Forestry Issues

The wood needed for the Pownal plant will be close to about 600,000 green tons per year, not 330,000 tons, as previously quoted.

The electric portion of the plant is 29.5 MW. It takes about 13,000 green tons of wood per MW annually, which would be 29.5 x 13,000 = 383,500 green tons. If the 29.5 MW is net, than the wood use would be even higher.

The pellet portion of the plant proposes to produce 100,000 tons of pellets. It takes at least 2 green tons of wood to produce 1 ton of pellets = 200,000 green tons.

Total wood = 383,500 + 200,000 = 583,500 green tons ~600,000 green tons

Putting this in context, this is much more than the entire annual timber harvest on private and public lands in Massachusetts of about 400,000 green tons, and is about 40% of the entire annual timber harvest on private and public lands in Vermont of about 1.5 million green tons.

Another critical issue is that at least four biomass plants are proposed in southern and central Vermont, and at least 4 in western MA, and the wood supply regions overlap each other.

Please see map of proposed plants in western MA and southern Vermont.

Burning trees emits 50% more CO2 per unit of energy produced than coal.

http://www.maforests.org/MFWCarb.pdf.

And more over the long term as well:

http://www.wbur.org/2010/06/11/wood-power-plants.

The “Manomet” study, which was performed by biomass proponents, found that biomass energy will be worse than coal by 2050 and underestimated the carbon impacts of tree burning: http://www.catf.us/resources/whitepapers/files/201007-Review_of_the_Manomet_Biomass_Sustainability_and_Carbon_Policy_Study.pdf .

The letter from 90 scientists to Congress (http://216.250.243.12/90scientistsletter.pdf) contradicts Beaver Wood’s claim that their new technology is renewable and non-polluting, and experts in the field of renewable energy such as William Moomaw, Mary Booth, William McKibbin and Irving S. Goldstein have come out against wood burning on a massive scale to generate electricity.

Burning wood for energy disrupts our forests carbon cycle, uses up natural resources, and wastes energy (wood burning is only 30% efficient in terms of electricity production) and releases 40–50% more CO 2 than coal or fossil fuels, making it a major polluter.

The developer has proposed that this facility will get wood from within a 50 mile radius. This does not compute, particularly given that the developer “pledges” to use “sustainably harvested” “clean forest residue”. Who enforces this pledge? How is it enforced? Is there sufficient “clean forest residue” in the 50 mile radius referred to by the developer to maintain the plant’s needs over the long term? It seems very unlikely. The McNeil plant in Burlington goes up to 300 miles to get its wood, and the McNeil plant uses only about 66% as much wood as the proposed Pownal plant would use. McNeil admits they clearcut up to 25 acres (~25 football fields) to get the wood. The inefficiency of burning wood to generate electricity (remember: 30%) means that a significant amount of wood must burned to keep this plant going.

Furthermore, the developer’s own track record presents a contradictory reality, where construction and demolition debris was burned in his biomass facilities, perhaps due to shortages in wood supply.

William Moomaw, Professor of International Environmental Policy and Director of the Center for International Environment and Resource Policy Education at Tufts University and a resident of Williamstown, claims that the woodshed region from which Beaver Wood will cut cannot sustain the scale of Beaver Wood’s enterprise. He maintains that BWE and other biomass companies do not take into account the damage to wildlife and delicately balanced ecosystems that result from harvesting wood and “forest waste” on a corporate scale

We cannot rely on pledges or promises or lease terms. Leases are easily renogotiated, particularly once the plant has been built. Pledges and promises last only as long as market conditions are favorable and only as long as the original developer owns the plant. We should note that the principals in Beaver Wood no longer own nor operate the plants that they built when they were part of other companies.

Chris Matera, of Massachusetts Forest Watch, informs us that the timber industry promises that the forests will be gently cut to remove the wood are irrational and not credible. The industry already practices clearcutting and “hi-grading” today, so a radical increase in wood demand will only increase these practices. The developers of the proposed plant in Pownal even admitted that they would do some clearcutting, downplaying, without circumscribing amounts (leaving it vague to at a time).

http://www.maforests.org/MAINE_CC.pdf

Also, you can see the clearcutting that has been occurring in recent years on Massachusetts public forests. These forests have been targeted literally for a 1000% increase in logging for biomass removals. Hard to believe, but that is not an exaggeration.

http://www.maforests.org/Biomess.ppt

Some people cite the success of a biomass burning facility at Middlebury College as rational to move forward with the project in Pownal, Vt. But, it is important to understand that the biomass burning at Middlebury is on a radically smaller scale (2 truckloads of wood a day. Furthermore, Middlebury College runs a small biomass incinerator for heat, and they are having difficulty obtaining enough sustainably harvested fuel. They believe that if similar facilities are built all over VT, they will run out of trees.