management to ensure every base is covered.

"The RSB certification is an incredibly important step for the development of our commercial production facilities which we expect to bring online in 2014," said Dr. Jennifer Holmgren, CEO of LanzaTech. "In addition, we trust this certification will help accelerate the acceptance of biofuels made through carbon capture technologies and serve to showcase the possibilities opened up by thinking of carbon emissions as an opportunity, not just a problem."

RSB is a preferred standard of major airlines globally, including LanzaTech's partner Virgin Atlantic and the Sustainable Aviation Fuel Users Group, an aviation industry-led coalition that is supporting the development, certification, and commercial use of lower carbon renewable fuels, derived from sustainable sources.

Virgin Atlantic President Sir Richard Branson previously described the LanzaTech process as "one of the most exciting developments of our lifetime and a major breakthrough in the war on carbon." Reflecting on this latest development, he says "RSB's certification of the Beijing facility is a crucial step to ensure this revolutionary new fuel will meet the highest possible environmental standards and will result in a radical reduction in our carbon footprint."

Virgin Atlantic Chief Executive Craig Kreeger notes: "Our partnership with LanzaTech is a key part of our Change is in the Air sustainability program. Beyond our significant fleet upgrades and our comprehensive fuel efficiency programme, this breakthrough opportunity to pioneer away from fossil fuels offers us the best possible chance of substantially reducing the carbon emissions associated with our flying programme. Key to that has always been ensuring that any new fuel meets the highest possible sustainability standards, and we view RSB as the gold standard scheme to help us to achieve this. We're excited and committed to help hasten the day when we are using LanzaTech's RSB-certified fuel to power our aircraft."

The audit summary report is available on the RSB website, www.rsbservices.org. The audit was conducted by SCS Global Services (SCS), www.scsglobalservices.com, a leading global provider of third-party environmental and sustainability certification, auditing, testing, and standards development for nearly 30 years.

About LanzaTech

LanzaTech is a leader in gas fermentation technology. It provides novel and economic routes to fuels and high value chemicals from waste gas streams. LanzaTech's unique process provides a sustainable pathway to produce platform chemicals that serve as building blocks to products that have become indispensable in our lives such as rubber, plastics, synthetic fibers and fuels.

LanzaTech's technology solutions mitigate carbon emissions from industry without adversely impacting food or land security. With commercial facilities in China slotted for construction in 2014, LanzaTech, a company founded in New Zealand, is now a global organization. More information is available at www.lanzatech.com.

About Shougang Group

Shougang Group is a large enterprise group founded in 1919. While Shougang's main business is iron and steel, the Group is also engaged in mining, machinery, electronics, construction, real estate, services and international trading. Shougang has made great progress, especially since economic reforms began in China 30 years ago.

Entering the new century, the steel industry is facing unprecedented pressure and challenges, as well as unprecedented development opportunities. Shougang has created a first class iron and steel enterprise by actively promoting optimization of the industry's structure, promoting continuous innovation and pioneering new product development and production processes. Shougang has also changed its traditional product line to produce high-grade sheet metal, an historical change. In the past thirty years, Shougang steel's production capacity has increased from 1.79 million tons to 12.19 million tons and sales income has increased from 1.443 billion yuan to 132 billion yuan. The Group has paid more than 57.66 billion yuan in tax revenue and has made a significant contribution to the development of the modern Chinese iron and steel industry. More information is available at http://www.shougang.com.cn/shougang_cn_web/
 
About Tang Ming Group 

Tang Ming Group Ltd was established in November 1999. It was successfully formed into a corporation with China Shougang Group in 2003 to establish Shougang Tangming (Auckland) Corporation Ltd. In 2011, Beijing Shougang LanzaTech New Energy Science & Technology Co., Ltd was established in Beijing.

About RSB Services
The Roundtable on Sustainable Biomaterials (RSB) certification system helps farmers, feedstock processors and biomaterial producers prove their sustainability to the world. Certified entities demonstrate that their operations comply with ambitious yet practical safeguards, including the protection of natural or rare ecosystems, food security, and respect for human rights to land, water and decent work conditions, and the management of water resources. With unmatched NGO support, global market compatibility across all feedstocks, practical guidance and tools for an ongoing sustainability system, RSB Services Foundation, the implementing entity of the RSB, helps companies manage their risk and increase shareholder and consumer confidence through the certification of their businesses. More information about RSB certification can be found at www.rsbservices.org. 

Media Contacts:
John Williams
Scoville PR for LanzaTech
jwilliams@scovillepr.com
+1-206-625-0075

Helena Kennedy
Director of Communications at RSB Services Foundation
hkennedy@rsbservices.org
+1-703-725-4626

European climate policy drives wood pellet boom in NC

http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2013/08/17/4244134/european-climate-policy-drives.html

By Bruce Siceloff: bsiceloff@newsobserver.com

Posted: Sunday, Aug. 18, 2013

• 
  Chris Seward - cseward@newsobserver.com

  A worker shows a handful of the finished product at the Enviva facility in Ahoskie NC on August 12, 2013. Enviva makes wood pellets from North Carolina forest products and ships them to Europe for use in power plants there. The pellets are trucked to the Hampton Roads, VA ports and then put on ships bound for Europe..

  
  

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

Trash talk: Worthan angry county not in the loop on biofuels company

http://www.douglascountysentinel.com/news/local/article_64c7c62e-0793-11e3-b23a-0019bb30f31a.html

Posted: Saturday, August 17, 2013 7:18 pm

Ron Daniel / Staff Writer | 

While the city and county have made strides toward working together over the past year and a half, sparks still fly from time to time, as Friday’s meeting of the Development Authority of Douglas County proved.

Douglas County Commission Chairman Tom Worthan didn’t mince words when the subject of a biofuels company interested in locating at the landfill and turning trash into fuel came up.

