Photos Show Whole Trees Burned for Biomass Power

Pho­tos Show Whole Trees Burned for Bio­mass Power

New evi­dence has emerged once again prov­ing that bio­mass pow­er incin­er­a­tors burn whole trees—not just wood “residues”—for fuel. The pho­tographs below (tak­en in Decem­ber 2012) show thou­sands of trees stacked and await­ing the chip­per at Hemphill Pow­er and Light, a 14-megawatt bio­mass pow­er incin­er­a­tor in Sul­li­van Coun­ty, New Hamp­shire. Click here for more photos.

Bio­mass Pow­er Asso­ci­a­tion’s Bob Cleaves said in a June 2010 arti­cle in Pow­er-Gen World­wide that his orga­ni­za­tion is “not aware of any facil­i­ties that use whole trees for ener­gy and that it is not an eco­nom­i­cal­ly sus­tain­able approach to bio­mass as the cost of cut­ting down one tree out­weighs the poten­tial ener­gy ben­e­fits.” Yet as con­sumer demand for lum­ber in a col­lapsed hous­ing mar­ket remains stag­nant, the tim­ber indus­try has been liq­ui­dat­ing forests for bio­mass energy. 

Past doc­u­men­ta­tion of the use of whole trees for bio­mass pow­er incin­er­a­tors has includ­ed pho­tos tak­en at the McNeil Gen­er­at­ing Sta­tion, a 50-megawatt bio­mass incin­er­a­tor in Burling­ton, Ver­mont and at McNeil’s rail­car load­ing site in Swan­ton, Ver­mont [below].

While cur­rent­ly the major­i­ty of wood fuel­ing bio­mass pow­er incin­er­a­tors such as Hemphill and McNeil comes from tree tops and limbs, also known as wood “residues”—which con­tain the high­est nutri­ent con­tent in the tree and are an essen­tial com­po­nent of for­est soils—an increase in bio­mass pow­er incin­er­a­tor pro­pos­als in the US and Europe (which intends to source much of its wood from the US) means com­pe­ti­tion for a lim­it­ed fuel source and an increase in burn­ing whole trees.

“The idea that we can pro­vide enough ‘waste and residue’ from forestry oper­a­tions to fuel these elec­tric util­i­ties is pure bunk,” said Rachel Smolk­er, co-direc­tor of Bio­fu­el­watch, based in the US and UK. “They require thou­sands, even mil­lions of tons per year depend­ing on capac­i­ty. In Europe, huge coal plant con­ver­sion plans are under­way and whole trees are being pel­letized and shipped across the Atlantic to be burned there.”

“The sheer volume—current plans in UK alone will require over 63 mil­lion tonnes of pel­lets per year—can only be met by using whole trees,” said Smolk­er. “When we see and pho­to­graph whole trees going into these facil­i­ties we know the claims are false. When we see piles of wood­chips and pel­lets there’s a very good chance those were once whole trees as well.”

The Pack­ag­ing Cor­po­ra­tion of Amer­i­ca (PCA), the fifth largest pro­duc­er of con­tainer­board and cor­ru­gat­ed prod­ucts in US, con­cerned about a 50-megawatt Roth­schild, Wis­con­sin bio­mass pow­er pro­pos­al (cur­rent­ly under con­struc­tion) warned: “It would seem that the sim­plest and per­haps only alter­na­tive for [the bio­mass devel­op­er] is to pro­cure pulp­wood to be chipped as fuel. This obvi­ous­ly will raise the cost not only of pulp­wood but also of bio­mass across the region.”

PCA also cau­tioned that “the scale of oper­a­tions may also result in unfore­seen for­est man­age­ment impacts, e.g., clearcut­ting of north­ern hard­wood stands for whole tree chips.”