Louisiana
forests being sacrificed to fuel Europe's biomass boom
Environmentalists
say swaths of Southeastern woodlands are being cut down for 'green'
energy efforts across Atlantic
16
January, 2014
BATON
ROUGE, La. — The smell of freshly cut wood wafting from a dirt
lot along an industrial stretch of road near the state capital might
not conjure up an image of green energy, but some say this is the
future of sustainability.
The
smell comes from two white plastic domes rising high along the
Mississippi River. Stored inside those domes are millions of wood
pellets, which started as trees in the surrounding 50- to 75-mile
area, and were converted to easily shippable and burnable material at
mammoth factories where wood can stretch as far as the eye can see.
The
white domes aren’t the pellets' final destination.
After
being packed into containers the wood is shipped to Europe, where
power companies will burn them in an effort to meet the European
Union’s stringent renewable energy requirements.
This
is known as biomass energy.
The
problem is, not everyone thinks burning wood is green.
Environmentalists
in Louisiana are crying foul over European corporations using
Louisiana’s forests for their profit, and perhaps polluting the
planet in the process.
Last
month, as the white domes were being constructed, Western
Louisiana–based environmental activist Dean Wilson sounded the
alarm, telling his fellow environmentalists the state’s forests
could be under threat. As more and more power plants in Europe
convert to biomass, he said, more and more forests in the United
States could disappear.
Wilson
and his wife, Cara Leverett, live in a small shack with their young
son and two dogs in the middle of the largest swampland in the U.S.
It’s called the Atchafalaya Basin. The basin’s thousands of acres
of cypress, bottomland hardwood trees and coastal marshes are a
refuge for wildlife. They also act as a sponge when hurricanes cause
the Mississippi River and Gulf of Mexico to surge.
Despite
the Atchafalaya Basin’s size, Wilson and Leverett are the only
employees of Atchafalaya Basinkeeper, which is the only nonprofit
dedicated to overseeing the basin’s hundreds of miles — extending
from the southwestern tip of Louisiana at the Gulf of Mexico to north
of the state capital.
The
fact that few others are watching over the Atchafalaya has made
Leverett and Wilson the default warning system for any perceived
threats to the woods.
In
2008, Wilson was able to trace bags of cypress mulch being sold at
Walmart, Home Depot and other retailers — labeled as
sustainably harvested — back to clear-cut Atchafalaya
woodlands. He and his fellow Louisiana activists pressured the
companies to stop selling the mulch.
It
was a big victory for Wilson and his ilk. Wilson said he’s noticed
a drop in logging in the Atchafalaya since 2008 because of that win.
But
now he worries that the demand for biomass in Europe will reverse his
work to protect the woods.
“They
said not a single cypress was being used, but they lied in the past,”
he said. “Why wouldn’t they lie again?”
In
2007, the European Union set an ambitious goal to reduce emissions of
greenhouse gases to 20 percent below their 1990 levels by 2020. That,
in effect, required power plants across the continent to quickly find
new ways to make energy. Some turned to wind and solar. But for
coal-fired power plants it was much cheaper to convert their
facilities to burn wood. The conundrum for those companies is that
much of western Europe doesn’t have sufficiently large forests left
to meet the demand, and the remaining woodland is heavily regulated.
So corporations turned to the Southeastern U.S., where wood is
plentiful, and regulations about what can be done on private land are
lax.
Wood
pellet manufacturing in the U.S. is now booming.
Drax,
Britain's largest coal plant, is in the process of converting most of
its operations to biomass fuel, and other power plants across the
continent are following suit.
In
2008 Europe imported about 2.5 million tons of wood pellets. By 2012
it imported 9 million. And by 2020 it’s projected to import upwards
of 20 million tons, largely from the United States and Canada,
according to John Bingham of Hawkins
Wright,
a British forest products consultancy.