Douglasville Development Services Director Jeff Noles told the city’s development authority Tuesday morning that landing the company “would be a big win for the county and give them an opportunity to make money where they’re not currently making money.”

But the landfill is outside the city limits and is run by the county. Worthan made clear again Friday the county wants no part of the project and that he wasn’t happy about being left out of the talks.

Noles, Chris Pumphrey, executive director of the DADC, and DADC Board Chairman Ron Wilson were all involved in a conference call with the company about three weeks ago, according to Wilson.

“I have pushed for cooperation, communication,” Worthan said. “It’s embarrassing for me that our development authority had been in contact with these people. Evidently the city development authority has.”

Wilson told Worthan the conference call wasn’t positive. The company would make fuels like synthetic diesel from the decomposition of trash. But Wilson said there were concerns about groundwater pollution and air quality if the company moved here.

Additionally, the company was looking at using the Douglas County landfill to handle the trash for all of the west metro Atlanta area, which would mean an increase from 100 garbage trucks a day on rural roads like Cedar Mountain Road and Mann Road to 1,000.

“From a development authority standpoint, we didn’t have any interest at all,” said Wilson.

Worthan wasn’t satisfied.

“Mr. Chairman, even if you didn’t have any interest in it, I should have been told that you were talking about it,” Worthan said.

Wilson said he agreed and apologized to Worthan.

Douglasville Mayor Harvey Persons said he and Worthan made a pact when he took office in 2012 the city and county would work “in the spirit of cooperation.”

“I think it’s incumbent on both of these bodies to make sure the chief elected officials of the city and county are aware of what’s going on as it relates to economic development,” said Persons.

Wilson said he believed the city and county development authorities were doing just that. But Wilson said the development authority hasn’t traditionally gone to the county and city governments with projects “we take no action on.”

Worthan said he found out about the project second-hand from a Douglasville city council member earlier this week, that even the Douglasville-Douglas County Water Sewer Authority knew about the project, but that the county “was left out of the loop completely.”

“As I’ve said all along, I push for cooperation and consolidation and whatever I could,” Worthan said. “But there’s no excuse for what happened. It just happened to happen, and I don’t expect it to again.”

Then Worthan got in the final words of the meeting, making clear one last time where the county stands on the biofuels company locating at the landfill.

“Not interested,” he said.

Also at Friday’s meeting, Atlanta Kitchen Equipment, located on Industrial Access Road in Douglasville, announced plans to add 20,000 square feet of space and an additional 20 employees.

The expansion will cost $2.5 million and the DADC agreed to help the company get tax-exempt bonds.

Also, Pumphrey also said a land owner in the northwestern corridor of the county had approached the DADC about buying 109 acres just north of the railroad tracks, which could be used to spur industrial growth in that area.

Pumphrey said the DADC is looking “to see what options are there.”

Renewable Surprise: Big New Biomass In Georgia

http://www.earthtechling.com/2013/08/renewable-surprise-big-new-biomass-in-georgia/

by Pete Danko

Posted on August 16th, 2013 

The latest federal accounting of new electrical generation going into service is another disappointing one for renewable energy, after last month’s downer, as natural gas dominated new capacity added in July.

According to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission [PDF], 199 megawatts of new capacity came online in July and 144 of it was natural gas.

Loblolly pine is the most commercially important tree species in the southeastern United States (image via Wikimedia Commons)

In a surprise, the big contributor to new renewables in the past month wasn’t wind or solar but was biomass:  a 40-megawatt biomass system, using logging residual, at Graphic Packaging International’s operation in Macon County, Georgia.

When the company announced the project several years ago it said that by upping its investment in biomass – which was already being used to generate 90 percent of the paperboard mill’s process steam and 60 percent of its electrical power – it would be able to idle a coal-fired boiler. That would trim greenhouse gas emissions by 50,000 tons per year. Electricity produced would also reduce its grid load enough to curtail another 340,000 tons of CO2 emissions.

The company had said the high-efficiency biomass boiler and 40-MW turbine generator would cost as much as $80 million, but would “further the Company’s sustainability strategy, reduce energy costs and to improve the profitability of the Macon mill in advance of expected increases in electricity costs.”

New wind was nonexistent in July, as the industry continues to realign after last year’s near-death production tax credit experience. Through the first seven months of the year, wind has added 959 MW compared to 3,773 MW in the same period last year.

Solar came through with 11 MW in July, giving it 1,071 MW for the year, ahead of last year’s 842 MW at the same point in the year. Remember, that’s utility scale solar; the smaller stuff on residences and businesses, of which there is oodles going in, isn’t counted in that figure.

Tilbury Power Station completes final day of operation

http://biomassmagazine.com/articles/9311/tilbury-power-station-completes-final-day-of-operation

By Erin Voegele | August 13, 2013

The U.K.’s largest biomass power plant is completing its final day of operation. RWE npower has announced that the 750 MW Tilbury Power Station will generate power for the last time on Aug. 13.

The facility, originally fueled with coal, operated for 46 years.

In 2008, RWE made the decision to opt out the then 1,100 MW coal-fired power plant under the E.U.’s Large Combustion Plant Directive, a regulation that aims to reduce sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and particulate matter emissions from power stations and other large industrial facilities. The decision to opt-out meant that the plant would shut down after either 20,000 hours of operation or the end of 2015, whichever was sooner. However, in 2010, RWE elected to use the remaining hours of operation to trial the use of 100 percent biomass.  The action effectively reduced the plant’s production capacity to 750 MW. The conversion was completed in late 2011.

According to information released by RWE on Aug. 12, the second phase of the conversion would have required the closure of the plant under the LCPD and the development of a full-scale biomass conversion to meet new environmental standards. It would have taken approximately two years to complete the upgrades. Information released by the company specifies the move would have allowed the plant to operate for an additional 10 to 12 years.

