Pacific BioEnergy would be short a very major customer if one of the world's most influential environmental organizations had its way.
In February 2010, the wood pellet producer took on France-based energy company GDF Suez as a minority partner to help support a $24-million expansion of its Prince George plant.
What's more, GDF Suez agreed to purchase 2.5 million tonnes of its product each year for a decade for use in electrical generation facilities in Belgium.
Those pellets would be used to replace two million tonnes of coal and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by four million tonnes, Pacific BioEnergy said in a press release issued at the time.
But Greenpeace forest campaigner Nicolas Mainville, the author of a report critical of using forest-based biomass for large-scale electricity generation, is leery of substituting wood pellets for coal.
"We're not making in any way the case that we should keep on using coal," Mainville said in an interview. "But what we're saying is we should not think that natural ecosystems can provide that amount of energy without having serious impacts on ecosystems and very deleterious effects on climate for many decades."
Mainville, who holds a masters degree in biology, dismisses as false the argument that forest biomass is carbon neutral.
In part, Mainville cites a life cycle analysis that looked at the energy devoted to producing a pellet in British Columbia and shipping it from Vancouver to Stockholm, Sweden. It found that 40 per cent of the energy the pellet would produce upon being burned is taken up in the process.
Further, he claims emissions from wood pellets are even worse than those from coal, at least in North America, not only for greenhouse gases but for other pollutants.
He says biomass plants on this continent can emit at the smokestack up to "150 per cent more climate disrupting carbon dioxide, 400 per cent more lung irritating carbon monoxide, and 200 per cent more asthma causing particulate matter to produce the same amount of energy."
There is a proviso. Mainville notes that "better efficiency can be reached with new technologies implemented, for example, in European facilities."
No numbers are provided in the report for European operations but in an interview Mainville said the efficiency of coal and biomass burning plants in Europe are about the same.
Efficiency in those plants is about 30 to 35 per cent compared to 25 per cent in North America, Mainville said.
"That means for every 100 trees, they use 25 and the rest is wasted in heat and pollutants," Mainville said. "That efficiency is a little higher in Europe but it's still very similar to what coal releases."
Industry begs to differ.
Even if emissions from wood burning generators was no better than from coal, representatives will tell you that in contrast to fossil fuels like coal, trees are a renewable resource.
Once a tree is harvested, it can be replaced with a replanted seedling that can act as a "carbon sink" absorbing greenhouse gases that have been emitted into the atmosphere.
As a result, European power producers are securing wood pellets to meet greenhouse gas emission targets.
Pacific BioEnergy vice-president Brad Bennett added that companies like his are making use of so-called "roadside debris" - the branches, needles and splinters that loggers leave behind because it's of no use to the sawmills and pulp plants.
"Historical practice was that material was piled and burned," said Bennett, who also noted that waste from sawmills is also
converted into pellets.
If the material was left to rot, it would give off methane, "which is also a greenhouse gas," Bennett said.
Instead, grinders are taken to the sites where trucks are loaded with fibre that's transported back to the pellet plant, usually within a two-hour driving radius, for further processing.
Rather than going up in the air, the debris is being converted into a commodity that is used to heat buildings, generate electricity and provide an economic benefit.
"This way you're capturing the carbon, utilizing the value of the carbon, you're essentially recycling it," Bennett said.
"So, wood is considered carbon neutral whereas coal is not. You just dig it out of the ground and burn it."
Mainville disputes those arguments.
"Those very old logging techniques, the whole-tree harvesting, where you take the entire tree and bring it to the roadside and you branch it there and you take only the stem, that's a problem in itself," Mainville said.
"Branches, treetops, leaves, needles should stay on the ground where you cut the tree so the nutrients go back and the forest can regenerate."
Although rotting trees release methane, Mainville contended the process takes decades whereas burning them in large-scale generators speeds up the process drastically.
"If you increase the speed at which the carbon will enter the atmospheric pool, you just encourage climate change and that's exactly what we're trying not to do," Mainville said.
He asserted the situation is exacerbated by a policy in B.C. of "salvage logging" of stands of beetle-killed pine, "primarily for pellet exports to the
[European Union]."
In the process, Mainville said the forest floor is effectively "vacuumed" of all debris so it can be sold to pellet producers and area operators of wood-burning heat and power plants.
After looking at the research by experts in the field, Mainville concluded that at least 75 per cent of the debris should be left behind at a logging site and even more in some cases.
"Some sites should not have biomass extraction at all, others are more resilient," Mainville said.
The B.C. Forest Planning and Practices Regulation requires that in the Interior at least four logs, each at least two metres long and 7.5 cm in diameter at one end, be left behind on each hectare of logged forest.
B.C. chief forester Jim Snetsinger has also issued guidelines for "coarse woody debris" in which he warns that studies show species of flora and fauna dependent on dead wood are at risk when the levels fall below 30 per cent of what occurs in the natural forest.
In an interview, Snetsinger said the Ministry of Forests will continue to monitor stands to make sure there is enough debris left behind, "and if we feel we're not getting enough, then we'll change the legislation to make sure we do get enough."
Mainville's doubts don't end there.
Another concern is that the European Biomass Association has suggested forest biomass be the source of 15 per cent of electricity production in rich countries by 2020. Mainville calculates that to reach that goal in Canada, more than 147 million cubic metres of wood would need to burned annually, "more than the amount harvested by 'traditional' logging throughout Canada in 2008."
As it stands, Wood Pellet Association of Canada executive director Gordon Murray insisted the industry is causing no additional stress on forests and characterized as alarmist concerns about "whole tree harvesting" in the name of wood-based power and heat.
"The harvesting that takes place does not take place because of the pellet industry, so if there is a cutblock anywhere in B.C. or anywhere in Canada for that matter, it was going to get cut because of the forest
industry," Murray said.
"We're not creating the clearcuts, all we're doing is going back out and picking up the pieces that have been left behind, and this notion that we're somehow going to go out and log green healthy forests to make bioenergy is just false, we're not
going to do that."
There are 13 pellet plants in the province but even that's not enough to process all the roadside slash, Murray said.
"You still see the slash fires out there, so our hope one day is we're going to eliminate all that," he said.
Using wood-based biomass for large-scale heating and power production is just all too much as far as Mainville is concerned, but he believes there still is a place for wood-based biomass.
"The goal is to have small scale producers being encouraged, heating systems developed for local use, but really discourage large scale exports," Mainville said.
"It just doesn't make sense for the climate crisis."
He also says the best use is cogeneration, where plants are used to provide both heat and electricity. Doing so increases the efficiency to 75 per cent from 25 per cent because the heat from the burned wood is put to use, Mainville asserts.
Mainville's study has won an endorsement from Art Fredeen, a professor in the ecosystem and science management program at the University of Northern British Columbia (UNBC).
Fredeen, who was one of seven UNBC professors who collaborated on a paper framing the issues surrounding bioenergy in Central B.C., said Mainville did a good job of putting numbers to the concerns they raised.
"I think we were also really concerned about the scale of the enterprise," Fredeen said. "I think if we really scale it up to a large size, then we start to see environmental impacts on our forest.
"If it's a small scale that can be done sustainably, then that's fine."
