Report: “Unintended Consequences” from Biomass Boom

Report: “Unin­tend­ed Con­se­quences” from Bio­mass Boom 

- by Josh Schlossberg

Synapse Ener­gy Eco­nom­ics out of Cam­bridge, Mass­a­chu­setts, can be a valu­able tool in the hands of bio­mass truth-tellers look­ing to strip the green­wash off bioen­er­gy. In Feb­ru­ary 2013, study co-author Sarah Jack­son pre­sent­ed on the find­ings of her and her col­leagues, Jere­my Fish­er and Bruce Biewald, at the Pub­lic Inter­est Envi­ron­men­tal Law Con­fer­ence in Eugene, Ore­gon for the ben­e­fit of envi­ron­men­tal and pub­lic health advocates.

Fish­er, Jack­son, and Biewald pre­dict that an ener­gy pol­i­cy that push­es for bio­mass with­out hon­est car­bon account­ing “may result in large-scale per­verse incen­tives and unin­tend­ed con­se­quences.” They urge the pre­cau­tion­ary prin­ci­ple in regards to the expan­sion of indus­tri­al scale bio-pow­er in the US and rec­om­mend a “clear and rig­or­ous” car­bon account­ing to be under­tak­en on a year­ly basis in a way that is “trans­par­ent, gen­er­al­iz­able, and inter­nal­ly consistent.”

The paper delves into the “pre­cept and assump­tion” of car­bon neu­tral bio­mass by pick­ing apart rel­e­vant aspects includ­ing land use, trans­porta­tion and pro­cess­ing, and stack emis­sions. The report lays out the basics of the car­bon cycle in rela­tion to bio­mass ener­gy, assess­es vary­ing per­spec­tives of car­bon account­ing in the sci­ence, advo­ca­cy, and pol­i­cy fields, weighs “the impli­ca­tions of those assump­tions and postulate[s] which types of assump­tions might lead to unin­tend­ed con­se­quence if imple­ment­ed in full.”

An assump­tion of car­bon neu­tral­i­ty “sets the stage for a mas­sive­ly per­verse incen­tive” for bio­mass ener­gy that could cause “large mar­ket dis­tor­tions for both local and inter­na­tion­al feed­stocks.” Fur­ther, an uptick in log­ging to feed a rash of new incin­er­a­tors across the nation could “result in large-scale shifts of car­bon from sequestered bio­mass stocks to the atmosphere.”

The study main­tains that the cur­rent life cycle analy­sis of bio­mass “has been applied incon­sis­tent­ly” and often can “give undue favor to bioen­er­gy.” The study authors “esti­mate that stack emis­sions from exist­ing facil­i­ties are around 1.67 tCO2/MWh, or any­where from 50–85% high­er than emis­sions from exist­ing coal plants.”

They cau­tion against co-fir­ing with coal, warn­ing that coal facil­i­ties that might oth­er­wise be shut down will be kept run­ning to burn vary­ing per­cent­ages of bio­mass, which could be “con­sid­ered large­ly coun­ter­pro­duc­tive” for lim­it­ing green­house gas­es. While focus­ing main­ly on car­bon emis­sions, The Car­bon Foot­print of Elec­tric­i­ty from Bio­mass notes that “burn­ing bio­mass gen­er­ates a con­sid­er­able amount of air pol­lu­tion” includ­ing asth­ma- caus­ing par­tic­u­late mat­ter and car­cino­genic volatile organ­ic com­pounds and can emit “haz­ardous air pol­lu­tants like hydrochlo­ric acid (HCl), formalde­hyde, dioxins/furans, mer­cury, and arsenic.”

Bio­mass pow­er incin­er­a­tors are “gen­er­al­ly not as well-con­trolled as pol­lu­tion from fos­sil-burn­ing plants” the authors explain, and “can emit up to two-and-a-half times as much pol­lu­tion as fos­sil fueled plants with­out any kind of reg­u­la­to­ry review or per­mit­ting restric­tions.” Instead of being a clean ener­gy source, “wood nat­u­ral­ly con­tains tox­ic constituents.”

Indus­tri­al heat­ing is cur­rent­ly the largest con­sumer of bio­mass ener­gy, account­ing for 52% of total bioen­er­gy use in 2011. Trans­porta­tion burns up 26% of bio­mass, main­ly from blend­ing ethanol into con­ven­tion­al gaso­line. Nation­al­ly, bio­mass pow­er incin­er­a­tion makes up 10% of total bio­mass burn­ing, amount­ing to 1.1% of total elec­tric­i­ty gen­er­a­tion in the US.