According to the RWE, the U.K. Department of Climate Change confirmed that the TIlbury project is ineligible for the new Contract for Difference Support mechanism for lower carbon technologies. As such, the company said it will not proceed with the second phase of the conversion. RWE attributes the decision to the fact that the conversion is not economically viable under the existing Renewable Obligation mechanism.

Recent statistics released by the U.K. Department of Energy and Climate Change indicate that power generation from plant biomass in the U.K. increased by 69 percent during the first quarter of 2013 compared to the same quarter of the prior year, rising from 1.1 terawatt hours (TWh) to 1.8 TWh. The increase is attributed to the Tilbury power plant becoming fully operational.

Data provided by RWE states that the Tilbury plant generated 1.27 TWh of power during the first quarter of this year. That is more than 10 percent of the 12.4 TWh of total renewable electricity generated in the U.K. during the same three-month period.

“This is a sad time for everyone at Tilbury Power Station, but I would like to personally thank all of our staff past and present who have contributed to the success of the station, particularly in the delivery of such a pioneering development for UK biomass,” said Nigel Staves, manager of Tilbury Power Station. “Tilbury remains an excellent site for power generation and RWE will now review future plans for the site. The lessons learned from the successful biomass conversion will be shared across the RWE Generation portfolio, as RWE remains committed to exploring new energy technologies that can provide energy solutions that are both affordable and sustainable.”

Judge dismisses case against biomass plant

http://www.ajc.com/news/news/local/judge-dismisses-case-against-biomass-plant/nZFKt/

Posted: 3:23 p.m. Monday, Aug. 5, 2013

By April Hunt

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution 

An administrative law judge has dismissed a lawsuit from a group of DeKalb County residents opposed to a proposed biomass plant near Lithonia.

Judge Amanda Baxter said the Citizens for a Healthy and Safe Environment, or CHASE, did not respond in a timely manner to various court orders in its challenge to a state air permit for the facility.

Green Energy Partners had secured the state permit for the $60 million facility on Rogers Lake Road, which calls for burning wood chips to create energy that it will sell to Georgia Power. County Commissioners approved a rezoning chance for the plant in 2011, and company officials plan to break ground on the facility later this year.

Judge Rules Biomass Plants Have to Obey the Law, While Usefulness is Questioned

http://www.sustainablebusiness.com/index.cfm/go/news.display/id/25085

07/25/2013 11:16 AM

A federal appeals judge has ruled that power plants that turn biomass into energy also have to obey the Clean Air Act.

It closed a loophole under which the Environment Protection Agency (EPA) exempted biomass plants from the same emission rules that all other power plants are subject to.

“Burning trees to generate electricity is dangerous, polluting, and ought to be limited to protect people and the environment,” says Kevin Bundy, a senior attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute, which challenged EPA's policy. “This important decision will reduce respiratory ailments, protect forests and help ensure a healthier, more livable climate.” 

The ruling reflects recent research that finds biomass-fueled power plants emit significantly more carbon per kilowatt than fossil fuel power plants - even coal. It can take decades before that excess carbon is “re-sequestered” by subsequent plant growth, explains the Center for Biological Diversity.

“Today’s ruling upholds EPA’s authority to regulate pollution that drives climate change. The court’s decision is grounded in an understanding that the science shows that biomass fuels, including tree-burning, can make climate disruption worse,” says Ann Weeks, legal director of the Clean Air Task Force, who argued the case for petitioners, which include the Conservation Law Foundation and Natural Resource Council of Maine. “The court clearly noted that the atmosphere can’t tell the difference between fossil fuel carbon dioxide and carbon dioxide emitted by burning trees.” 

"The court's decision is particularly important for the Southeast. Now we have an opportunity for a more sensible, science-based policy, one that avoids clearcutting the region's wildlife-rich forests for energy while intensifying climate change impacts," says Frank Rambo of the Southern Environmental Law Center, which represented the Dogwood Alliance, Georgia ForestWatch, South Carolina Coastal Conservation League and Wild Virginia in the case. 

In the case of wood, the adverse impact is exacerbated because of the large amounts of carbon released from deep forest soils as a result of disturbances such as logging, finds research released in June by Dartmouth College. Most global atmospheric studies don't consider deep soil, which could store up to half of all carbon in forest soils. 

"Our paper suggests the carbon in mineral soil may change more rapidly, and result in increases in atmospheric CO2, as a result of disturbances such as logging," says Dartmouth Professor Andrew Friedland. "Increased reliance on wood may have the unintended effect of increasing the transfer of carbon from mineral soil to the atmosphere." 

Woody biomass including trees grown on plantations, managed natural forests and logging waste, is used for 75% of global biofuel production. 

“If we are going to start changing recommendations and tell people to leave oil and coal in the ground, and burn more wood, we first need solid science behind that recommendation,” says Friedland. “Wood still might be a green choice, but let’s know all the consequences of everything that we do—and some of these consequences are not currently being discussed or appreciated or evaluated.” 

Next-Generation Biofuel Investments in Doubt 

 

Meanwhile, Europe’s biggest oil companies, BP and  Shell, are scaling back investments in biofuels because they don't see them becoming economical to produce until at least 2020. Exxon (remember all those algae TV ads?) and Chevron gave up several years ago, when they didn't see enough profit.

Why bother with these longer term investments when they're making a killing on their core business, oil and gas?

 

Both Shell and BP, however, continue to expand in their sugarcane ethanol businesses in Brazil. Shell has 23 refineries there and BP is spending $350 million to double production.

Global investment in biofuel production was $57 million in the first quarter, the lowest since 2006 and off significantly from a peak of $7.6 billion in the last quarter of 2007, reports Bloomberg. 
 

“Progress in deploying these technologies has been slower than many had anticipated and what’s needed to keep on track with our aspirations,” Maria van der Hoeven, executive director of the International Energy Agency (IEA), told Bloomberg. “Many potential producers have found it difficult to secure the capital they need.” 

