The European wood pellets market: towards a dependency on imports?

http://www.ihb.de/wood/news/European_wood_pellets_market_34659.html

• October 31, 2013

In the past few years, EU's quest to limit its dependency on fossil fuels and to cut CO2 emissions, has brought renewable energy on the peak of the European most successful market developments. While most of the wood industry was struggling with the effects of the financial crisis and a critical drop in consumption, the wood energy sector was setting new records every year.

And indeed the numbers are impressive: in just six years, wood pellets consumption has increased more than 3 times ( from 4,6 mil. tons in 2006, to 14,3 mil. tons in 2012). In the same period, production tripled (3,5 mil. tons, up to 10 million), while imports rose five times (from just 800,000 tons in 2006, to 4,4 mil. tons in 2012). But so far, the potential of the market hasn't reached its limits, as future expectations surpass any of these recent evolutions.

The annual 2013 EU biofuels report forecasts that by 2020, pellet consumption in Europe will be somewhere in the range of 50 to 80 mil. tons per year (2012: 14,3 mil.). Both the advantage of pellet use in heating systems, as well as many power plants are trying to reduce the usage of coal and switch to renewable energy are major factors that will contribute to this upsurge.

However, the European pellet market is facing a dillema: the relatively high costs of wood pellets in Europe have resulted in a massive increase in imports, especially from North America, where raw-material costs are lesser than in the EU. In addition, the two largest pellet pellet producers in the EU, Germany and Sweden, have either slowed down or decreased their production. The consequence is that, in 2012, intra-EU trade of pellets declined by -12%, meanwhile purchases from North America jumped 44%.

Recently, US and Canada have expanded their production capacities, gaining some important shares on the European pellet market. Their combined market share has jumped from 28% in 2011, to 37% in 2012, reaching an all-time record of 43% in the seven months of 2013. But clearly the US exports are rising at a higher pace than the Canadian ones. Last year, the US almost doubled its pellet deliveries to Europe becoming, in just one year, EU's main source of wood pellets. Moreover, in January-July 2013, US pellet shipments to EU further grew by 74% over the same period of 2012, totaling 1,67 million tons.

New pellet plants projects where announced during 2013 in the US, with almost 1,5 mil. tons of new pellets ready to be shipped in Europe in the next years. UK's Drax started construction of two pellet plants (one in Louisiana and the other in Mississippi) with a joint capacity of 900,000 tons per year. Also, Viridis Energy, a Canadian company, already started pellet production in August at its facility in Middle Musquodoboiin/Canada. The production will reach 120,000 tons of pellets per year.

BlueFire Renewables Inc. has integrated a synergistic wood pellet production plant to its facility in Fulton, Mississippi. The reconfigured design will be a 9 million gallon per year ethanol plant integrated with a 400,000 ton per year wood pellet plant. The company says that the pellets will be sold under long term contracts into the European mandated renewable energy market.

The outlook for the upcoming years is interconnected to some factors such as the ability of the EU countries to satisfy internal demand. Although with an expected 4-6 times rise in demand, it is obvious that EU's pellet production will not be able to keep up the pace and will become partially dependent on imports. Already, with recent new pellet plants construction announced in the US, some market predictions estimate that by 2014, the US will cover more than half of all European pellet imports, which means almost 25% of the overall consumption.

Current market shares in the European wood pellets market

TOP 10 Origins	Jan.-July 2013
Wood pellets imported by EU from	Quantity/tons	Market share%
United States	1,679,196	26.2%
Canada	1,117,162	17.4%
Latvia	657,509	10.2%
Estonia	386,055	6.03%
Russia	343,115	5.36%
Germany	302,403	4.72%
Portugal	287,018	4.48%
Austria	221,144	4.45%
Romania	197,060	3.07%
Lithuania	106,519	1.66%

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

Franklin plant with McAuliffe ties under a campaign spotlight

http://articles.dailypress.com/2013-08-11/news/dp-nws-mcauliffe-wood-pellets-20130811_1_terry-mcauliffe-franklin-pellets-pellet-plants

August 11, 2013|By Michael Welles Shapiro, mwshapiro@dailypress.com | 757-247-4744

 

For more than two years, talk of a new wood pellet plant has dangled the promise of jobs and new business in the rural town of Franklin.

