Report: Biomass Dirtier Than Coal

Friends of the Earth (Eng­land, Wales, and North­ern Ire­land), Green­peace, and the UK’s Roy­al Soci­ety for the Pro­tec­tion of Birds denounce burn­ing trees for elec­tric­i­ty as a greater threat to the cli­mate over the com­ing decades than burn­ing coal, the dirt­i­est fos­sil fuel, in a report released in November. 

The report, Dirt­i­er Than Coal: Why Gov­ern­ment plans to sub­sidise burn­ing trees are bad news for the plan­et, crit­i­cizes pro­pos­als by the UK government’s Depart­ment of Ener­gy and Cli­mate Change (DECC) to con­tin­ue and expand tax­pay­er sub­si­dies for the bio­mass pow­er indus­try. The NGOs accuse the gov­ern­ment of ignor­ing prin­ci­ples set out in the 2012 UK Bioen­er­gy Strat­e­gy which called for a bio­mass ener­gy pol­i­cy that would “deliv­er gen­uine car­bon reduc­tions that help meet UK car­bon emis­sions objec­tives to 2050 and beyond.” Accord­ing to crit­ics, even the Bioen­er­gy Strategy’s pol­i­cy con­clu­sions sup­port an expan­sion of bio­mass ener­gy and con­tra­dict the analy­sis and cau­tions about car­bon impacts. 

Friends of the Earth (FOE), Green­peace, and the Roy­al Soci­ety for the Pro­tec­tion of Birds (RSPB) say that the gov­ern­ment has “cho­sen to exclude a num­ber of key sources of emis­sions” from bio­mass ener­gy in their car­bon cal­cu­la­tions, with the find­ings “based on fun­da­men­tal­ly flawed data relat­ing to green­house gas impli­ca­tions.” Fail­ure to fix the error and rework bio­mass poli­cies will come at “con­sid­er­able cost to the pub­lic, and have a dam­ag­ing impact our climate.”

Dirt­i­er Than Coal alleges that gov­ern­ment sup­port for burn­ing trees for elec­tric­i­ty “threat­ens” com­mit­ments in the Cli­mate Change Act of 2008 to cut back on green­house gas­es “in terms of actu­al emis­sions to the atmos­phere in the crit­i­cal peri­od to 2050, with­in which we must avert dan­ger­ous cli­mate change.” The report authors demand an “imme­di­ate review and revi­sion” of the emis­sions cal­cu­la­tions to include those from “car­bon debt and indi­rect sub­sti­tu­tion,” and to devel­op a “com­pre­hen­sive account­ing sys­tem.” They call for an end to sub­si­dies for burn­ing bio­mass from saw logs and round­wood because of the com­pelling evi­dence for a high car­bon debt from burn­ing wood from whole trees.

Car­bon debt refers to the increase of car­bon in the atmos­phere from cut­ting and burn­ing trees for bio­mass ener­gy. The report is based on a study by Tim­o­thy Searchinger at Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty that used DECC data to con­clude that burn­ing trees for elec­tric­i­ty would emit eighty per­cent more green­house gas­es than burn­ing coal over a twen­ty year time frame and forty nine per­cent more over forty years. Only after one hun­dred years would burn­ing trees for elec­tric­i­ty “per­form bet­ter than coal,” accord­ing to the study.

The envi­ron­men­tal groups point out that DECC “ignores the fact that forests are already grow­ing and already stor­ing car­bon,” and that when forests are cut and burned for ener­gy, that “car­bon stor­age is reduced” and the CO2 that had been stored in the trees escapes into the atmosphere.

Indi­rect sub­sti­tu­tion is what hap­pens when wood is “divert­ed from exist­ing uses, such as con­struc­tion and wood pan­els.” Accord­ing to DECC data, eighty per­cent of trees for bio­mass ener­gy would have to be import­ed, since the UK has a “lim­it­ed domes­tic wood resource that is already in demand from oth­er indus­tries.” The groups claim that ignor­ing this fac­tor “direct­ly con­tra­dicts the UK Bioen­er­gy Strategy.”

Almuth Ern­st­ing of Bio­fu­el­watch says there are many oth­er neg­a­tive impacts from bio­mass ener­gy than just car­bon diox­ide emis­sions. Since many of the trees that the UK would burn would come from monocrop tree plan­ta­tions, such as fast-grow­ing euca­lyp­tus in the south­east­ern US and the glob­al south, “the destruc­tion of bio­di­ver­si­ty, the impacts on the liveli­hoods of local com­mu­ni­ties, on land and human rights, fresh­wa­ter, and soil will be very severe.”

Ern­st­ing warns that “if the bio­mass debate gets reduced to one sole­ly about car­bon debt then there is a real dan­ger that ener­gy com­pa­nies and their con­sul­tants will pro­duce enough dubi­ous reports to con­vince or at least con­fuse the pub­lic and pol­i­cy mak­ers and thus to ensure that sub­si­dies remain in place.”

Not just envi­ron­men­tal­ists are con­demn­ing the UK government’s bio­mass boost­ing. The Wood Pan­el Indus­tries Fed­er­a­tion, an orga­ni­za­tion rep­re­sent­ing “indus­tri­al man­u­fac­tur­ers” of wood chip­board, ori­ent­ed strand board, and medi­um den­si­ty fiber­board in the UK and Ire­land launched a cam­paign—Stop Burn­ing Our Trees—to push back against burn­ing trees for electricity.

The campaign’s goal has been to remove sub­si­dies for tree-fueled bio­mass due to its impact on the wood pan­el busi­ness, stat­ing that “burn­ing trees will even­tu­al­ly cost hun­dreds of UK jobs.” Their peti­tion reads that sub­si­diz­ing tree burn­ing for ener­gy means that “ener­gy com­pa­nies can afford to pay more for trees than any­one else,” which spikes the price of “tim­ber and hurts busi­ness­es that make use­ful things with wood.” 

The Renew­able Ener­gy Asso­ci­a­tion (REA), a trade asso­ci­a­tion rep­re­sent­ing “renew­able ener­gy pro­duc­ers” in the UK, issued a state­ment rebut­ting Dirt­i­er Than Coal. REA claims that an expan­sion of log­ging for bio­mass pow­er incin­er­a­tion would result in “less neglect of forests,” insist­ing that forests and the cli­mate ben­e­fit more from log­ging than preser­va­tion. The REA also advo­cates for an increase in old growth log­ging to fuel bio­mass pow­er incinerators.