The paper cites the Oak Ridge Nation­al Lab­o­ra­to­ry’s cal­cu­la­tions of 2,600 megawatts of bio­mass elec­tric­i­ty cur­rent­ly in the US, with the US Depart­ment of Ener­gy fore­cast­ing anoth­er 1,040 megawatts over the com­ing years from pro­posed incin­er­a­tors and facil­i­ties now under construction.

The Depart­ment of Ener­gy also pre­dicts that the con­sump­tion of for­est bio­mass could dou­ble by 2030, pri­mar­i­ly due to a “tripling” of wood use from bio­mass pow­er incin­er­a­tors and co-fir­ing with coal. The US Ener­gy Infor­ma­tion­al Admin­is­tra­tion esti­mates a “100-fold increase” in bio­mass co-fir­ing with coal by 2021.

The “diver­sion” of crop­lands, for­est prod­ucts and nat­ur­al forests to burn for bioen­er­gy could spike the price of food and for­est prod­ucts, say the authors, while point­ing out that “eco­nom­ics sug­gest that the day is not far afield when gen­er­a­tors will start divert­ing paper and pulp pro­duc­tion, or start replac­ing forests or agri­cul­tur­al lands with short-rota­tion woody bio­mass crops.”

A Wise et al. study from 2009 fore­casts that ener­gy pol­i­cy which ignores car­bon diox­ide emis­sions from bio­mass could result in a future in “which unman­aged (i.e. nat­ur­al) forests dis­ap­pear com­plete­ly by 2070.”

While it may seem obvi­ous to any­one with a com­mand of eighth grade earth sci­ence, one point rou­tine­ly ignored by bio­mass boost­ers the world over is the fact that “any addi­tion­al har­vest attrib­ut­able to bioen­er­gy pro­duc­tion nec­es­sar­i­ly results in less car­bon sequestered in the ecosys­tem and more car­bon in the atmos­phere.” The paper also reminds us that short­er log­ging rota­tions for bioen­er­gy means that forests “sub­se­quent­ly store less carbon.”

Fly­ing a bit more under the radar is the con­cept of “leak­age,” where com­pe­ti­tion for a lim­it­ed wood source “dri­ves up the mar­gin­al price” of pulp wood, forc­ing the paper and par­ti­cle board indus­tries to “increase their har­vests to meet the new demand,” often by log­ging out­side of the region. This on-the-ground real­i­ty ends up “under­min­ing the CO2 ben­e­fit of the bioenergy.”

A Sed­jo and Sohn­gen study from 2009 in ref­er­ence to cel­lu­losic ethanol pol­i­cy con­clud­ed that bio­mass demand could spike wood prices by 20%, “divert­ing con­ven­tion­al wood prod­ucts and dri­ving wood pro­duc­tion over­seas.” Using for­est “residues”—the tree tops and limbs that a for­est requires to enrich soils and pro­vide wildlife habitat—is iffy in the authors’ esti­ma­tion as well, stat­ing that “the eco­nom­ics of trans­port­ing this low­er ener­gy-den­si­ty wood from log­ging sites to pro­cess­ing plants or gen­er­a­tors may not be favor­able with­out incentive.”

While pleased with the debunk­ing of car­bon neu­tral bio­mass, some bio­mass oppo­nents are con­cerned that car­bon account­ing is sim­ply anoth­er way to grease the skids for more incin­er­a­tion. Rachel Smolk­er, co-direc­tor of the US and UK-based Bio­fu­el­watch, warns that the bio­mass indus­try is “already work­ing on ‘stan­dards’ that would enable them to do sham account­ing and cre­ate an appear­ance of hav­ing resolved the problems.”

The bio­mass indus­try is “very skilled at work­ing the num­bers to their advan­tage, where­as any­one with basic under­stand­ing of ecol­o­gy knows that car­bon flux in and out of forests is extreme­ly com­plex and not easy to con­trol or mea­sure accu­rate­ly,” said Smolk­er. “There are so many obvi­ous rea­sons to oppose tree burn­ing for electricity—we do not want to get lost in the weeds count­ing car­bon molecules.”

While apply­ing a pre­cau­tion­ary prin­ci­ple to indus­tri­al scale bio­mass ener­gy “does poten­tial­ly slow the devel­op­ment of bioen­er­gy,” The Car­bon Foot­print of Elec­tric­i­ty from Bio­mass: A Review of the Cur­rent State of Sci­ence and Pol­i­cy main­tains that “such pre­cau­tion may be war­rant­ed.” The nation­al Anti-Bio­mass Incin­er­a­tion Cam­paign, made up of over 50 orga­ni­za­tions across 32 states, embraces the pre­cau­tion­ary prin­ci­ple by oppos­ing “all indus­tri­al, com­mer­cial and insti­tu­tion­al burn­ing of bio­mass and bio­fu­els for energy.”