What’s Big Biomass?

Biomass is burned to produce electricity.  Almost all the biomass used for power purposes comes from forests.  Trees are cut down, turned into wood pellets, and then burned for power. 

Biomass is used in thermal power plants, very often burned alongside coal.  We call this ‘big biomass’ to emphasize the use of wood in industrial and power sectors.  That’s different from home uses like firewood or burning in pellet stoves, or the use of woody residues in landscaping, composting, or soil remediation.

Biomass burning took off as a result of a decision by the European Union (EU) that allowed power utilities and big industrial concerns to ignore carbon emissions from wood burning.  For coal or oil – in fact, for anything that’s burned in a thermal plant except wood – the utility has to count those emissions and report them.   But to increase Europe’s use of renewable energy, the EU said that biomass burning would be treated as ‘carbon neutral’. More about carbon accounting for biomass.

While the EU policy measure was intended to subsidize use of wind and solar power, what happened instead was that the majority of new renewable energy in Europe was derived from biomass burning. That’s what began the raid on forests in the southern U.S.

Several major firms, including Drax, started exporting wood pellets from the South to biomass burners in Europe.  Europe itself supplied less than half  of the total wood used by European utilities for burning.   The percentage of ‘domestic wood’ supplying biomass burners in East Asia is even lower.

Utilities in Japan and South Korea also have many aging and highly-polluting coal plants.  To address climate change, those facilities were supposed to shut down.  But instead, Japan and South Korea adopted biomass-burning, ‘carbon-neutral’ rules similar to those in the EU. More about the global biomass market.

Those rules created a huge new demand spike for imported forest biomass.  Wood pellets manufactured in the South were loaded onto ships, transported through the Panama Canal, and sold to utilities in East Asia.

Drax and other companies wanted to shorten the supply chain, so they started exporting wood pellets from British Columbia, Canada.  Old-growth temperate rainforest, and boreal forests, were cut down to supply this new demand for forest biomass.  Soon, these same companies began buying access to U.S. west coast ports in order to manufacture and export wood pellets.  In addition to the pellet plants proposed for Washington State, there’s a big project under review in northern California that would also seek to export pellets to East Asia.

More information about the wood pellet industry can be found on our Resources page.

Overview, proposed wood pellet plants in Washington State