More recently an associated storage and export facility announced late last year offered hope of a long-term tenant at a mostly vacant state-owned shipping terminal in Portsmouth.

Now that Terry McAuliffe, a business partner involved in the deals, is running for governor, the projects have become fodder in a slash-and-burn political campaign. Most recently the group Citizens United produced a 29-minute film portraying McAuliffe as a serial exaggerator in his business life and asking Franklin residents, "Where are the jobs?"

Though neither site is in service, interviews, public documents released by the Virginia Port Authority and a recent article in the trade publication Biomass Magazine all suggest progress is being made toward a pellet operation, albeit at a slower pace than was originally anticipated by a McAuliffe business partner and a Houston-based energy company involved in the deals.

Peter O'Keefe, the McAuliffe business associate, told the Daily Press in April 2011 that "if all goes well, we will be up and running in about 18 to 24 months" — or by April 2013.

He said Friday it has taken longer to finance the projects because utility companies in the United Kingdom are waiting on two much-delayed regulatory decisions before they enter into new long-term contracts to buy American wood pellets.

"They're more than a year behind where we thought they would be (on the ruling)," O'Keefe said of the U.K. Department of Energy and Climate Change. But with "the way those decisions are expected to come down, the outlook is bright."

Citing confidentiality agreements, O'Keefe said he could not go into any level of detail about negotiations with International Paper over a lease site for what's called Franklin Pellets.

McAuliffe declined to discuss the wood pellet project, saying they would be better addressed by O'Keefe. But a McAuliffe spokesman rebutted several of the points made in the Citizens United film.
Pellet plants pulverize a variety of forms of wood, including waste byproduct from lumber facilities, and produce pellets that can be burned as a supplement to or substitute for coal at power plants.

The Franklin initiative is one of a number of prospective wood pellet plants that have sprouted up across the southeastern part of the country. Existing pellet plants and the prospective new facilities seek to take advantage of a European Union subsidy program that created a hunger among British and European utility companies for U.S. and Canadian product.

The partnership with McAuliffe ties is hoping to build a plant called Franklin Pellets on land leased from International Paper, which runs a large campus that is now home to a fluff-pulp mill and a recycled tissue company. Using a separate corporation, the group is more than 11 months into a lease negotiation with port officials.

There are several indicators that there's been progress on both sets of negotiations, according to three sources familiar with the talks who all declined to speak on the record citing the confidentiality agreements.

"They're trying to make a go of it and get the (Portsmouth Marine Terminal) lease together," one source said.

The 20-year lease includes a six-month interim early termination period that gave CMI and MultiFuels an opportunity to walk away. That period expired Feb. 28. The Daily Press obtained a copy of the lease from the port authority.

"There's no effective date yet as far as occupancy goes, but they did not walk away from it," the source said. "They're trying to finalize the lease and an occupancy agreement but they have to find a buyer (for their pellets)."

That would put Franklin Pellets in the same position as numerous other would-be pellet operations.
Seth Ginther, a Richmond lawyer and head of the U.S. Industrial Pellet Association, said the financing for a wave of new wood pellet developments are on hold pending an environmental policy decision in the U.K. that's expected to stoke more demand for U.S. pellets.

"If you're a developer in today's market for export to Europe you're constantly juggling three different balls — European policy, raising money for a project for when the policy gets in place, and also logistics," Ginther said.

"Once you have that policy certainty, you finance your facility on the back of that off-take agreement," he said, referring to a contract, typically with a utility, to ship a certain amount of pellets from a manufacturing plant.

