Preface. More than half of Europe’s “green” energy comes from burning wood, a lot of it imported from America.  Now Denmark would like to import methanol made from pinyon pines and junipers from hundreds of thousands of acres in the Southwest. And American biomass burning electric plants would like to burn them as well. The first article below is about the consequences of doing that.

The second article, from Science, doesn’t address the fact that after you cut down a forest and convert the wood into pellets destined to be burned in European furnaces for “clean energy”, the next forest won’t grow back with nearly as much lumber. So CO2 isn’t being replaced, not even after 100 years. Forests don’t regrow to their former magnificence because logging causes soil erosion, depletes the water retained in soil needed for regrowth, and compacts the soil (Elliot 1999).  Therefore the new growth won’t be able to absorb as much CO2 as their burned parents emitted because they contain less biomass, and since it takes half a century for a forest to regrow, whatever CO2 replacement occurs will take an awfully long time. Too long given the State of the World.

Also left out of the equation is the lost soil carbon. Clear-cutting disturbs the soil, which gets oxidized, which releases carbon that would remained stored, and a lot of it: According to the US Forest Service, soil can sequester up to twice as much carbon as the above ground forest ecosystem (Ellis 2016).

The article also doesn’t mention the energy returned on invested.  Think of all the fossils used to drive logging trucks and heavy equipment to the forests, cut them down, lift entire trees with giant grappling buckets, chopped on the site for different uses (pellets, lumber), loaded and driven to the pellet factory where the wood is heated in massive drying units to get the water out, then send the wood through “a labyrinth of massive tubes and conveyors that ferry treetops, sawdust, and whole trees up to 26 inches in diameter through grinders, dryers, and presses. The resulting pellets are loaded into the contains of 27 ton transfer trucks, driven to a port, shipped to Europe, taken by truck to the European power plant, and finally up a conveyer belt for their final doom in the furnace.

Like coal and natural gas, two-thirds of the wood energy will be lost to heat, and another 10% over the electric lines.  That can’t possibly be net energy positive. Or carbon neutral, since all of these transportation and industrial processes emitted CO2 long before the pellets were even burned.

That’s one reason some scientists estimate that burning wood could release 1.5 (Hanson 2017) to three times as much CO2 as coal. Biomass plants also produce more than twice as much nitrogen oxide, soot, carbon monoxide, and volatile organic matter as coal plants. Worse yet, many wood-burning power plants are partly fueled with contaminated waste wood which can emit toxic compounds like dioxins; heavy metals including lead, arsenic, and mercury (Upton 2014).

Much of the wood sent to Europe comes from the south-eastern US, from private land with zero regulations. Large-scale clear cutting is routine and old growth and endangered forests fall to the chainsaws as well. Worse yet, much of this destruction is done with an extensive use of chemical herbicides (BLI 2014).

After fossils are gone, people will turn back to wood to heat their homes and cook, make bricks, ceramics, metals and all the other things wood used to do before coal and oil took over starting in the 19^th century

So I’m sad and alarmed that Europe is going after American forests.  We’re going to need them someday.  They are not renewable.  They are not zero carbon.  

Related post: Wood, the fuel of preindustrial societies, is half of EU renewable energy

Alice Friedemann  www.energyskeptic.com  Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”.  Women in ecology  Podcasts: WGBH, Financial Sense, Jore, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity,  Index of best energyskeptic posts

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Sahagun L (2024) Love them or loathe them, pinyon-juniper woodlands are a growing biofuel battleground. Los Angeles Times.

https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2024-02-11/should-pinyon-juniper-forests-be-turned-into-biofuel

In parts of California and much of the Great Basin, land owners have declared war on pinyon pines and juniper trees, clearing them from range lands with chains, bulldozers, saws and herbicides. At the same time, the trees are drawing increasing interest as a source of renewable energy — such as in California’s Lassen County, where 150,000 tons of the trees are fed into the Honey Lake Power Plant each year to generate energy for customers including San Diego Gas & Electric.

