5 takeaways:

➀ Wood pellets produce more greenhouse gases than fossil fuels, as carbon is emitted when wood is harvested, pelletized, shipped and burned. The wood pellet industry has emerged in the American South over the past two decades, as companies use everything from brush in the forests to whole trees and process them into little pellets. The pellets are shipped to plants in the U.K. and elsewhere, where they are burned to generate electricity. While biomass is billed as renewable, burning wood pellets releases more carbon dioxide than burning natural gas, experts said; in addition to the actual burning, carbon dioxide is released during harvesting, drying, debarking, pelletizing and transportation. “You’re emitting more carbon from the power plant than you would be if you were burning fossil fuels,” said Timothy D. Searchinger, a senior research scholar at the Center for Policy Research on Energy and the Environment at Princeton University. There are additional carbon costs as well, such as the fuel spent shipping pellets across the ocean.

➁ Yes, but … trees grow back and thus restore carbon. Right? The fact that trees store carbon means that as more of them grow, the carbon lost during the harvest-to-burn cycle eventually comes back. That’s the premise of the wood-pellet industry, which promises to promote sustainable forests even as it cuts many of them down. Enviva, a major player in the industry, said in its 2020 sustainability report that “we create an essential market for low-value wood that encourages good forest stewardship and creates incentives for forest landowners to replant and keep their land as forest.”

➂ The public often confuses “sustainable” with “carbon neutral.” Large groups of scientists have begun urging global leaders and climate negotiators to stop treating the burning of forest biomass as carbon neutral. One letter of 500 scientists noted that “there has been a misguided move to cut down whole trees or to divert large portions of stem wood for bioenergy, releasing carbon that would otherwise stay locked up in forests. … Regrowing trees and displacement of fossil fuels may eventually pay off this carbon debt, but regrowth takes time the world does not have to solve climate change.” Searchinger said people falsely believe that anything renewable is free, including a forest: “You can cut it down and burn it. The forest regrows. You can burn your tree and have it too.” The problem is we are accelerating climate change today on the promise of pulling down carbon emissions later, well after the environmental damages has been done, he said.

➃ Because of the differing ways nations account for their carbon emissions, forests cleared in one country and burned in another often aren’t counted in either. Much of the wood pellet production in the U.S. is shipped overseas to the U.K. and the EU — and soon to Japan and South Korea. Companies in those locations are given financial incentives to burn wood pellets instead of coal, and the burning of those pellets is counted as carbon neutral in the energy sector of their nations’ carbon accounting ledgers. In addition, because of the erratic way that carbon emissions from a nation’s land-use sector are counted, the emissions might not be reported there, either. “There are so many loopholes in the carbon accounting in the land sector — and particularly in relation to forests — that much of it never gets counted,” said Peg Putt of the Environmental Paper Network. “It’s led to a gross understatement of emissions and to misplacing a responsibility for those emissions.”

➄ Even while global leaders at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, pledge to halt deforestation, the use of wood pellets is expanding. The past decade has seen a doubling of biomass energy supply and a quadrupling of pellet production, Putt said. More growth is coming: a projected 270% increase in biomass demand over the next decade. The U.S. and Canada are major suppliers of wood pellets, and Russia, Vietnam, Australia and other nations are expected to join in. Putt said that poses new challenges, as harvests will increasingly be not from biomass “waste” but from longstanding forests that are diverse and carbon rich.

Speakers:

Peg Putt, Coordinator, Working Group on Forests, Climate and Biomass Energy, Environmental Paper Network

Timothy D. Searchinger, Senior Research Scholar, Center for Policy Research on Energy and the Environment, Princeton University

This program was funded by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. NPF is solely responsible for the content.