Get on Board for the Climate

Get on Board for the Climate: All Emissions Count

Martha Walden, 11th Hour

Redwood Coast Energy Authority's (RCEA) recent decision to make a new ten-year contract with Humboldt Sawmill Company disappointed many a foe of biomass electricity. My group, 11th Hour, had presented RCEA with more than 400 signatures from people opposed to burning wood to make electricity. That happened in 2019 when RCEA invited public input on its Repower Plan for the next decade.

Citing local energy and jobs, RCEA stood by biomass even though it emits more carbon and air pollution than coal. However, the staff promised to investigate alternatives to biomass and wrote into the Repower Plan that it would "Limit procurement of biomass power from existing direct combustion plants to short-to-mid-term contracts." That gave us hope that RCEA was serious about transitioning away from biomass. But alas, not this decade.

Humboldt Sawmill Company (HSC) in Scotia produces premier lumber and generates quite a lot of mill waste in the process. Some of it is occasionally sold as landscaping material, but at least 50% of the waste is incinerated to produce electricity at its biomass plant next door. Some of the by-product heat is used to dry lumber, which somewhat mitigates the low efficiency (about 20%) of extracting energy from wood.

Because HSC trucks any leftover mill waste to a biomass plant in Anderson, the issue gets presented like this. So where do you want to burn this mill waste-- here or Anderson? There is also talk about reducing fuel loads out in the forest by trucking slash to a biomass plant where it will produce electricity with a significant percentage of the pollutants filtered out. Due to the cost of transport, very little of this potential is actually realized. But talking about it reinforces the impression that large-scale wood burning is inevitable.

People used to think that burning trash was also inevitable, but transferring carbon to the atmosphere no longer seems like disposal. Wood can be composted or turned into biochar. Both of those options sequester carbon and boost soil fertility. Other new technologies such as nanocellulose offer hope for turning woody waste into durable and useful articles. This decade of 2020 to 2030 is a race to drive down our emissions by 50%.

Aerial photo of Humboldt Sawmill Company (HSC). Source: Redwood Coast Energy Authority Biomass website, redwoodenergy.org/community-choice-energy/about-community-choice/power-sources/humboldt-county-biomass/

What are the new great ideas? What can we do better?

For many years turning wood waste into electricity had an environmental stamp of approval. But as the atmospheric load of carbon keeps increasing alarmingly, the idea of biogenic carbon getting a free pass is convincing to fewer and fewer people.

Humboldt County's inventory of greenhouse gas emissions did not even count the 284,800 metric tons of carbon flooding up from the little town of Scotia in 2019. That's almost as much as the total emissions from every car and truck in the county. Focusing on biomass emissions would be the single most effective blow we could strike against climate change. It would also get rid of a lot of air pollution, including fine particulates. As for local jobs, it takes work to sequester carbon instead of feeding it to inefficient boilers. Step one towards fending off the climate catastrophe right around the corner is to stop defending the status quo.