{"id":36862,"date":"2016-08-23T07:32:44","date_gmt":"2016-08-23T05:32:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/?p=36862"},"modified":"2016-09-09T09:34:34","modified_gmt":"2016-09-09T07:34:34","slug":"europe-aims-to-close-loophole-on-wood-energy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/europe-aims-to-close-loophole-on-wood-energy\/","title":{"rendered":"Europe Aims to Close Loophole on Wood Energy"},"content":{"rendered":"

European officials are moving to close a loophole that promotes the burning of wood for electricity by an industry that\u2019s felling American trees, and a new report<\/a> they commissioned has laid bare the urgent need for reform.<\/strong><\/p>\n

European Union climate rules treat woody biomass energy as if it\u2019s as clean as solar or wind energy, despite it releasing more heat-trapping carbon dioxide for every megawatt of electricity produced than coal. Producing wood pellets for fuel can also foster climate-changing deforestation.<\/p>\n

\"8_8_16_upton_enviva_trees_720_405_s_c1_c_c\"
A stack of tree trunks at a mill in Virginia that will be turned into wood pellets and shipped to Europe. Credit: John Upton\/Climate Central<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The European Commission, which advises European Union lawmakers, last week identified myriad environmental hazards from the transatlantic wood energy trade in a 361-page report.<\/p>\n

The loophole in Europe\u2019s climate policies is a veritable accounting error that has led to national energy subsidies that are financing a burgeoning industry. The subsidies are paying for wood pellet fuel to be produced at newly built mills in the American South, where trees are plentiful and forest protections are minimal.<\/p>\n

Dozens of Southern mills produced an estimated 5 million tons of wood pellets that were exported to Europe last year, with production growing by a third on average each year since 2012. Producing each ton of dried wood pellets requires roughly twice that amount of freshly cut wood.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe U.S. is the main exporter of wood pellets to the EU,\u201d said Daniel Calleja Crespo, who directs the European Commission\u2019s environmental department, which commissioned consultants to produce the report. \u201cThe growth of the industrial pellet industry has raised concerns about possible negative environmental impacts \u2014 direct and indirect.\u201d<\/p>\n

The report was commissioned to help guide a European Union effort to update climate and energy policies after 2020, when a new global treaty on climate is expected to take effect.<\/p>\n

Under the Paris Agreement, which is a climate pact that was finalized during U.N. negotiations in France in December, the European Union pledged to reduce its climate pollution by 40 percent in 2030, compared with 1990 levels.<\/p>\n

While the findings were characterized as \u201cexploratory\u201d in the new report, due in part \u201cto the short time period over which the wood pellet industry has emerged in the U.S,\u201d the researchers identified a number of \u201cpolicy risks\u201d from the transatlantic wood energy trade. Those included \u201cbiodiversity loss, deforestation and forest degradation\u201d in the U.S., and \u201cnot meeting\u201d reductions in greenhouse gas pollution at power plants in Europe.<\/p>\n

Environmental groups who have been rallying to protect America\u2019s forests and the climate from industrial wood energy use in Europe lauded the report as an important step forward.<\/p>\n

Adam Macon, a campaigner with the North Carolina-based nonprofit Dogwood Alliance, which works to protect Southern forests, called the report the \u201cclearest acknowledgement\u201d yet from European officials about the environmental impacts of their growing reliance on wood energy.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe report broadly confirms the growing understanding that industrial scale bioenergy and subsequent wood pellet production is bad for the forests, climate, and communities,\u201d Macon said. \u201cAny increase in wood pellet production is going to have much more negative consequences than any sort of potential benefits.\u201d<\/p>\n

The U.S. Industrial Pellet Association, which represents America\u2019s wood pellet producers, by contrast, denounced the report\u2019s proposals, such as limiting wood energy use and capping wood pellet imports.<\/p>\n

In a statement, the wood pellet producers characterized the \u201cunderlying conclusion\u201d of the report as being \u201cthat the wood pellet industry has not adversely impacted\u201d America\u2019s forests.<\/p>\n

The group described the report\u2019s policy recommendations as \u201coverzealous\u201d and said they \u201cappear to be a classic example of a solution in search of a problem.\u201d<\/p>\n

Improving Europe\u2019s rules affecting bioenergy, including biofuels for vehicles and biomass fuel for power plants, is a major focus of the planned overhaul of Europe\u2019s climate policies. Such improvements threaten to sink America\u2019s new industrial pellet industry, which exists only because of the perceived environmental benefits of its products.<\/p>\n

From a climate perspective, the report says electricity produced by burning wood is only an improvement over coal and natural gas in limited circumstances \u2014 when cutting down trees for fuel results in forests growing more quickly. That\u2019s because power plant emissions for wood energy are \u201chigher than those of fossil fuel alternatives.\u201d<\/p>\n

Aside from industry reports and a letter from U.S. Agriculture Department secretary Tom Vilsack promoting American wood pellet exports, the main scientific evidence the wood pellet producers pointed to in an email in support of their claims of greenhouse gas savings came from research published in the journal Environmental Research Letters in November.<\/p>\n

That research, however, did not measure smokestack pollution when wood pellets are burned. (Climate Central last year found that carbon dioxide pollution by a major British power plant increased 15 to 20 percent as it converted from coal to wood.) Instead, the researchers measured the climate pollution released \u201cin the process of producing the wood and pellets,\u201d said the paper\u2019s lead author, University of Illinois professor Madhu Khanna.<\/p>\n

The new European report warned that such life-cycle analysis approaches \u201chave been widely used\u201d in the energy sector, but that \u201cthere are significant limitations that hinder their uniform application.\u201d<\/p>\n

The report didn\u2019t just focus on climate impacts. It also warned of impacts on biodiversity, forest regrowth and soil nutrients as natural forests are cut down to produce wood pellets, and as natural forests are replaced with pine plantations to help meet growing demand.<\/p>\n

The U.S. south is home to some of the world\u2019s most heavily logged forests, and the new report highlights that further logging could threaten \u201cnumerous globally rare, threatened, and endangered plant and animal species\u201d \u2014 many of which are \u201cendemic to the region, existing nowhere else.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

European officials are moving to close a loophole that promotes the burning of wood for electricity by an industry that\u2019s felling American trees, and a new report they commissioned has laid bare the urgent need for reform. European Union climate rules treat woody biomass energy as if it\u2019s as clean as solar or wind energy, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":59,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","nova_meta_subtitle":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5572],"tags":[5842,6406,12366],"supplier":[12611,10418,7980,2317,5585,150,8400,12519],"class_list":["post-36862","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bio-based","tag-biomass","tag-environment","tag-fuels","supplier-climate-central","supplier-dogwood-alliance","supplier-drax","supplier-european-commission","supplier-european-union","supplier-university-of-illinois","supplier-usda","supplier-u-s-industrial-pellet-association"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36862","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/59"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36862"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36862\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36862"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36862"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36862"},{"taxonomy":"supplier","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/supplier?post=36862"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}