Biomass
advocates say the technology is good for the environment because it’s
carbon-neutral — trees are cut down, and they grow back. They
point out that European companies must show they’re harvesting
woods in line with the EU’s sustainability standards.
But
many environmentalists and scientists who’ve studied the issue
believe that current industry practices virtually guarantee a loss of
carbon in the process, and that diverse ecosystems are often the
collateral damage.
“It’s
just not as simple as 'the trees will grow back,’” said Norman
Christensen, a professor of environmental science and policy at Duke
University. “Yes, you are regaining carbon when trees grow back,
but when you cut landscapes intensely, you release some degree of
carbon to the atmosphere more or less permanently.”
Christensen
and others say that in the years it takes to grow the trees back, a
harvested forest isn’t sequestering nearly as much carbon as it
would were trees not cut down.
Mark
Harmon, a professor of forestry science at Oregon State University,
said it’s helpful to imagine a forest as a bucket and carbon as
water.
“It’s
kind of like a leaky bucket — if you put another hole in the
bucket, it’s harder for the bucket to hold water,” he said.
“Biomass producers are saying they’re going to harvest more,
saying they’re going to take more trees, and saying that won’t
lead to more leaks (of carbon). But if you take more you’ll have
more leaks.”
Add
to that the oil burned to get wood pellets from the Mississippi River
to Europe, and biomass begins to look less and less attractive to
environmentalists.
But
even if burning wood in biomass facilities were carbon-neutral (and
some argue it is actually worse
than coal),
Southern environmentalists say they still wouldn’t support it
because of the damage they’ve seen to forests in the Southeastern
U.S. over the last several years.
“It’s
ludicrous that we’re chopping down our forests and shipping them to
Europe to help meet their energy goals,” said Scot Quaranda, the
campaign director for the Dogwood
Alliance,
a forest watchdog group. “But in the South, on private land, you
can basically get away with anything.”
Quaranda
said his group has documented
several cases of
forests clear-cut for biomass fuel. A
Wall Street Journal report
also found clear-cutting in North Carolina.
Seth
Ginther, a lawyer with the U.S.
Industrial Pellet Association,
insists the pellet industry is not responsible for environmental
damage. But he acknowledged that private landowners are free to do
what they wish, including cut down whole trees on their land.
And
in the South, where nearly 90 percent of land is privately owned,
there is no law on the books requiring landowners to grow those trees
back.
Dozens
of biomass facilities have been built in the South. There are
currently two in Louisiana, with eight more planned, according to
Quaranda.
With
a permit
to build roads
for logging in a protected area of the Atchafalaya pending approval
from the Army Corps of Engineers, Dean Wilson worries he’s just
seen the beginning of a decades-long battle to protect the woods he’s
been looking after since the 1980s.
Now
Wilson is trying to employ the same tactic he used when he found out
retailers were selling cypress mulch taken from the Atchafalaya.
Working
with European environmentalists from groups such as Birdlife and
Friends of the Earth, Wilson is attempting to establish a chain of
accountability — from a Louisiana tree to a European light
bulb.
He
knows regulations are unlikely to become more protective in
Louisiana, so he and others are hoping that, by showing Europeans
where their supposedly renewable energy is coming from, they can
persuade the European
Commission's
energy division to reconsider how it treats biomass as a renewable
energy source. If it does, environmentalists hope that will
effectively kill the market for wood pellets in the South.
But
this time around, establishing a chain of accountability will be
harder for Wilson. When companies were logging for cypress mulch, he
could find bags of the mulch branded with company logos in his local
Walmart.
Now
it’s hard to even find out who owns the massive biomass factories
and storage facilities surrounding Baton Rouge. And the wood isn’t
going to Walmart — it’s going thousands of miles away to
highly guarded power plants in remote parts of Europe.
“With
the cypress mulch, we managed to find the trucks and the bags and
take pictures,” Wilson said. “This time we don’t have that.
It’s going into a black hole.”
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