County takes out USDA loan to buy land for wood pellet plant

http://msbusiness.com/blog/2013/08/06/county-takes-out-usda-loan-to-buy-lans-for-wood-pellet-plant/

by Associated Press
Published: August 6,2013

LUCEDALE — George County supervisors have signed off on $1.3 million in U.S. Department of Agriculture loans to pay for land where a new wood pellet plant will go.

The Mississippi Press reports that the USDA rural development loans will be used to purchase the property that will expand the George County Industrial Park.

Green Circle Bio Energy Inc. announced in June that the $115-million plant will produce up to 500,000 tons of pellets per year.

Wood pellets are shipped overseas to European utilities plants to use as biomass energy that complies with their stricter sustainability guidelines. The pellets are made from a mix of soft and hard woods.

George County secured a $1 million loan with no interest and a $283,000 loan with 1 percent interest.

They are both five-year notes.

“It took almost 10 months to get here,” Community development and communications director Ken Flanagan told supervisors yesterday. “With any luck, this fall we’ll get everyone together for a groundbreaking.”

The money will mostly be used to purchase the land, he said, and lease payments from the company will pay the note.

Any money left over from the loans will be used for road work.

Flanagan said the county will also be responsible for upgrading wastewater lines, and upgrading drinking water and process water to the site, among other infrastructure work.

That work will be funded through additional loans and grants that will be announced later, Flanagan said.

County leaders have said the mill will create 126 new full-time jobs in George County and others at the Port of Pascagoula in Jackson County.

The facility is expected to be operational by spring 2015.

Green Circle is wholly owned by the JCE Group, a privately owned international investment company headquartered in Gothenburg, Sweden.

Pellet plant project to create 175 jobs in Selma

http://www.al.com/business/index.ssf/2013/08/pellet_plant_project_to_create.html

By Dawn Kent Azok | dazok@al.com
on August 05, 2013 at 10:43 AM, updated August 05, 2013 at 11:26 AM

Zilkha Black Pellets will be produced in Selma. (Zilkha Biomass Energy)

SELMA, Alabama -- Zilkha Biomass Energy is renovating an existing facility in Selma in a project that will produce wood pellet fuel and create 175 jobs.

The company is moving in to the former Dixie Pellets plant, which it bought out of bankruptcy in 2010.

It will become the world's first full-scale plant to produce Zilkha Black Pellets, which are an environmentally sustainable and low carbon fuel that can be transported and burned by coal plants using their existing equipment, a press release said. Unlike traditional compressed wood pellets, the hydrophobic Zilkha Black Pellets can't be damaged by water.

The facility itself is expected to have 55 jobs, with another 120 jobs in the trucking and forestry industries in the community. And during construction, about 380 jobs are expected.

U.S. Bank, Stonehenge Capital Company and AMCREF Community Capital said today they are providing $5.3 million in financing for the project through federal and Alabama state New Markets Tax Credits, a program that encourages the investment of private capital in designated low-income communities. Investors receive tax credits.

Selma is the county seat of Dallas County, which has the third-highest unemployment rate in Alabama.

Construction is underway, and the plant is set to begin operations in 2014.

"We're excited to open the world's first full-scale Zilkha Black Pellet plant in Alabama," Jack Holmes, chief executive for Houston-based Zilkha Biomass Energy, said in a statement. "Selma offers the workforce and training that will help make this facility successful. The plant will produce 275,000 tons of our Black Pellets per year, which can generate enough clean, renewable electricity to supply 50,000 homes per year."

Birmingham's Bradley Arant Boult Cummings served as borrower's counsel to Zilkha Biomass on the deal. The team was led by Birmingham partner Beau Byrd, along with Birmingham partner Paul Compton, Nashville partner Mark Miller, and Birmingham associate Jimmy Long.

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.”

Keeping Pace with Pellet Trade

http://www.biomassmagazine.com/articles/9238/keeping-pace-with-pellet-trade

The Port of Brunswick is one of many upgrading and expanding to meet Europe’s surging pellet demands. 

