Biofuels and Biomass Energy Are Not Clean, Nor Sustainable
Tuesday, May 16, 2023
Biofuels and biomass energy are not clean, nor sustainable
BY GEORGE WUERTHNER
Presently around the West, the Forest Service, timber advocates, and far too many conservation organizations are promoting biofuels and biomass energy as "green energy."
But the only thing "green" about biomass energy is the subsidies that government agencies bestow.
Biofuels and biomass energy are not clean, not carbon neutral, and not sustainable.
For instance, the city of Prineville, in their promotional literature for a 20 megawatt biomass burner: "The City and County will utilize the PREP to reduce the risk of severe wildfires, reinvent jobs in the natural resources/forest products industries, diversify energy supplies, reduce C O2 emissions, and reinvigorate the community and local economy, all while offering a clean, renewable energy source."
Subsidies
Most biomass burners are not economical. They often receive massive subsidies of two kinds: direct funding from government agencies and the environmental damage they promote.
The city of Prineville thus far has received a $1 million grant from the Forest Service to help construct its proposed biomass burner. Mount Bachelor's proposed biomass burner is subsidized with state and federal government grants.
An even worse waste of tax dollars is the Red Rocks Biofuel plant in Lakeview, Oregon which has received over $350 million in public funding. Making these subsidies more disastrous is that the Red Rocks plant has never opened and recently went bankrupt.
In most cases in the West, the wood source or "fuel" for biomass operations results from below-cost Forest Service deforestation projects. These deforestation projects destroy biodiversity, pollute the land and air, and worsen climate change ? all a cost to society to subsidize these biomass burners.
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Pollution
Biomass energy is anything but "clean." Burners pollute the atmosphere with carbon and toxins that are damaging to health. Worse for people, particulates from burner emissions is continuous throughout the year rather than associated with one-time seasonal events like wildfires.
Wood is an inefficient energy source
Proponents argue that biomass is "biogenic" meaning cut forests eventually grow back and reabsorb C O2. That is a sleight of hand because it requires decades for cut forests to recapture the carbon emitted during burning.
Researchers working with the Natural Resources Defense Council concluded that a wood-burning plant would have higher net carbon emissions than a comparable coal plant for the first 4 decades or more of operations. Most biomass burners are unlikely to operate for 4-5 decades.
Carbon releases
Logging of any kind releases a huge amount of carbon.
OSU researcher Bev Law concludes: "When you have a disturbance such as fire, and when wood is removed and harvested and put into wood products, you have to follow the carbon," she said. "And it turns out that ? harvest-related emissions are five to seven times that of the wildfire emissions in Oregon.
Flawed assumptions about 'fuels' and fires
All of these biomass projects are predicated on the premise that logging will preclude or slow wildfire spread and thus reduce carbon emissions.
However, what drives all large fires is climate/weather, not fuels. Thinning and logging do not reduce fire spread under extreme fire weather conditions.
For instance, a study in Ecological Applications concluded "Daily fire weather was the most important predictor of fire severity, followed by stand age and ownership, followed by topographic features. Estimates of pre-fire forest biomass were not an important predictor of fire severity."
Similarly, another review paper that looked at 1,500 fires in ponderosa pine and mixed conifer forests across the West concluded that active forest management (aka logging) resulted in higher severity blazes than areas with no logging or other fuel treatments.
Proforestation
As Bill Moomaw of Yale University suggests: "The most effective thing that we can do is to allow trees that are already planted, that are already growing, to continue growing to reach their full ecological potential, to store carbon, and develop a forest that has its full complement of environmental services," said Moomaw. "Cutting trees to burn them is not a way to get there."
? George Wuerthner has published several books on wildfire, including "Wildfire: A Century of Failed Forest Policy." He is an ecologist and lives in Bend.