Most recently, Higbee and other Nevada officials have proposed converting them into green methanol — a biofuel that could be used for everything from generating electricity to powering cargo ships calling on the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.

In January, Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo signed a declaration of understanding with Denmark to develop an industrial park in Lincoln County where methanol would be extracted from wood and used as a fuel additive to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from diesel engines.

Environmental groups, however, have blasted the plan. Among other criticisms, they say the deal with Denmark sets the stage for a fight over the future of an ecologically rich landscape, much of which has remained untouched by the glitz and bustle of Las Vegas and Reno.

Gary Hughes of Biofuelwatch, an advocacy group focused on the impact of bioenergy development, dismissed the proposal as “a technological dead end road and heartbreaking waste of healthy trees.”

Denmark — which is home to Maersk, the world’s largest container shipping company — has pledged to become 100% fossil fuel free by 2050, and bioenergy is a key part of that ambitious effort.

“Denmark is at the forefront of renewable energy developments and closer collaboration between Nevada and Denmark can only strengthen our joint quests to create economic growth and well-paid jobs — while also doing good for the environment and our planet,” read a statement from Danish Ambassador to the U.S. Jesper Møller Sørensen.

Nevada officials want to locate the facility in the middle of about 1.3 million acres of pinyon-juniper woodlands in public lands some 150 miles northeast of Las Vegas. The proposed site is also crossed by a Union Pacific mainline that terminates at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.

But there are significant environmental issues involved in scalping eastern Nevada’s mountainous public lands of century-old trees standing 15 to 20 feet tall.

“I’d be surprised if this proposal is successful,” Hughes said. “So far, efforts to produce methanol from wood at scale for the aviation industry, for example, have all failed.”

Patrick Donnelly, Great Basin director for the Center for Biological Diversity, called it a new chapter in “our nation’s 200-year-long war on pinyon-juniper ecosystems.”

Pinyon-juniper woodlands absorb atmospheric carbon through the process of photosynthesis, and have been widespread for thousands of years in much of Nevada and Utah, as well as portions of California, Idaho, Oregon, Wyoming and Baja California. Critics of the biofuel project say the woodlands’ role in carbon storage is critical to battling climate change.

Environmentalists also worry that the loss and degradation of pinyon-juniper woodlands will pose a significant threat to a number of animal species, including the bright blue pinyon jay, which is under consideration for listing as a federally endangered species

The Western Watershed Project and Center for Biological Diversity have filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court challenging the BLM’s approval of a plan to remove pinyon-juniper forests across more than 380,000 acres of sagebrush shrublands on federal land in eastern Nevada.

The lawsuit claims the plan would eradicate habitat for imperiled sage grouse and pinyon jays with techniques including “chaining” — the dragging of an anchor chain from a U.S. Navy vessel between two bulldozers in order to uproot and crush pinyon-juniper forests and sagebrush.

Cornwall W (2017) The burning question. Science.

It took half a century for an acorn to grow into the 20-meter-tall oak tree standing here in a North Carolina hardwood forest near the banks of the Northeast Cape Fear River. But it takes just seconds to turn the oak into fuel for the furnace of a European power plant.

With a screech, a spinning blade bites through the trunk. Ultimately, the thickest bits of this tree and hundreds of others from this forest will be sliced into lumber. But the limbs from large trees like this, along with entire small or crooked trees, go to a specialized mill to be squeezed into tiny wood pellets. Shipped across the Atlantic Ocean, they will likely end up fueling a giant power plant in the United Kingdom that supplies nearly 10% of the country’s electricity.

The trans-Atlantic trade in wood pellets is booming due to a push by policymakers, industry groups, and some scientists to make burning more wood for electricity a strategy for curbing carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions. Unlike coal or natural gas, they argue, wood is a low-carbon fuel. The carbon released when trees are cut down and burned is taken up again when new trees grow in their place, limiting its impact on climate.