 

By Tim Portz | July 22, 2013

U.S. Highway 82 follows a predominantly western course, away from the port complex at Brunswick, Ga., running first slightly northwest and then doglegging to the southwest. It ambles through Glynn, Brantley and Ware counties before arriving in Waycross, Ga. This 60-mile stretch of highway traces a path through some of the densest stands of southern yellow pine in the country. Together, these three counties boast nearly .5 million forest acres, most of them privately owned and actively managed for delivery to the area’s forest products complex, including area pellet mills. East of the Port of Brunswick lies the Atlantic Ocean, and the world’s fastest-growing pellet market. Linking this incredible forest biomass resource to power generators in the United Kingdom and northern Europe, which seek a less carbon-dense fuel are port terminals like the East River Terminal at the Port of Brunswick.

In August 2011, the Georgia Ports Authority and Logistec, a Montreal-based stevedoring and terminal operations company, announced a shared investment in the East River Terminal to facilitate the rapidly growing export market for wood pellets. Commenting on the project, Curtis Foltz, GPA executive director said, “The significant expansion and installation of new infrastructure at East River Terminal will accommodate Georgia’s export for biomass fuels and create jobs throughout Georgia’s transportation, logistics and forest industries.”

Investing in this critical piece of infrastructure has proven to be wise and timely, as the demand for wood pellets has increased as predicted, contributing to the highest cargo levels the GPA has ever experienced. In April, 2.4 million tons of cargo passed through Georgia’s ports, a new record. Tonnage moving through the East River Terminal increased 14 percent over the same time frame in the previous year, reaching nearly 670,000 tons. The growth in East River’s tonnage was led by biomass fuels, validating the 2011 investments.

A critical component of the investments was a deepening of the shipping channel from 30 to 36 feet.  Expounding on the ramifications of that improvement, David Proctor, Logistec terminal manager, says, “The GPA also dredged from 30 to 36 feet, which will increase our capability of bringing in larger vessels for pellet exports. With a 30-foot-depth, you can only get maybe 15,000 or 16,000 tons of any kind of cargo into the Port of Brunswick. With the expansion and the deepening of the channel down to 36 feet, we are capable at this time of moving close to anywhere from 35,000 to 40,000 tons of wood pellets in a vessel. “There are economies of scale with the larger-size vessels, and this additional draft allows us to attract a new target market when serving the large-size utility companies overseas.”

Already a significant piece of Georgia’s forest products industry, pellet producers in the state manufacture over 1 million tons of pellets each year. Current production levels, however, pale in comparison to the nearly 3 million tons of production capacity currently planned or under construction. Virtually all of this new capacity is being developed to serve the growing European market. Georgia’s port operators are feeling the momentum, too, and Proctor notes, “We continue to prospect for new opportunities, and there are many interested parties that we are pursuing.”

As production capacity in Georgia increases, its ports are keeping pace, ensuring the critical market access necessary to maximize the opportunity that fuels growth in both the state’s forest products and port sectors.

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.

Georgia Biomass outlook is strong

http://www.theblacksheartimes.com/articles/2013/07/20/opinion/doc51e586eabc61e257532059.txt

World’s largest fuel pellet plant sees a bright future for renewable energy production here

By Robert M. Williams, Jr.

Published:Wednesday, July 17, 2013 4:06 AM EDT

The news came in early 2010 that Southeast Georgia would be home to the world’s largest producer of wood pellets for fuel to power Europe’s energy generating plants.

That our job-hungry area would be a focus for the renewable energy movement brought a flurry of welcome publicity. Then-Governor Sonny Perdue came for the groundbreaking of the $175 million Georgia Biomass plant later that year and, by mid-2011, the first of hundreds of truckloads of pine timber began rolling through the gates each week. Employing more than 80 people and indirectly creating hundreds more jobs, the Georgia Biomass plant has been a natural fit. This new industry needed our abundance of pine trees as a raw material, rail lines to ship the fuel pellets out and a nearby port at Savannah to send them on their way to Europe where the United Kingdom is leading the way on promoting the use of renewable energy sources.