"This is very capital intensive," Phil New, head of BP's biofuels program, told Bloomberg. "There's lots of difficult engineering. It will take time for scale-up."

Last year, BP scrapped plans for a $300 million refinery in Florida, although it just opened a $520 million wheat-to-ethanol facility in the UK with DuPont. Shell canceled plans in April for a straw-to-ethanol facility and also pulled back funding for biofuel enzymes at Codexis and an algae venture with HR BioPetroleum.

"All of these technologies are capable of working technically," Matthew Tipper, Shell's head of alternative energy, told Bloomberg. "It was purely on cost that this technology couldn't be taken forward. Fuels have to be cheap enough to burn. Otherwise no-one will buy them."

Both the US and Europe are counting on biofuels to help reduce emissions that contribute to global warming. To meet climate targets, biofuels must account for 27% of transportation fuels by 2050, up from just 3% in 2012, says IEA. 

Last year, ethanol made from sugar or corn was the major source of biofuels - almost all of the 1.9 million barrels produced a day. Next-generation technologies are focused on supplies that don't compete with food, such as switch grass, corn stalks, jatropha and algae, as well as wood waste from the lumber and paper industries. 

The first commercial-scale cellulosic biofuels plants are coming online, from companies like KiOR, Abengoa Bioenergy, BlueFire Renewables, Mascoma and Fulcrum Bioenergy. The plants will boost US cellulosic biofuel output 20-fold this year. At an anticipated 9.6 million gallons of production, it falls short of government’s target of 14 million gallons.

Big oil has basically decided to let these smaller firms develop the technologies and then surely they'll step in.

Last year, the EU set limits on crop-based biofuels because of rising food prices worldwide and shifted the focus to agricultural residues like straw, and potentially algae.

Central Louisiana making gains in biomass industry

http://www.thetowntalk.com/article/20130723/BUSINESS/307160021/Central-Louisiana-making-gains-biomass-industry

 Written by Jeff Matthews

Jul. 23, 2013   |   

 

Sundrop Fuels CEO Wayne Simmons (center) announces in 2011 that his company would build a $450 million biofuels plant in Rapides Station. The plant is expected to employ about 150 people and begin operation in late 2015. / Town Talk file photo

Central Louisiana appears to have struck gold, and workers don’t even have to dig for it. It’s just lying on the ground.

The area has very quickly grabbed a significant share in the emerging biomass manufacturing market, with three large plant projects announced in the past 19 months.


Local economic developers are optimistic that more activity is on the horizon.

“We’re still seeing an unusual amount of opportunity in that area,” said Jim Clinton, president and chief executive officer of Central Louisiana Economic Development Alliance. “I don’t think this will be the last opportunity we see.”

All three projects are manufacturing plants that use wood products — mostly things that have been looked at as waste, such as leftover shavings or parts of the tree unsuitable for making lumber — in some way to create fuel that is more environmentally friendly than traditional fossil fuel.

Colorado-based startup Sundrop Fuels. Inc. announced in late 2011 that it is building the pilot plant for its “green gasoline” in the Rapides Station area near Boyce. The plant is expected to employ about 150 people and begin operation in late 2015.


The fuel can be used like normal transportation fuel, but instead of being refined from petroleum, it is produced in a unique gasification process using natural gas and woody biomass.


The plant is expected to produce about 60 million gallons of fuel per year. But that’s just the beginning. Sundrop is hoping its new technology takes off and the company can follow through on building as many as four more plants, each producing more than 200 million gallons of fuel per year. 

Local economic developers would love to see one of those “megaplants” going up next to the pilot plant off Interstate 49.


In April, wood pellet manufacturing giant German Pellets breathed life back into the tiny LaSalle Parish town of Urania when it announced a $300 million plant there.

The plant will be on the site of the former Louisiana Pacific and Georgia Pacific plant that closed in 2002. It is expected to create 500 jobs and come online next spring.

Wood pellets are used extensively in other parts of the world, particularly Europe, to generate electricity and heat. They are most commonly made by pressing wood shavings and sawdust into a globe or cylinder shape.

The facility in Urania is billed as the world’s largest pellet plant. It is expected to produce one million tons of pellets per year.

Most recently, Hinterland LLC announced plans to build a pellet manufacturing plant in Vidalia.


The facility at Vidalia Industrial Park is expected to cost more than $100 million and employ more than 50 people. It has access to the developing Port of Vidalia.

“I tell people wood is our oil,” said Rick Ranson, vice president of the regional development alliance in Alexandria.
 

“Biomass certainly going back several years has been identified by state and local entities as a target,” Clinton said. “Our wood base, our resources give us a position of strength in the field.”

Policy changes should not affect wood-pellet plans at port

http://www.starnewsonline.com/article/20130722/ARTICLES/130729922

By Wayne Faulkner, Wayne.Faulkner@StarNewsOnline.com

Published: Monday, July 22, 2013 at 3:14 p.m.

A worker piles wood pellets at a holding facility at the Georgia Ports Authority in Brunswick, Ga., in 2011. Courtesy photo

 

Energy policy changes across the Atlantic could affect how long the boom in the U.S. wood pellet industry will last, forestry experts and industry opponents say.

But the company that plans to invest millions into building a pellet-exporting facility at the Port of Wilmington says those changes were long anticipated and have provided certainty for the industry to continue rapid growth.

The United Kingdom, where North Carolina's pellets will be shipped, is changing some of its rules that favor use of pellets in place of coal. It is cutting out subsidies for new power plants that would burn pellets while eventually ending them for plants that are converting from coal to pellets, according to news reports. 

The U.K.'s decisions "give certainty to the major utilities there so they can make good investments in converting existing coal-fired plants to biomass (wood products) plants," Enviva Chairman and CEO John Keppler said Monday.

"We have some pretty aggressive plans under way" for the Port of Wilmington and elsewhere in North Carolina, he said.

Enviva has two pellet-producing facilities in North Carolina, at Ahoskie and Northhampton, and has identified several sites in the state for a possible third facility, Keppler said.