European wood burning power plants claim that this emits zero carbon.  Which is totally untrue – some actually emit more CO2 than coal or natural gas, partly because wood has a higher water content and extra energy goes to boiling the water off.  Regulators designated wood as carbon-neutral anyway which led to many countries building new wood-fired plants or converting coal plants to burning wood.  The UK even provided subsidies that make wood pellets competitive with fossil fuels.

To feed these European plants, wood is imported from all over the world. The Southeast sends more than 6.5 million metric tons of wood pellets today.

Critics counter that favoring wood could actually boost carbon emissions, not curb them. Some scientists also worry that policies promoting wood fuels could unleash a global logging boom that trashes forest biodiversity in the name of climate protection.  It basically tells the Congo and Indonesia and every other forested country in the world: ‘If you cut down your forests and use them for energy, not only is that not bad, it’s good.

Scientists disagree about whether burning wood is carbon-neutral because so many assumptions are made that a model could spit out results that were only true for a particular kind of tree, the assumption of how long the CO2 of burned trees takes to be absorbed, and other factors.  Also time is a factor – widespread wood burning will cause emissions spikes for half a century, more than a coal power plant would have.  So it’s possible for scientists using a 100-year time frame to say that forests will have regrown in a century and recapture the carbon of their burned ancestors.

And after a forest is cut down, it doesn’t necessarily return to being a forest, but instead might become housing lots or farms and never grow more trees to suck up the excess carbon.

And there’s no guarantee forests will keep returning after being mowed down.  Asko Noormets, a North Carolina state ecologist, has been running an experiment for 11 years that shows that every year each square meter of forest loses about 125 grams of carbon to the atmosphere. Over time, logging is likely to wear this fertile, peat-based soil down to the sandy layer below, releasing most of its carbon and destroying long-term productivity.  And this is true of other managed forests around the world he adds.

Right now carbon accounting is only for the burning of the wood itself, but clearly needs to also add in the soil carbon being lost as well.

Plus add in land use changes.  Just as rainforests are being mown down to plant soybeans, hardwood forests may be logged to establish fast growing pine plantations.  As much as 10% of North Carolina hardwood ecosystems could be lost by 2050.

Power Plants Try Burning Wood With Coal to Cut Carbon Emissions.  Matt Wald. New York Times. November 3, 2013.

There are many difficulties to burning wood in coal plants:

1. Pound for pound, wood only produces 66% as much energy as coal, and takes up about 5 times as much space
2. Coal power plants aren’t built to handle fuel that can rot and grow fungus
3. Coal plants are finely engineered to burn one particular kind of coal, i.e. anthracite, bituminous, subbituminous, or lignite
4. It’s hard to find enough wood
5. Wood doesn’t come in predictable sizes. If the chunks are too large the feeder system can’t handle it
6. Coal is pulverized before burning, but often this equipment can’t pulverize wood.  When it is possible, the mix can be no more than five percent wood
7. Up to fifteen percent of the fuel can be wood if it’s blown into holes cut in the boiler in confetti sized pieces, but that’s expensive (in both money and energy to convert the boiler and shred the wood that finely).
8. Europe has tried heating wood in a chamber outside of a coal plant and pumping the resulting carbon monoxide and hydrogen fuel into the coal boiler, but that is even more expensive than the holey-boiler-confetti-wood kluge.

References

BLI. 2014. Wood pellet industry cheats on sustainability evidence shows. Bird Life International.

Elliot, W.J. et al. 1999. The effects of forest management on erosion and soil productivity. Chapter 12 in Lal, R., ed., Soil Quality and Soil Erosion. CRC Press. 195-208.

Ellis, E. G. 2016. The senate says burning trees is carbon neutral. Oh really now? Wired.com

Hanson, C., et al. 2017. Why burning trees for energy harms the climate. World resources institute.

Upton, J. 2014. What’s worse than burning coal? Burning wood. Grist.org