This is chapter 3 of my book, A Natural Language, which exposes the environmental narrative as propaganda and puts bottom-up solutions in front of the actual problem.
The practical shortfalls in the IEA’s plans should not lead us to dismiss burning wood pellets out of hand. Wood is a genuinely sustainable, renewable source of energy. Countless people around the world already depend on wood as their primary source of fuel. Forests are chock full of dead wood, and you can prune a tree for stick wood or small round wood without killing it. Gardeners often prune their hedges in the fall. Orchard operators do the same with their trees. Coppicing in short cycles like the EIA suggests doing is a perfectly valid way to prune a tree for yield. So is pollarding, a formerly routine practice that you can still see used on roadsides across Europe to this day. The Daisugi and the Espalier pruning methods illustrate that pruned trees need not be ugly. This pruning and these forestry operations generate enormous amounts of woody yield each year. As such, why not make pellets out of the stuff?
One purported problem is that burning wood pellets is reputably dirtier than coal. This argument derives from the fact that burning wood produces more carbon dioxide and more fine particles per useful energy unit than burning coal. This is because you waste heat during the combustion process when water is evaporating, and again when tars are getting released through pyrolysis. The argument is shaky for two reasons. One is that biomass producers dry biomass pellets until their water content is comparable to or lower than that of coal. The water vapor issue is thus moot. The other is that biomass pellet boilers are engineered to get as complete a combustion as possible. That is to say, the tar that would result in soot build-up in a household’s chimney ends up burnt for extra energy. The soot issue is thus moot too. In addition, burning wood pellets doesn’t produce toxic coal ash or result in acid rain, so it is actually better.
Another purported problem ties into sourcing wood. In principle, biomass producers could harvest mature trees to produce wood pellets. Anecdotal reports suggest that the practice is not unheard of as noted earlier. Climate experts decry this on the basis that it makes no sense from a carbon sequestration viewpoint. Biomass producers concur, if only in public, so that case seems clear-cut. Things are murkier for younger trees, like those that Suzano grows in a short harvest cycle. Such trees grow back in just a few years, so burning them seems fair game. Things are murkier still with forestry waste. Wood pellet producers like Enviva use dead or subpar wood that loggers can’t sell to anyone else; “slash,” which is waste from logging operations; and sawdust from sawmill operations. These trees were going to get harvested anyway. Forestry waste therefore seems like fair game too, with two caveats.
The first caveat is that trees would purportedly be better off left in the ground. This makes sense from a carbon sequestration standpoint, but the devil is in the details of what these trees are used for. Wood fuel is a good chunk of all wood use. In theory, we could reduce this with better insulation and heating options. In practice, households that depend solely on wood for heating cannot all afford such investments. Plus, if minimizing carbon signature is the goal, building smart cities full of green communal facilities where people get packed and stacked like rabbits in hutches would make far more sense than upgrading detached homes. The major non-fuel uses of wood are timber, packaging, and paper. Bar a few mansions, yachts, and giant patios, timber is mostly put to good use. Plus, alternatives would mean fossil fuel to move materials around or make cement, steel, and glass. Reducing packaging and paper would mean transitioning the economy back to something more local and less consumerist. This has been on the environmental wishlist forever, so it seems aspirational. That leaves us with forestry for the foreseeable future, and thus forestry waste.
The other caveat is that this forestry waste might have other applications. The use of slash and dead trees, for instance, is problematic because dead wood is habitat for bugs and fungi. Loggers could mulch part of this waste in place and leave another part of it as is on the ground to keep the forest healthy. This would reduce fertilizer costs as a bonus. At the same time, excess slash, overgrowth, and dead wood can be a fire hazard, so harvesting the rest of that waste seems legit — especially if the alternative is to burn it using controlled fires. Even then, though, the use of pulverized wood and sawdust warrants scrutiny because they have other uses. You can grow fungi in molds full of sawdust, for instance. A promising new industry is emerging, in fact, to create biodegradable alternatives to plastic this way. That industry will no doubt compete with biomass producers for access to forestry waste in the future. This will push biomass producers to use less forestry waste and more farming waste unless subsidies distort the market.
What makes wood pellets particularly interesting is the justification used to subsidize them as green energy. The latter can be bewildering at first. It is rooted in international carbon accounting rules and forestry math. The former propose that you count the carbon emissions tied to harvesting wood at harvest time. This is to avoid double counting issues when wood ends up in a smoke stack down the road. This is legit, because you wouldn’t want to count harvesting timber once and counting the same wood again when you burn it. Forestry math proposes that harvesting wood produces no carbon emissions when no land use changes occur. This is debatable per our earlier discussion, but such is the consensus among experts. It follows that burning the wood waste from such wood produces no carbon emissions either, even though common sense would suggest that it does. Confused readers can verify for themselves that the bean counting checks out: burning this wood waste really does produce no carbon emissions that haven’t already been accounted for within this framework.