Enviva plans to build two concrete storage domes, rail and truck unloading stations and a ship loader/dock-conveyer system at Wilmington. Enviva is not involved in pellet-exporting plans at the Port of Morehead City, which have been scaled back. The cutback is unrelated to European environmental policies, said Laura Blair, spokeswoman for the N.C. State Ports Authority.

U.S. production of pellets is expected to increase from 3 million tons in 2009 to 10 million by 2015, according to a study by Daniel Saloni of the Department of Forest Biomaterials at N.C. State University. 

There are or will be six Atlantic ports handling wood pellets between Norfolk and Brunswick, Ga., according to the Southern Environmental Law Center, an environmental advocacy organization based in Charlottesville, Va.

Pascagoula, Miss., is joining the push, planning to spend $30 million to accommodate future pellet exports.

Viable business?

But some question the limits of the wood-pellet export boom.

Opponents of the industry are arguing that burning wood pellets to produce energy not only doesn't make environmental sense but that it eventually won't make economic sense, either.

In addition to the U.K.'s new biomass subsidy policy, Europe is looking at whether it will require stricter requirements that the wood it receives from the United States is third-party-certified as sustainable, according to Dennis Hazel, associate professor and extension specialist for the Department of Forestry and Environmental Resources at N.C. State University.

One of the largest certifying groups is the Forest Stewardship Council, which originated from the Rain Forest Alliance, Hazel said.

"If your forest is certified, every product" that comes from it is certified, including pellets, he said Monday.

Problem is, there is little third-party-certified land in North Carolina, Hazel said.

If Europe decides to require strict certification, it may cloud the long-term viability of the pellet industry in the state, he said.

Lack of certification by either independent or industry groups is not to say the state's forests are managed badly.

The U.S. Forestry Service thinks "we do forestry pretty well in the Southeast. Most of our land is adequately regenerated" after trees are cut, Hazel said. That means that most cutting, even clear-cutting, allows the forests to come back. That, in turn, shrinks the relative carbon footprint of using North Carolina pellets for power production, he said.

But the forest watchdog group Dogwood Alliance says using the state's forests to produce pellets for power production is far from the European goal to be carbon neutral – producing no more carbon dioxide than is absorbed by regenerated forests.

The alliance's executor director, Danna Smith, said burning pellets for electricity may actually increase carbon emissions compared to coal. 

But she also argued that pellet companies are limited in their ability to make money from selling to the United Kingdom.

"It is not a long-term strategy for (the companies)," Smith said. "This is not going to be a long-term development opportunity.

"The justification for this (pellet) market is emission reductions. When you burn a tree that is, say, 20 years old, all that carbon is going into the atmosphere. If that tree had not been logged it would have been storing that carbon plus absorbing more carbon from the atmosphere."

In other words, the forests just can't regenerate fast enough to make the harvesting-burning process carbon neutral, she added.

But the pellet-burning process is never going to be carbon neutral, Hazel said. It, however, can be relatively beneficial.

In the short term, burning pellets may be less advantageous than burning coal. But in the long term it looks good compared to coal, because the forests have time to regenerate, he said.

Regardless of the arguments, Keppler is confident in his company's and the pellet industry's course of high investment and growth.

Nothing, he reiterated, has changed in Enviva's ambitious plans for the Port of Wilmington.

Once powerful logging region getting back to its roots with biomass fuel source

http://www.sunherald.com/2013/07/09/4785036/once-powerful-logging-region-getting.html

Published: July 9, 2013

By Mike Lacy — The Journal of South Mississippi Business

 

South Mississippi has found itself on the edge of an industrial opportunity that could literally light a fire in its the economic engine and put it on the world stage for decades. Wood pellet manufacturing appears to be a nice fit for a region long known as a logging powerhouse. Proponets promise infrastructure renewal, employment opportunities, tangential small business growth and a clear conscious that comes from creating a long-term, self-sustaining, eco-friendly fuel for the world.

Trouble is, a lot of other people want a piece of the action, and some neighboring states may already be ahead in its plans to capitalize. In wood pellet manufacturing, companies take forest junk that doesn’t meet milling specifications and make it into what could be the next big not-really-so alternative fuel source.

“Other Southern states — Louisiana, Georgia and Florida — are on board and building wood pellets and ports to handle them,” said Ken Flanagan, community development director for the George County Board of Supervisors. “They are moving very quickly. Georgia may be a little ahead of the curve. It’s very obvious to us that this is a competitive business market. Our sister states are getting into this game.” But, he said that South Mississippi is “definitely on the forefront” of the battle.

“You’re going to hear about wood pellets for years to come.”

In late June, Green Circle Bio Energy, Inc., announced plans to build a $115 million wood pellet manufacturing plant in George County’s Industrial Park, which it says will create 126 full-time jobs and produce about 500,000 metric tons of pellets to be shipped to European markets. Construction of the plant on a 120-acre site is expected to begin this fall.

It was the second plant in five months to announce plans to build in the George County Industrial Park and one of four wood pellet producers to have considered George County as home for their plants. Gulf Coast Renewable Energy announced plans in March to build a 320,000 metric ton-plant that would create 40 jobs and 288 indirect jobs. But, so far, plans have not yet materialized.

Green Circle’s arrival has also spurred infrastructure development for the George County Industrial Park as well as the Port of Pascagoula to support the industry.

In April, the state House of Representatives and Senate authorized a borrowing bill that included $10 million for the Port of Pascagoula. The port will put the $10 million toward the development of a specialized facility to support the state’s wood-pellet industry.

Port Director Mark McAndrews said at the time of the announcement that the center will be built in a terminal in its Bayou Casotte east harbor and will have a conveyor system, storage silos and a ship loader for receiving and shipping wood pellets.

The total cost will be $28 million to $30 million. The port and the terminal’s operating partner will pay the balance after the state’s $10 million, McAndrews said.