The operation has not been without one or two hiccups. A wood dust explosion a year ago shut down production temporarily but, fortunately, injured no one. Today, Plant Manager Brad Mayhew is proud to say Georgia Biomass has not had a single lost-time injury on the job since opening over two years ago. The firm felt another kind of blow a few months ago, however, when RWE, one of Europe’s five leading electric and gas companies, and the owner of Georgia Biomass, announced they would not continue their focus on utilizing wood pellet technology, leading to fears the plant could be sold, or worse, shut down. Doomsayers around the area were quickly saying: “We knew it was too good to be true.”

But wait.

Georgia Biomass officials hosted a sit-down this week, to set the record straight for area political leaders and the press.

With demand far outstripping supply and Georgia Biomass’ entire production capability already sold through mid-2015, don’t expect this plant to go anywhere anytime soon.

“Last year, Georgia exported about a million tons of wood pellets,” said Georgia Biomass CEO James Roecker. “We did about 60% of that. By 2020, the Southeast will be shipping 6-7 million tons of pellets.”

In other words, there’s still lots of money to be made turning our tall pine trees into tiny pellets and Georgia Biomass plans to lead the way.

“This company is not currently up for sale by RWE, but we’ve had about 20 companies make inquiries if they ever do,” added Roecker.

All of this is good news for area businesses. Forest products have been a mainstay of this region’s economy for more than a century and Georgia Biomass has only further emphasized the impact of timber on so many of us.

Think about this. Last year Georgia Biomass purchased 54,000 truckloads of pine timber. Those trees came from within a 75-mile radius and put more than $40 million into the pockets of landowners, timber dealers, etc. The multiplier effect of gas purchases, trucks, tires and more means the impact of this plant represents hundreds of millions of dollars to this region.

The staggering number of trees consumed by this one plant often leads to the inevitable question: “How long can we continue to provide pine trees to meet this demand?”

The answer: As long as needed.

“Georgia is growing 20 million tons of trees more than are being harvested every year,” explains Georgia Biomass procurement forester Barry Parrish. “We’re only tapping 20 percent of the excess growth. There’s five million extra tons being grown just within our 75-mile radius.”

Eighty-five employees at GB are drawing paychecks. Hundreds, probably thousands, more are impacted by this new industry.

The sweet scent of pine chips lingers in the air around the Georgia Biomass plant.

And it smells like money.

• Robert M. Williams, Jr. is Editor & Publisher of The Times. Email: rwilliams@theblack­sheartimes.com.

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.

UK biomass plant exploded from Waycross wood pellets

http://www.l-a-k-e.org/blog/2013/05/uk-biomass-plant-exploded-from-waycross-wood-pellets.html

May 27, 2013

Explosions in Tilbury, England, explosions in Waycross: south Georgia wood pellet dust blowing up here and there and producing CO2 when burned there. Why is “the world’s largest wood pellet plant” a better use of Georgia foresters’ resources than solar farms, which don’t pollute and don’t explode?

Josh Schlossberg wrote for The Biomass Monitor 24 May 2013, Biomass Industry Plays With Fire, Gets Burned,

A massive fire raged inside wood pellet silos for RWE’s Tilbury Power Station in Essex, UK, on February 27, 2012. The biomass incinerator—the largest in the world at 750 megawatts—had just been converted from coal to woody biomass a month earlier. RWE claims no single cause can be attributed to the fire, but suspects that smoldering wood pellets triggered the dust fire.

