Wood Pellets & Climate Change: Grave Concerns.

I have received this mail from a very reliable source in the US and as we are concerned about preserving God’s Creation – it is right to make you aware of the grave realities of using this type of fuel. Please share this post.

Hello Christina in London, Judith at the UK’s Green Christians organization, Katerina at the Conference of European Churches, and Lindsey at the U.N. office in Bonn, Germany.

I need your help in addressing a European dimension of climate change that is impacting the forests of the United States and Canada. 

We need your assistance in exposing a great fraud.

The Drax Energy Company in North Yorkshire, UK, is shifting from coal as a fuel for electrical generation to wood pellets obtained from the hardwood forests of the U.S. and Canada. They claim that wood pellets are a carbon neutral source of energy. This is a big fat lie. It is based upon the supposition among EU regulators that biomass (i.e., wood pellets) are a carbon neutral renewable alternative. This claim is made on the supposition that the growth of new trees will absorb as much carbon as wood pellets release when they are burned to generate electricity. But the trees which are being cut are hundreds of years old and this is clearly not renewable.

Please see the news article appended below.

Many climate and forestry scientists have emphasized that converting coal plants to biomass will increase carbon emissions for decades, if not centuries.

Prof Michael Norton, a director at the European Academies Science Advisory Council, said large-scale forest removal to meet the demand for biomass would be “horrifying from a climate perspective” and already risks overshooting the Paris agreement targets.

A representative of Drax Energy makes the following misleading and false statement:

‘these pellets are sustainable biomass sourced from managed forests that are replanted and stay as forests, absorbing carbon as the trees grow. Drax will not use biomass that drives harvesting decisions which would adversely affect the long-term potential of forests to store carbon. These commitments are central to our new biomass sustainability policy, launched in October.

This is corporate nonsense. In fact these wood pellets are taken from old growth forests that will not and could not be replaced for hundreds of years.

http://www.biofuelwatch.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/Clearcut-with-close-up-of-stump9-resize600.jpg

This photo shows a logged forest that once stood in the Urahaw Swamp in northeastern North Carolina. This forest was logged to make wood pellets. The rapidly growing wood pellet industry is logging bottomland hardwood forests across Southeastern U.S. forests to produce fuel pellets that are shipped overseas, primarily to Europe.

While the world tries to shift away from fossil fuels, the energy industry is calling wood pellets a renewable source of energy. This is false. Forests should be a source of carbon sequestration, but logging forests does serious damage to the world’s ability to reduce carbon dioxide levels. Burning trees as fuel in power plants is heating the atmosphere more quickly than coal.

Please help us expose the fraud that wood pellets are carbon neutral. Nothing could be further from the truth. Every little bit helps in this global effort to reduce carbon emissions, and telling the truth about our carbon predicament is one more way to address this problem. 

Thank you for helping in this effort to address global climate change.

Fred Krueger

Converting coal plants to biomass could fuel climate crisis, scientists warn

Experts horrified at large-scale forest removal to meet wood pellet demand

Jillian Ambrose

Mon 16 Dec 2019 01.01 ESTLast modified on Mon 16 Dec 2019 11.51 EST

Biomass fuel at Drax power station in North Yorkshire

 Biomass fuel at Drax power station in North Yorkshire. Photograph: Anna Gowthorpe/PA

Plans to shift Europe’s coal plants to burning wood pellets instead could accelerate rather than combat the climate crisis and lay waste to woodland equal to half the size of Germany’s Black Forest a year, according to campaigners.

The climate thinktank Sandbag said the heavily subsidised plans to cut carbon emissions would result in a “staggering” amount of tree cutting, potentially destroying forests faster than they can regrow.

Sandbag found that Europe’s planned biomass conversion projects would require 36 million tonnes of wood pellets every year, equal to the entire current global wood pellet production. This would require forests covering 2,700 sq km to be cut down annually, the equivalent of half the Black Forest in Germany.

EU carbon target threatened by biomass ‘insanity’

The majority of wood pellets are imported from the US and Canada, “meaning that there’s a huge added environmental cost in transporting the wood from the other side of the Atlantic”, said the report’s author, Charles Moore.

The planned biomass conversions – with Finland, Germany and the Netherlands leading the way – would emit 67m tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere, which would be unlikely to be reabsorbed by growing trees over the timescales relevant to meeting the targets set by Paris climate agreement, warned Sandbag.

In return, the forest-hungry power plants would produce less than 2% of the EU’s electricity needs – the same generation capacity built in Europe every year by wind and solar farm developers.

“It’s impossible to believe coal companies when they argue that the switch to burning forests could be good for the climate,” Moore said.EU regulators consider biomass as a carbon neutral renewable alternative, saying that the growth of new trees can absorb as much carbon as wood pellets release when they are burned to generate electricity.

The Drax energy complex in North Yorkshire has used this logic to underpin its plan to become the world’s first “carbon negative” company within 10 years by burning biomass in conjunction with technology that can capture carbon from its power plant flues. 

Drax robustly defends the sustainability record of its biomass supply chain. Its wood pellets, shipped from the US, are made mostly from sawmill residue and forest overgrowth, which is carefully cleared to improve the quality of forests. Drax has pledged never to source biomass from farming practices that lead to deforestation.

Burning wood for power is ‘misguided’ say climate experts

But Alex Mason, from WWF’s EU office, said burning forests was “literally the opposite of what we should be doing” to help tackle the climate crisis.

“As 800 scientists pointed out last year, converting coal plants to biomass will increase emissions for decades, if not centuries. This new report is yet more evidence that the EU must use the new EU Green Deal to fix EU bioenergy rules before this ticking time-bomb of a policy does any more damage,” he said.

Prof Michael Norton, a director at the European Academies Science Advisory Council, said large-scale forest removal to meet the demand for biomass would be “horrifying from a climate perspective” and already risks overshooting the Paris agreement targets.

He said European countries were moving ahead with plans for giant biomass plants despite reports showing “the counter-productive nature of biomass” and the urgent need to stop deforestation.

A Drax spokesperson said: “Drax only uses sustainable biomass sourced from managed forests that are replanted and stay as forests, absorbing carbon as the trees grow. Drax will not use biomass that drives harvesting decisions which would adversely affect the long-term potential of forests to store carbon. These commitments are central to our new biomass sustainability policy, launched in October. We also have a new advisory board – an independent group of scientists, academics and forestry experts, which will ensure our biomass sourcing meets the highest standards using the latest science and best practice.”

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It has been clear to many that the use of such methods is unsustainable and should therefore, not be used. We add our voice to those trying to prevent energy companies from continuing to use practises that will in effect, push us all off the cliff. Please share this post with your friends. Dr Christina