When Green Circle was in negotiations with George County, it was also in negotiations with the Port of Pascagoula. “The port authority wanted to make sure we were on the same page as they were,” Flanagan added. “They have to act independently, but it was a good, open relationship.

“For us, keeping this inside Mississippi is very important,” he said. “If we produce it in Mississippi, we want to ship it out from Mississippi.”

The product

Wood pellets are a refined biomass fuel. By “pelletizing” residual forest waste, sawdust and used wood pallets, millions of tons of waste can be put to work for the economy while enhancing the environment. The process utilizes parts of trees that do not meet sawmill specs — like the trucks or the tops.

Biomass energy proponents say wood pellet energy is carbon neutral, largely because regrowth of vegetation was believed to recapture and store the carbon that is emitted to the air. But some environmental groups have questioned the simplistic claim arguing that it depends on how the fuel is harvested, from what forest types and what kinds of forest management are applied.

Wood pellets pose no soil or water contamination risks. The Mississippi Biomass Council also states that a typical wood pellet plant will produce 70K tons of pellets per year, enough to supply one 250 MW generating plant with 5 percent of its fuel as co-fired biomass.

Basically, the wood is processed, ground into a paste and squeezed into pellets. In doing so, the moisture content is reduced from 50 to 60 percent down to about 5 percent, making it dense, stable for long-term storage and easily shippable. There are no additives.

Why now?

Wood pellet manufacturing has been around for years, but what’s driving the market right now is a mandate to reduce carbon emissions from power plants in Europe by 2020. When mixed with traditional coal, wood pellets can burn at the same heat and rate, but with a reduced carbon emission.

But while Green Circle is the latest news, Enviva Pellets has been operating an industrial plant in Wiggins since 2010, replacing Piney Wood Pellets, which produced more for residential use.

Enviva owns one other plant in Amory (Monroe County) and a third plant is operated by New Biomass Energy in Quitmann.

Enviva Wiggins is a 150,000-ton wood pellet manufacturing plant. It operates 24 hours a day, 365 days per year.

Elizabeth Woodworth, director marketing communications for Enviva, said the Wiggins site was the “right opportunity” and the “right combination.”

“It is a good business environment, has incredible forest resources that are robust and healthy for us and it’s also located near a deep-water port,” she said.

Enviva Pellets exports through the Port of Mobile and has no immediate plans to change.

Why here?

According to a study commissioned by the Mississippi Development Authority, forestland dominates the Mississippi landscape, covering about 65 percent of the state. This coverage provides an excellent woody biomass supply to support the bioenergy and biochemical industries. It is estimated that about 6.5 million dry tons of unutilized pulpwood and woody biomass residues are available for new bioenergy and biochemical development in Mississippi. In addition, annual timber growth exceeds harvests in the state by a ratio of 1:13:1, meaning that 1.3 units of timber are added to the state’s stocks for each unit harvested each year.

“This immediately struck me that here is an emerging energy market — there’s no better way to say it,” Flanagan said. “It will never be like coal or oil, but in the recycling energy market, wood pellets do not have a rival.”

Europe makes wood pellets as well, but its “wood basket” — the area of harvesting wood within a 50- to 70-mile radius — is not as big as it is in the certain areas of the United States. In choosing a potential site, manufacturers consider how many years one can harvest, replant and harvest again.

Green Circle President and CEO Morten Neraas said it was important in the process to have more trees growing than what are being taken.

“But you’ve got to have more than wood,” Flanagan said. “You don’t want to be too far away from the Coast.” And he said the combination of rail and highway transportation to the Port of Pascagoula put George County in a good position. Is it good for Mississippi?

Nash Nunnery with the MDA said it has been estimated that nearly 100 new jobs are created by a typical pellet plant, including plant operators and workers, loggers, landowners and truckers. Each plant requires delivery of up to 6,000 truckloads of wood biomass equating to around 2,500 truckloads of wood pellets to customers each year.

The latest figures from a 2010 report from the Mississippi Department of Employment Security found that biomass industry-related jobs, not just those involving the wood pellet industry, directly or indirectly employed nearly 187,000 Mississippians.

Woodworth said in addition to direct and in-direct jobs created, it also adds an incentive for forest owners to keep their forests intact “rather than using it for agriculture — or worse — developing into strip malls.”

She said her company “goes through the supply chain” to obtain the raw material — sometimes through sawmills and sometimes on private forestland.

“It (the industrial process) helps promote bio diversity and value to the forest owner,” she said. “Maybe that will help him decide to keep his forest a forest. Over history, we’ve seen direct a correlation.”

Pricing

Woodworth said that wood pellet relative cost is one of the lowest, second only to onshore wind sources.

“But because wood pellets uses current utility infrastructure, it saves the utility on capital costs to retrofit,” she said.

But while Europe is the company’s primary business partner, she hopes that domestic acceptance of biomass fuel sources and, in turn, domestic business will increase.

“In Europe, it’s not a political matter. It’s a given,” Woodworth said. “Here, it’s divisive. I’d love to see biomass take off. It’s good for the environment and it’s part of the puzzle to use.

“When we talk about the impact of Enviva, we don’t focus on the fact that it’s a new green economy,” Woodworth said. “We’re connected to managing jobs and getting the forest industry back on its feet.

“We’re excited to be in the South Mississippi business region,” she said. “ The area has high quality labor in manufacturing. “And what’s cool about Wiggins, is that this facility is part of a global energy future.”

Read more here: http://www.sunherald.com/2013/07/09/4785036/once-powerful-logging-region-getting.html#storylink=cpy

RWE npower closes Tilbury biomass power station

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/jul/05/rwe-npower-tilbury-biomass-power-station

The blow to the UK's renewables industry was welcome news to some green campaigners who argue biomass is unsustainable

Fiona Harvey and Natalie Starkey
The Guardian, Friday 5 July 2013 08.11 EDT 

 

The closure of the Tilbury biomass power station will result in the likely loss of 220 jobs. Photograph: Alamy

 

RWE npower is halting operations at its Tilbury biomass power station, with the likely loss of 220 jobs, in a blow to Britain's renewable power industry.

