In order to meet the European Union’s goal of 20% renewables by 2020, some European utility companies are moving away from coal and replacing it with wood pellet fuel. The idea is simple: trees will regrow and recapture the carbon released in the burning of wood pellets, making the process supposedly carbon-neutral. But just like other simple ideas, it misses out important details that can turn it on its head.
The catch is that the process could be carbon neutral only after the trees regrow to the original size. In the case of cutting 100-year old forest, it would take a century. If the forest is clear-cut, it may never regrow, unless replanted. If the new forest plantation is composed by different or fewer tree species, it will most likely store less carbon than the original forest. Finally, if the forest ecosystem was rich and valuable, as for example a wetland forest, its wildlife may be lost forever.
Cutting old-grown forests, wetland forests and clear-cutting is illegal or highly regulated in most of Europe. In the Southern U.S., however, it is perfectly legal. That is where the large wood pellet producers are staging their operations.
A Maryland-based company Enviva is one of the top five largest pellet producers in the US. Its facilities in North Carolina and Mississippi currently produce and export to Europe more than half a million tons of wood pellets every year. The company plans to triple its output in the next few years to meet ever-increasing demand for wood biomass fuel, mainly from European utilities, but also from U.S. power plants.
Enviva claims that it produces wood pellets only from low-grade wood resources such as chips, bark, sawdust by-products, treetops, branches, and other forestry debris remaining after the tree trunks from commercial forests have been shipped for construction material. These unprocessed residues would most likely otherwise go unused as a resource. Additional biomass sources currently include low-grade wood fiber and small logs.
From Mongabay.com: https://news.mongabay.com/2013/0606-dimitrova-biomass-eu.html