California Lawsuit Seeks Pollution Cuts From Massive Tree-burning Power Plant

- by Kevin Bundy, August 22, 2014, Cen­ter for Bio­log­i­cal Diversity

The Cen­ter for Bio­log­i­cal Diver­si­ty filed a law­suit today chal­leng­ing a Clean Air Act per­mit issued by the Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency for a mas­sive, 31-megawatt bio­mass pow­er plant pro­posed by Sier­ra Pacif­ic Indus­tries in Ander­son, Calif. The chal­lenge, filed direct­ly in the 9th Cir­cuit U.S. Court of Appeals, charges the EPA with fail­ing to con­trol cli­mate-warm­ing car­bon diox­ide pol­lu­tion from the plant.

“Tree-burn­ing pow­er plants foul the air, dam­age the cli­mate, and threat­en our forests,” said Kevin Bundy, a senior attor­ney with the Center’s Cli­mate Law Insti­tute. “For too long the EPA has act­ed as if car­bon pol­lu­tion from bio­mass doesn’t exist. But you can’t fool the atmos­phere. Car­bon from burn­ing trees still warms the climate.”

The Clean Air Act requires the “best avail­able con­trol tech­nol­o­gy” for car­bon pol­lu­tion from large facil­i­ties like the Ander­son plant. The EPA’s per­mit, how­ev­er, treat­ed bio­mass com­bus­tion itself as a “con­trol tech­nol­o­gy” — even though the facil­i­ty is pri­mar­i­ly designed to burn biomass.

“The EPA’s deci­sion makes no sense,” Bundy said. “You can’t con­trol the pol­lu­tion from burn­ing trees by burn­ing trees, any more than you can con­trol the pol­lu­tion from burn­ing coal by burn­ing coal.”

The EPA’s per­mit also failed to con­sid­er whether the facil­i­ty should be lim­it­ed to less car­bon-inten­sive fuels — such as amply avail­able mill waste — rather than being allowed to burn whole trees.

Burn­ing wood for pow­er releas­es about three times as much car­bon diox­ide per megawatt-hour as nat­ur­al gas and is even more car­bon-inten­sive than coal. Depend­ing on the mate­r­i­al, bio­mass pow­er gen­er­a­tion can increase atmos­pher­ic car­bon diox­ide con­cen­tra­tions for decades or cen­turies com­pared to what oth­er­wise would have hap­pened to the material.

Burn­ing whole trees that oth­er­wise would have been left to grow in the for­est, for exam­ple, can increase cli­mate pol­lu­tion for many years, even if the pow­er gen­er­at­ed replaces reliance on fos­sil fuels.

“Bio­mass is tout­ed as a clean, green and renew­able source of ener­gy, but the real­i­ty on the ground and in the air is dif­fer­ent,” Bundy said. “The EPA can’t give these inef­fi­cient, dirty facil­i­ties a free pass on car­bon pollution.”

The case is titled Cen­ter for Bio­log­i­cal Diver­si­ty v. EPA. The Cen­ter is rep­re­sent­ed by attor­neys Kevin Bundy and Bren­dan Cummings.