But some green campaigners welcomed the closure, which will take effect from the end of October, as they argue biomass use on a large scale is environmentally unsustainable.

The closure will also raise further concerns over the ability to "keep the lights on" as an increasing number of ageing power stations are taken out of service.

The German electricity generator blamed a lack of investment capacity and the difficulty in converting the plant – the world's biggest biomass power station, with a planned capacity of 750MW – to use wood, waste oil and other organic materials in place of coal.

Biomass investors have also been rattled by the government's planned changes in subsidies for biomass and other renewable forms of energy. Drax, Britain's biggest coal-fired power station, last year shelved plans for two new biomass power stations.

Tilbury has a complex history that closely reflects the developments in energy and environment policy over the past decade.

Originally a coal-fired plant, it fell foul of EU regulations intended to cut airborne pollutants such as sulphur, and was intended in 2008 to be gradually run down, with a closure date of 2015.

But in 2010, the station was given a new lease of life as RWE announced its intention to experiment with biomass, sourced from sustainable forests, energy crops and waste.

Last year, RWE applied for environmental permits that would have kept the plant open as the world's biggest biomass burner. The investment required would run to the low hundreds of millions of pounds, less than building a new power station but a sum that would require considerable confidence in the future of biomass, as coal is now at its lower price for years.

Now, the company has decided it has other investment priorities.

However, RWE is open to selling the power station to another operator, if a buyer can be found. The company is only mothballing the plant, not dismantling it.

Roger Miesen, chief technical officer at RWE Generation, said: "It is with regret that we are announcing the decision to halt the Tilbury biomass project. This decision has not been taken lightly. Tilbury remains a good site for future power generation. RWE still believes that biomass has a role to play in future power generation and will continue to progress options at strategic sites."

The closure has reopened debate over the future of biomass power generation in Britain.

The government supports biomass, as a low-carbon form of power generation compared with fossil fuels – the trees and plants used as fuel take up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as they grow, so if they are regrown under environmentally sound conditions, burning them results in a net carbon saving as it displaces coal and gas.

However, that is not the whole story, according to many green campaigners. They point to problems with sourcing sufficient quantities of biomass, much of which has to be imported, and say that without strict regulations, growing trees and crops for biomass can lead to deforestation in developing countries. There are also concerns about the effects of the soot that comes from burning the organic fuel.

Ports Authority board to vote on Wilmington wood pellet facility

http://www.starnewsonline.com/article/20130528/ARTICLES/130529554/-1/sports01?Title=Ports-Authority-board-to-vote-on-Wilmington-wood-pellet-facility

By Adam Wagner
Adam.Wagner@StarNewsOnline.com

Published: Tuesday, May 28, 2013 at 5:54 p.m., Last Modified: Tuesday, May 28, 2013 at 5:54 p.m.

The N.C. Ports Authority’s board of directors will take a vote on one of two wood pellets facilities on Wednesday, even as the energy source comes under more heat.

Enviva’s facility at the Port of Wilmington will come to a vote on Wednesday, but the board will wait to vote on the International Wood Fuels facility in Morehead City until Secretary of Transportation Tony Tata can have more discussions with Gov. Pat McCrory. 

If the Wilmington project is approved Wednesday, its next step will be the Council of State because it involves the leasing of state land. The authority will not need the council’s sign-off on the Morehead City project, which involves state-funded construction on state property. 

Enviva, which has also built a pellet terminal in Chesapeake, Va., would build two concrete storage domes, rail and truck unloading stations and a ship loader/dock conveyor system at the Port of Wilmington. 

In the meantime, representatives of the Southern Environmental Law Center have been critical of the pellet projects, in part because of possible shifts in attitude across the Atlantic.

“That entire policy is under active consideration in Europe now,” said Derb Carter, director of the N.C. office of the Southern Environmental Law Center. “They’re examining the assumption that this is an energy path that they want to go down. There’s active meetings going on in the UK and in the EU, and if this market goes away, the state will have been involved in making major investments at the port that have no purpose.”

 

Danny McComas, the chairman of the Ports Authority’s board, said he can’t predict the future but is reassured by the Europeans’ investment in pellet plants.

In addition to the concerns about the pellets’ viability as an energy source, the Law Center raised questions about the Ports Authority’s transparency.

“In our view, if they’re going to be making decisions about a particular project and they know that in advance, then the public has a right to know what those topics will be and what will be considered at that meeting,” Carter said.

Public notices of the ports board’s teleconferences on Tuesday and Wednesday was provided by the Ports Authority, but they did not explicitly mention that the pellet projects would be discussed during those meetings.

Carter said he thinks the projects should have been the topic of a public hearing.

McComas said he’d be willing to talk with representatives of the organization about their environmental concerns after the agreements become finalized.

“After it becomes public that it’s been finalized, we can certainly talk to them,” he said.

Adam Wagner: 343-2096

On Twitter: @adamwagner1990

Dogwood Alliance launches campaign against logging for energy

http://www.mountainx.com/article/50340/Dogwood-Alliance-launches-campaign-against-logging-for-energy

By David Forbes on 05/29/2013 04:05 AM

From the Dogwood Alliance:

May 28, 2013 – Southern forests are being burned for electricity, and a new campaign announced today aims to put an end to it. Dogwood Alliance and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) have launched “Our Forests Aren’t Fuel” to raise awareness of an alarming and rapidly-growing practice of logging forests and burning the trees as fuel to generate electricity

At the forefront of burning trees logged from Southern forests for electricity are some of Europe’s largest utility companies, including Drax, Electrobel and RWE. Rising demand by these companies has resulted in the rapid expansion of wood pellet exports from the Southern US. The American South is now the largest exporter of wood pellets in the world. Recent analyses indicate there are twenty-four pellet facilities currently operating in the Southeast, and sixteen additional plants planned for construction in the near-term. Market analysts project that annual exports of wood pellets from the South will more than triple from 1.3 million tons in 2012 to nearly 6 million tons by 2015. All of the South’s largest domestic utilities, including Dominion Resources and Duke Energy, are also beginning to burn wood with plans for expansion in the future.