In a recent editorial (apparently not online), Robert Farris Executive Director of the Georgia Forestry Commission, wrote that Georgia has nine wood pellet plants. He didn’t name them, but Biomass Magazine has a list of U.S. wood pellet plants, including these in Georgia (I added the City column):

Company	Plant	City	State	Feedstock	Capacity
Enova Energy Group – Gordon	Enova Energy	Gordon	GA	Softwood	550,000
Enova Energy Group – Gordon	Enova Energy	Warrenton	GA	Softwood	550,000
First Georgia BioEnergy	First Georgia BioEnergy	Waynesville	GA	Softwood	38,000
Fram Renewable Fuels LLC	Appling County Pellets LLC	Baxley	GA	Hardwood and Softwood	200,000
Fram Renewable Fuels LLC	Fram Renewable Fuels – Hazlehurst	Hazlehurst	GA	Softwood	500,000
Fulghum Graanul Oliver LLC	Fulghum Graanul Oliver LLC	Oliver	GA	Hardwood and Softwood	200,000
General Biofuels	General Biofuels – Georgia	Waynesville	GA	Softwood	440,000
RWE Innogy	Georgia Biomass	Waycross	GA	Hardwood and Softwood	825,000
SEGA Biofuels LLC	SEGA Biofuels LLC	Nahunta	GA	Softwood	150,000
Varn Wood Products	Varn Wood Products	Hoboken	GA	Softwood	80,000

That’s ten; maybe another has opened lately. Biomass Magazine lists RWE Innogy as in Savannah, but according to Georgia Biomass PR of 26 May 2011,

Georgia Biomass held its official ribbon cutting ceremony in mid-May at its new operation just outside Waycross, Ga., hosting dignitaries and officials from around the world at the opening of the world’s largest wood fuel pellet plant. The facility, scheduled to be at full capacity by this fall, can produce up to 750,000 metric tons annually.

 The facility is a venture of major German utility RWE and its bioenergy subsidiary, RWE Innogy. According to RWE Innogy CFO Hans Bunting, the Georgia Biomass project came in two months ahead of schedule and under budget. RWE COO Leonard Birnbaum noted the almost $200 million plant is only a small part of the $8 billion a year RWE invests worldwide, but is very important to the company, which is the world’s largest biomass buyer and biomass power producer. The company operates more than 50,000 giga watts of power capacity, “But the challenge is provide more of this energy sustainably,” he added.

A good portion of the plant’s output may be heading to RWE’s existing coal-fired plant in Tilbury, United Kingdom, which is being converted to biomass and would become the largest biomass-fired power plant in the world.

And less than a year later the Tilbury plant got fired up all right, burning and exploding using south Georgia wood. That February 2012 Tilbury explosion was after the Waycross plant exploded in June 2011. Teresa Stepzinski wrote for Jacksonville.com 21 June 2011, Explosion damages Waycross plant; no injuries reported

An explosion damaged the Georgia Biomass wood pellet processing plant near Waycross early Monday, crippling production at the factory that began operations a little more than a month ago.

No injuries were reported in the blast that occurred about 8 a.m. at the plant in the Waycross-Ware County Industrial Park about five miles west of Waycross off U.S. 82 and U.S. 1.

“It did extensive damage to the processing end. … They’ll probably be down an extended period of time,” Ware County Fire Chief Dennis Keen told the Times-Union.

An explosion here, and explosion there: pretty soon we might be wondering why we want “the world’s largest wood pellet plant” in south Georgia.

Georgia Biomass claims it’s carbon neutral, which we know isn’t true for biomass from trees. It was our local Industrial Authority making that very claim that convinced me as a tree farmer that biomass was a bad idea. They didn’t just try to pass off a stack of powerpoint slides as peer-reviewed research, they also, according to the VDT, made up a fake timeline. Lack of carbon neutrality is one of the reasons the VSU faculty senate voted to oppose that plant.

Fortunately, the Executive Director who tried to bring us that local biomass project is gone, and the Industrial Authority has since moved on to solar projects. But there’s still a wood pellet plant in Waycross, turning our local forests into fuel for a biomass plant in England, producing more CO2 and making climate change worse, affecting us back here that way, too.

When I paid my annual dues to the Georgia Forestry Association (GFA is a private organization not to be confused with the state agency Georgia Forestry Commission), I wondered whether Georgia tree farmers might find solar panels a better investment. I was told GFA is constantly talking to Georgia Power, so we’ll see.

Ever heard of an exploding solar panel? Me neither.

-jsq