The backstory that got us here revolves around the emergence of forestry math, carbon accounting, and associated concepts from the 1970s onward. Environmentalists and scientists were beginning to warn that the end of the world is nigh. NGOs wanted to secure funding for conservation efforts. Loggers wanted to sanitize their activities due to the growing public outcry about illegal logging. Fossil fuel corporations wanted to deflect blame for the pollution that they were causing. Financiers were salivating at the idea of operating the proposed carbon offset market. Things eventually fell into place with the Kyoto Protocol. Lobbyists and technocrats have since been working on how to put taxpayer money to good use.
South Korea, for instance, is so committed to biomass that its power station operators are collecting green energy subsidies for burning the stuff mixed with coal in so-called co-firing plants. In its 2020 reporting on this, the environmental news outlet Mongabay decried that high biomass subsidies were crowding out wind and solar. The situation is so bad that solar power plant owners and residents near biomass plants filed a lawsuit in South Korea’s Constitutional Court later that year. They’re basically challenging biomass subsidies on climate and pollution grounds. This case is an interesting one in that the court is being asked to weigh in on science. The decision could end up as intriguing as the German Supreme Court’s decision to uphold that scientists have not yet rigorously proven the existence of viruses.
The most perplexing biomass operator of all would no doubt be Drax Group. This is the UK-based energy provider that converted a coal power station into the world’s largest and most infamous biomass facility. Drax received a comfy £831.8 million of subsidies for its activities in 2020, or £2.27 million every day. This is financed through a surcharge on UK electricity bills. But what sets Drax apart is not its singular power station or its lavish subsidies. Rather, it is its “world-leading ambition to be a carbon negative company by 2030.” Posting carbon negative emissions while burning wood pellets is a lofty ambition that depends on using carbon capture and storage technologies and very creative carbon accounting.
Drax announced in 2021 that it would work with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI), a corporation that sells turnkey carbon capture solutions. This is after having worked for years with C-Capture, a carbon capture joint-venture that Drax has a stake in. In a response to Biofuelwatch questions about the switch, Drax insisted that, contrary to all appearances, it is not throwing the towel on its investment. Drax added that it hopes to have its first biomass burner with carbon capture in production by 2027, and that it aims to capture 8 million tons of CO2 annually from 2030. Time will tell if Drax is luckier than Petra Nova, the so-called clean coal power station in Texas that used similar technology and got shut down for being uneconomical despite government subsidies. Capturing a smokestack’s CO2 economically is hard.
Storing that CO2 economically is just as thorny. In the same response to Biofuelwatch, Drax brings up two startups that it intends to work with. One uses CO2 to create fish food using microorganisms. This is a good idea, if not one conducive to long-term carbon storage. The other uses CO2 to make plastic. That could also come in handy, if with potential environmental and health caveats. Especially if the technology can lead to making tires and countless other useful if toxic plastic items without depending on oil. These are but two examples of the many technologies that corporations are developing to sequester CO2.
The most hotly anticipated of these is clean oil. Exxon Mobile is forecasting a $2 trillion addressable carbon storage market by 2040 with 35% year on year growth. With red hot numbers like that, oil giants will be rebranding themselves as climate heroes before long. Not all corporations are comfortable with these sketchy bed fellows, however. Or so the prudish language on their websites suggests. Where MHI shamelessly explains that oil comes up when you pump CO2 down, Drax sheepishly brings up storing CO2 under the North Sea. Whether money is exchanged before or after consumption makes no difference. It is indulgence peddling all the same. The technology has practical concerns beyond these details. One issue is that CO2 might leak. Another is that this requires moving the CO2 to storage sites. Building pipelines for this purpose requires stealing land using eminent domain laws. In particular from farmers that could be doing a far better job than clean oil at sequestering that carbon.
The strangest part about these carbon capture and storage technologies, in fact, is how little consideration technologists give to plants. This is odd, because plants could potentially eliminate the carbon capture step if you instead pipe a smokestack’s output directly towards plants — think glorified drip irrigation system. Farmers routinely empty CO2 canisters in greenhouses to get more yield. They stick with a CO2 concentration of 1,000-1,200 ppm only because the extra yield beyond that is not worth the cost. Researchers also observe yield benefits when they boost CO2 levels by a few hundred ppm in open field experiments. All of this goodness is using CO2 alone. Plants will no doubt find something useful to do with CO2 and warm water. Removing toxins from the smokestack might even prove superfluous when growing plants like hemp. You could grow them in between dense hedges full of trees that break the wind and capture fine particles. Well designed operations could sequester carbon, purify air, absorb pollution, grow fiber and building materials, and produce biomass sustainably all at once.
Summary | Next: Green Colonialism.