“This rapidly expanding trend of burning trees for energy will both accelerate climate change and destroy forests,” said Danna Smith, Executive Director of Dogwood Alliance. “Southern forests not only protect us from climate change, but protect our drinking water, provide habitat for wildlife and contribute to our quality of life. We need these companies to stop burning trees for electricity and embrace a clean energy future that helps to protect, rather than destroy forests.”

“With the advancement of clean, renewable energy alternatives, the growing practice of burning trees for electricity is a major step in the wrong direction,” said Debbie Hammel, Senior Resource Specialist of the Natural Resources Defense Council. “Our Forests Aren’t Fuel lets the public know about the extent of this ecological devastation and calls on utilities to end the practice. It’s an even dirtier form of energy production than burning fossil fuels, it destroys valuable southern ecosystems, and it isn’t necessary.”

Energy from burning trees – or biomass – has been widely promoted as a form of renewable energy along with technologies like solar, wind, and geothermal. Over the past two years, however, mounting scientific evidence has discredited biomass from forests as a clean, renewable fuel. Recent scientific reports document that burning whole trees to produce electricity actually increases greenhouse gas pollution in the near-term compared with fossil fuels and emits higher levels of multiple air pollutants. This fact, combined with the negative impacts to water resources and wildlife associated with industrial logging have discredited whole trees as a clean fuel source. But current European and U.S. renewable energy policies and subsidies encourage the burning of trees as a “renewable” source of energy for power generation, helping to facilitate the rapid increase in demand for trees from Southern forests to burn in power plants.

Consequently, a new industry is spawning in the South. Companies like Maryland-based Enviva, the South’s largest pellet manufacturer, are grinding whole trees into wood pellets to be burned in power stations in Europe while also supplying wood to domestic utilities like Dominion Resources. New evidence that Enviva may be relying at least in part on the harvesting of wetland forests has recently emerged. Georgia Biomass, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the German utility RWE Innogy, is also manufacturing millions of tons of wood pellets annually to be burned in European biomass facilities.

“Our Forests Aren’t Fuel” organizers reveal the scope and scale of the growing biomass industry through a series of case studies on the campaign website that include wood pellet manufacturers, domestic utilities, and European utilities. Particular emphasis is placed on the following companies:

· Enviva - one of the largest manufacturers of wood pellets in the U.S. and Europe, with manufacturing facilities and partner facilities in Mississippi, North Carolina and Virginia. The Bethesda, Maryland-based company has an annual production capacity of more than 590,000 tons. It also operates a deep water terminal at the Port of Chesapeake, which has the capacity to receive and store up to three million tons of woody biomass annually. Much of its product is sold and shipped to European utilities, like Drax. Leftover biomass “residues,” like tree tops and limbs, are sold to domestic utilities, like Dominion Resources.

· Drax – major United Kingdom-based utility that recently shifted focus from co-firing biomass in coal power plants to full conversion of its largest plant to biomass. Drax has begun building pellet mills directly through its wholly owned subsidiary Drax Biomass. In December, 2012, Drax announced it will build Amite BioEnergy pellet mill in Gloster, Mississippi, and Morehouse BioEnergy in Bastrop, Louisiana, to supply wood pellets for use in its power plants, with production set to begin in 2014.

· Dominion Resources – the Richmond, Virginia-based utility recently launched several biomass operations that could well rely on whole trees in the near future. Its 83 megawatt plant in Pittsylvania, Virginia, is one of the largest biomass power stations on the east coast. Dominion is also converting three existing peak power coal-fired power stations into full-time biomass-burning facilities. The utility currently sources much of its biomass material as “residues” from wood pellet manufacturers like Enviva that export the bulk of its product to European markets. Should the supply of these residuals become limited, Dominion’s operations could increasingly rely on burning whole trees.

Full case studies for companies driving the biomass industry can be found on the “Our Forests Aren’t Fuel” website, http://www.dogwoodalliance.org/campaigns/bioenergy/, along with recommended actions for those concerned about losing southern forests for electricity, and a list of more than 70 supporting environmental groups.

LanzaTech CEO: Need Biofuels, Oil & All of the Above

http://domesticfuel.com/2013/04/19/lanzatech-ceo-need-biofuels-oil-all-of-the-above/

Posted by John Davis – April 19th, 2013



While some of the talk at the recent Advanced Biofuels Leadership Conference has focused on pointing fingers at the oil companies and some of the oil companies pointing back, at least one biofuel provider was saying we need them both. Jennifer Holmgren (shown holding an award for being one of the movers and shakers in the biofuel world), the CEO of LanzaTech, a company that turns carbon monoxide into ethanol, wants to take an “all-of-the-above” approach.

“It is so important for us to get as much energy and fuel into the pool that we need to have all of the solutions that can provide sustainable fuels at the table,” including natural gas, petroleum, algae, biomass, among others, she says … all providing economic, social and environmental sustainability.

Jennifer admits that is easy to say but tough to do. She says we need to look at the current state as part of a long journey to commercialize these processes. She adds that both sides need to tone down their rhetoric and recognize that oil is not going away, but it’s not enough to meet all of our energy needs.

“If you can get both sides to agree that oil doesn’t give us all the answers but is a necessary piece of the equation, I think we’ll be fine,” she says.

Jennifer is encouraged that so many oil companies attended the ABLC and are involved in the renewable energy business. She believes it’s a good start of better trust and patience between biofuels and Big Oil.