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Seeing both ends of the biomass burning

By BILL CHAISSON
[email protected]
Environmentalists in New Hampshire are noticing they have strange bedfellows when it comes to the issue of biomass burning. As John Lajoie of Charlestown, a longtime activist against the now-shuttered municipal-waste-burning power plant in Claremont, put it in a letter to the editor for the Concord Monitor: “While erstwhile progressives Molly Kelly and Steve Marchand seek to overturn Gov. Chris Sununu’s veto of Senate Bill 365, environmentalists are joining with ‘no subsidies for anyone’ conservatives to urge legislators to sustain the veto when it comes back for a vote on Sept. 13.”

Senate Bill 365 includes support for the municipal-waste-burning power plant in Concord, but is primarily focused on providing subsidies for three years to several biomass-burning power plants in the state. The text of the bill argues for supporting biomass (essentially wood around here) burning because “the New Hampshire and New England electricity supply is heavily dependent on electricity generated by the combustion of natural gas, which given the vagaries of weather and weather-induced delivery constraints can be a price-volatile source of electricity.”

The argument in the bill is that locally-sourced energy production can stabilize the regional energy market. Alternative energy producers benefit because their pricing now changes constantly because it is tied to the volatile natural gas market, a difficult environment for smaller-scale producers.

While some regional environmentalists have emphasized municipal-waste burning as the primary problem with SB 365, they also oppose biomass burning and build a case that it is not either green or renewable.

Mike Ewall, the executive director of Energy Justice Network, which is based in Philadelphia but has been active in New Hampshire, was in the state this week and spoke to the Eagle Times about his problems with biomass burning. Ewall said that the regulations that govern the plants are inadequate and that the enforcement of the regulations is also inadequate. 

“They claim that they are continuously monitoring the emissions,” he said in a phone interview on Tuesday, “but they are really only monitoring a few pollutants, nitrogen oxides [Nox], carbon monoxide, and sulfur oxides [Sox]. They don’t test for the rest more than once a year.” “The rest” includes several metals, such as mercury and arsenic, and organic compounds like benzene and formaldehyde. Ewall said that the power plants are warned of the coming tests, which he likened to telling a speeding motorist that there was a speed trap up ahead.

The text of the New Hampshire bill defines biomass as “clean and untreated wood such as brush, stumps, lumber ends and trimmings, wood pallets, bark, wood chips or pellets, shavings, sawdust and slash, agricultural crops, biogas, or liquid biofuels.” Ewall is dubious.

“There is no waste in a forest,” he said. “Leaving scraps there would be better than burning it. And it isn’t true that they are just using waste; they are cutting down trees to burn them. There are clearcuts in Vermont just to feed the Burlington plant.”

Ewall said that in vetoing SB 365 Gov. Sununu did the right thing for the wrong reasons. The governor stated that the subsidies to the biomass burners would create a burden on rate payers. Ewall calculated the subsidies would add $60 to $120 per year to the average utility bill. But he really balked at subsidizing what he called “the biggest polluters in the state.”

Woody Little, the Vermont and New Hampshire organizer for the Toxics Action Center, sent a document to the Eagle Times that detailed the pollutants being released by the seven incinerators (six biomass and one municipal waste burner). The incinerator data were presented as percentages of the total amount emitted by all polluters in the state. For example, the incinerators emit 52 percent of all the mercury. The very real adverse health affects of all the pollutants are also listed, but nowhere does it indicate that the incinerators are exceeding limits set by federal regulations. Metals accumulate in the body over time, so many environmentalist argue that there are no safe limits.

Jack Savage, vice president of communications and outreach at the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire’s Forests (the Forest Society), has a different view of the issue. He took issue with Ewall’s claim that perfectly good trees were being incinerated to produce electricity. “That may be so in the southeastern U.S. Where they grow in a plantation style, do clearcuts and make pellets that are then shipped overseas,” he said, “but it is different up here in northern New England.”

In New England foresters distinguish between low-grade and high-grade wood, Savage said. He explained that the current forest was a product of its history. “In the past they whacked a little of everything,” Savage said, “when they were clearing for agriculture and cutting trees to ship overseas for shipbuilding. What has grown up [in the place of the virgin forest] is about 65 percent low-grade timber.”

High-grade timber comes from a tree that can yield two or three board lengths 8 to 16 feet long of clear (knot-free) lumber, said Savage. Low-grade timber has been disfigured by weather events and poor growing conditions. Professional foresters go through wood lots and mark trees as one or the other. The low-grade wood is chipped and sold by the ton and the high-grade wood is sold by the board foot for a much higher return. 

“The idea that New Hampshire would be denuded of forests by biomass burning is absurd,” he said. “It makes no economic sense.” He described thinning out the forest of low-grade trees as analogous to thinning carrots early in the season to get bigger, better carrots later on.

Savage said that most forest land in the state is privately owned. “The landowners can do anything they want with it,” he said. “We need to give them an economic incentive to maintain it well, as opposed to subdividing it to make house lots.” The Forest Society, he continued, promotes scientific logging to create working forests in order to conserve them.

The Forest Society is not wholeheartedly behind biomass burning. Savage said the research into whether burning wood for electricity helps to conserve the forests has yield conflicting results. “Biomass burning is not a long-term solution,” he said. “This bill only extends the subsidies for three years.” He suggested that burning would to produce heat would be more efficient than producing electricity. 

The Forest Society believes that the logging business should be preserved because it is an important part of the New Hampshire economy. If loggers and foresters are put out of business, then the service and manufacturing businesses that support them go to.

Savage was unaware that biomass power plants released significant amounts of metals. He thought it might be true in places where the air, soil, and water were more contaminated. An online search of scientific literature (and links to studies in a document from the Energy Justice Network) revealed that this is so. There is a strong correlation between proximity to fossil-fuel burning and industrial activity and the metal content of wood ash and biomass plant emissions.

For example, a 2013 study done by Troy M. Runge and colleagues at the University of Wisconsin, Madison found that “all biomass fuels have the potential for mercury values above the EPA proposed major source MACT [maximum achievable control technology] limits indicating emission monitoring or installation of a control technology may be required if new regulations are enacted.”

It is the MACT standard that rubs environmentalists the wrong way. “The limits are based on technology standards, not health,” said Ewall.

In the end, this is a divide between conservationists like foresters, loggers and the Forest Society, who take a pragmatic approach to biomass burning, and environmentalists, distrustful of land-use science and industry and concerned about the levels of toxins in the environment.

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