Environmentalists vow to block woodchip export plan in NSW Hunter region
Environmentalists say they will try to block a plan to export up to 60,000 tonnes of woodchips a year from Newcastle that would be used to fuel Japanese power stations.
Energy startup Sweetman Renewables has signed a 20-year supply agreement with Sinanen Holdings to supply biomass to four biomass power plants in Japan.
The company, which is seeking investor backing for its proposal, also says it intends to supply a wood chipfed hydrogen plant in the Hunter region that it will establish in a joint venture with Singapore’s CAC-H2.
The company’s chairman, John Halkett, said the plan was to construct a hub in the Hunter that would “use biomass to produce green hydrogen-rich syngas and related products like wood vinegar, biochar and activated carbon”.
The Nature Conservation Council of NSW has criticised the proposal, saying any plan to export woodchips or use it locally for biomass fuel would be devastating for the state’s forests.
“There is never an acceptable reason to trash our native forests, but turning them into woodchips to burn in Japanese power stations is utterly idiotic,” the council’s chief executive, Chris Gambian said.
Sweetman Renewables is the owner of a sawmill at Millfield, near Cessnock, which was formerly operated by the Sweetman family.
Halkett said the company would be sourcing the woodchips for its new ventures from existing sawmill and wood processing operations from the mid north coast region south of Kempsey.
He said some of the material could also come from non-sawlog material from certified forestry operations.
“We are not about felling trees other than those already authorised for harvesting under legal contractual log supply arrangements,” he said.
“Sweetman is strongly committed to sustainable, certified forest management and the protection of forest biodiversity.”
Woodchip exports from Newcastle ceased in 2013, which Gambian said followed a long campaign by the conservation movement.
“Anyone thinking of investing in Sweetman Renewables should be made aware the conservation movement will not rest until this proposal is dead and buried,” he said.
The former Australian Greens leader, Christine Milne, said there was “nothing green about logging and burning native forests”.
“Trying to reframe logging native forests and the export of woodchips as ‘renewable biomass’ is the latest trick in the logging industry’s greenwashing playbook,” she said.
“Biomass is just the logging and woodchip industry’s last ditch effort to keep a dying industry alive by logging native forests and exporting them to Japan and China to be burnt for energy in an age of climate and biodiversity collapse.”