Booming business in America’s forests
Wood pellet industry produces over 10 million metric tons annually, and some environmentalists are raising the alarm
In 2013, Kathy Claiborne got a noisy new neighbor. That’s when a huge factory that dries and presses wood into roughly cigarette-filter-sized pellets roared to life near her tidy home in one of the state’s poorest counties. On a recent afternoon in her front yard, near the end of a cul-de-sac, the mill rumbled like an uncomfortably close jet engine.
“I can’t even recall the last time I had a good night’s sleep,” said Claiborne, who in 2009 moved to the neighborhood, which is majority African American. She wears a mask outdoors, she said, because dust from the plant can make it hard to breathe.
The slumberless factory’s output is trucked to a port in Chesapeake, Va., and loaded on ships bound for Europe, where it will be burned to produce electricity and heat for millions of people. It’s part of a fast-growing industry that, depending on whom you ask, is an unwelcome source of pollution or a much-needed creator of rural jobs; is a forest protector or a forest destroyer.
In barely a decade, the Southeast’s wood-pellet industry has grown from almost nothing to 23 mills with capacity to produce more than 10 million metric tons annually for export. It employs more than 1,000 people directly, and has boosted local logging and trucking businesses.
The industry is not done growing. It is courting new markets in Asia — Japan, which retreated from nuclear power after the 2011 Fukushima disaster, has become a major buyer of pellets — and is lobbying for greater prominence in the United States. It has backers at the Agriculture Department, which recently asked for suggestions on increasing the use of wood bioenergy.
Pellets are undoubtedly having a moment. The open question is whether a world increasingly desperate to avert climate disaster will continue to embrace, or turn away from, humanity’s original fuel: wood.
Most divisive is the industry’s claim to battle climate change by replacing dirty fossil fuels with clean bioenergy.
Many foresters, economists and environmental policy experts endorse that idea. But a legion of ecologists, conservationists and others strongly disagree. Some 500 recently wrote to heads of state, including President Joe Biden, urging them to reject wood burning as a tool for fighting climate change.
Michael Regan, the new administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, is also seen as lukewarm. During his previous job running the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, the department granted permits to mills but also required them to address air pollution and recommended against including wood bioenergy in the state’s clean-energy mix.
An EPA spokeswoman said the agency wasn’t currently considering adding most wood pellets to its renewable-fuel standard, an action that would raise their prospects here.
The story of industrial wood pellets in places such as Northampton County begins in climate policy made an ocean away. In 2009, European officials decided to declare biomass energy — basically, the burning of wood and other plants, rather than fossil fuels — to be carbon neutral. The idea is that regrowing plants, over time, would ultimately reabsorb the carbon dioxide released by the burning.
Britain and other countries set ambitious climate targets and began subsidizing electrical utilities to build biomass plants or retrofit coal plants to burn wood. Drax — Britain’s largest power plant and based in Selby in north England — produces 2.6 gigawatts of electricity from biomass, compared with just 1.3 gigawatts from coal. (One gigawatt is enough to power a medium-sized city.)
Drax buys pellets from Enviva — a company based in Bethesda, Md., that bills itself as the world’s largest pellet producer — and others. It also operates its own pellet mills in Gulf Coast states.