Black liquor
Proceeds for all types of renewable energy in Maryland’s portfolio have grown to $127 million in 2015, the most recent year for which totals are available.
For the largest energy producers, the incentives can reach millions of dollars.
By 2020, Maryland utilities will need to buy enough of the credits to equal onefourth of the state’s energy supply. By then, state legislative analysts predict, the cost to the average household will peak at somewhere between 77 cents and $3 per month.
Maryland’s biggest suppliers of renewable energy — the generators that get the most money from the ratepayer subsidies — include paper mills in Covington, Va., and Kingsport, Tenn.; a biomass facility that burns logging waste in South Boston, Va.; and two trash incinerators in Maryland: the Wheelabrator Baltimore facility near Russell Street and Covanta Montgomery in Dickerson.
More than three-quarters of the renewable energy subsidized by Maryland ratepayers is generated outside the state.
To Ewall of the Energy Justice Network, that statistic undermines arguments that the renewable energy incentives can grow jobs in the state. What, he asks, do Marylanders owe to a paper mill in Tennessee?
“Why should all this Maryland ratepayer money flow to them?” he asks.
Of equal concern to some is that the renewable energy credits are going to dirty sources such as black liquor.
It was part of the program from the beginning, thanks to nearly a dozen amendments that MeadWestvaco Corp., then the Luke mill’s owner, persuaded lawmakers to adopt during the legislative process in 2004, General Assembly documents show.
The paper industry argues that black liquor earns the “renewable” designation because it’s burned as part of an efficient process: As power is generated, the harsh chemicals used to create paper pulp are also being recovered from the sludge. They are reused in the next paper-making cycle.
And as trees are consumed to make the paper, more can be planted. Richard Watro, the Luke mill’s manager from 2011 to 2015, likens it to harvesting and replanting corn to create ethanol.
Verso Corp., which assumed ownership of the mill in 2015, says the carbon stored inside trees always makes its way into the atmosphere, whether through natural decomposition or forest fires. Burning black liquor is no different from the natural carbon cycle, company officials say, and the energy it generates means the mill can rely less on its other energy sources, coal or natural gas.
Mill workers say the fuel’s main problem is its name. “If you called it ‘dandelion liquor,’ no one would care,” Harvey says.
Paper mills generate less energy than power plants, and emit less pollution. But they still give off millions of pounds of carbon dioxide every year. They also release other harmful pollutants, including smogcreating nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide.
Last year, as the Luke Mill burned a combination of coal, gas and black liquor, it gave off 20 pounds of lead and 100 tons of methane. That was about the same as the Brandon Shores and H.A. Wagner coal- and gas-fired power plant complex in Pasadena in 2015, according to the annual emissions inventories that power generators must file with the state. The paper mill emitted more than half as much sulfur dioxide, a pollutant that can trigger lung disease, as the power plants.
“It’s better than burning coal, but it’s not a renewable energy source in my mind,” Del. Shane Robinson says. The Montgomery County Democrat has pushed legislation to stop rewarding black liquor as renewable energy.
Paper mills in Maryland and other states received about $60 million of Maryland’s renewable energy subsidies through 2015 — nearly a fifth of the total. That included about $4 million for the Luke Mill, where black liquor produces about 40 percent of the mill’s energy, Public Service Commission data indicates. (The PSC does not release precise figures, only the number of certificates each facility sells and the average price of all certificates.)
It was money that helped the mill amid the fluctuating demand for paper and pressure to reduce prices. Mill officials say demand for paper is declining at a rate of 5 percent each year.
Beginning in 2013, the subsidy came under threat. Environmentalists began to focus on the subsidies going to Luke and the other paper mills. They felt a program intended to spur the development of clean energy was paying to perpetuate dirty energy. They decided it was time to try to cut the paper mills off.
Mike Tidwell, director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, equated black liquor with pink slime, the maligned beef additive made from meat processing leftovers. He said black liquor seemed innocuous when lawmakers added it to the state’s menu of green power, and that no one knew how much of the subsidy money it would command.
“Today we do know,” he says. “And it’s a lot.”
In Luke, this was a new danger to the community’s survival.