More California Biomass Facilities Closing

- by Seth Nide­v­er, March 26, 2015, Han­ford Sentinel

[Notice not a sin­gle men­tion of health and envi­ron­men­tal impacts of bio­mass facil­i­ties. ‑Josh] 

Once upon a time, local orchard farm­ers tak­ing out trees piled them up in large heaps and struck a match, send­ing huge plumes of smoke into the air.

More recent­ly, the waste has gone to bio­mass pow­er plants that crank out elec­tric­i­ty, meet stricter air pol­lu­tion require­ments and pro­vide a renew­able ener­gy component.

But now that the whole bio­mass indus­try in Cal­i­for­nia is threat­ened with extinc­tion, the issue has become a hot top­ic in the ag industry.

Grow­ers are ask­ing: If you can’t burn orchard trees that have been removed, and you’ve got no bio­mass plant to send them to, where does it all go?

“They just pile up,” said Dino Gia­co­mazzi, Kings Coun­ty Farm Bureau pres­i­dent. “Cur­rent­ly, bio­mass plants are about the only way we have to dis­pose of orchard removal.”

About 10,000 tons of Kings Coun­ty orchard waste went to a facil­i­ty in Men­do­ta annu­al­ly before it closed last year, accord­ing to Matt Barnes, a spokesman for Cov­an­ta, a com­pa­ny that owns the Men­do­ta facil­i­ty, one in Delano and three oth­er plants in California.

Barnes said that about 1,500 tons of Kings Coun­ty waste has gone to the Delano facil­i­ty so far in 2015. That’s the only facil­i­ty Cov­an­ta is still oper­at­ing in California.

There’s no guar­an­tee it’ll stay open.

When bio­mass plants hit their hey­day in the 1970s and 1980s, there were more than 50 in the state. But as nat­ur­al gas has got­ten cheap­er and sub­si­dized wind and solar ener­gy have become wide­ly avail­able, util­i­ties have less incen­tive to pur­chase the more expen­sive pow­er that bio­mass facil­i­ties provide.

So the plants have been clos­ing down, one at a time, as con­tracts expire and util­i­ties choose not to renew.

There are only about 20 oper­a­tional plants left, accord­ing to Barnes.

“The issue is, there’s this whole ecosys­tem of the bio­mass plants,” he said. “It’s not just that the [elec­tric­i­ty gen­er­a­tion] goes away. Do we go back to open burning?”

In the ear­ly 2000s, the San Joaquin Val­ley Air Pol­lu­tion Con­trol Dis­trict start­ed crack­ing down on open burn­ing – a strat­e­gy that dove­tailed nice­ly with the bio­mass plants, because now grow­ers could send their waste there.

Those plants, like oth­er emis­sions sources, are reg­u­lat­ed by the dis­trict. Accord­ing to Barnes, they remove 90 per­cent to 95 per­cent of the pol­lu­tion open burn­ing would release into the air.

The air dis­trict deter­mined that the removal of orchard waste to bio­mass plants was an eco­nom­i­cal­ly and tech­no­log­i­cal­ly fea­si­ble alter­na­tive to burning.

“If we were to lose a sub­stan­tial amount of our bio­mass capac­i­ty, we would need to find oth­er alter­na­tive uses,” said Tom Jor­dan, a senior pol­i­cy advi­sor at the air district.

Jor­dan said there are some exper­i­men­tal alter­na­tives, such as con­vert­ing the waste into bio­gas, but they aren’t com­mer­cial­ly avail­able on a wide scale.

Send­ing the waste to land­fills is not con­sid­ered fea­si­ble because of the large vol­ume involved.

“To haul it to the land­fill, we’re going to fill it up in about three min­utes,” said Harley Phillips, man­ag­er of Wil­son Ag, a Shafter-based com­pa­ny that offers tree removal service.

The issue may take on greater urgency with drought. Nut crops – and the year-round water demand they gen­er­ate – have explod­ed in Kings Coun­ty acreage in the last decade. More orchards are expect­ed to be removed as some farm­ers find they can’t afford to pay ris­ing water costs.

“That’s going to be an unfor­tu­nate real­i­ty of the per­sis­tence of this drought,” said Assem­bly­man Rudy Salas, D‑Bakersfield.

Salas said he’s sign­ing on as a joint author of AB 590, a mea­sure intro­duced in the Assem­bly last month by Assem­bly­man Bri­an Dahle, R‑Redding. It would fun­nel cap-and-trade rev­enue into sub­si­dies for the plants, like­ly bring­ing some of the recent­ly closed facil­i­ties back online.

The bill has farm bureau sup­port. The air dis­trict hasn’t offi­cial­ly signed on yet, but Jor­dan said dis­trict offi­cials agree in prin­ci­ple with the concept.

In its cur­rent form, the bill doesn’t include a dol­lar amount that would be set aside to sup­port bio­mass facilities.

Salas said a mon­e­tary fig­ure will be going into the bill’s lan­guage soon. It’s cur­rent­ly being con­sid­ered by the nat­ur­al resources com­mit­tee and the util­i­ties and com­merce com­mit­tee in the Assembly.

“The alter­na­tive is gath­er­ing up mil­lions of tons of orchards and burn­ing them,” Salas said.