Biomass Study Challenged

Bill Opalka | Jun 21, 2010

 

A renewable energy advocacy group has forcefully responded to a Massachusetts study that could impact the use of forest biomass as an electrical energy source.

I wrote in this space last week that the report by Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences in Massachusetts challenged some of the assumptions about the carbon-reducing effects of biomass generation. State officials ordered the "Biomass Sustainability and Carbon Policy Study" and effectively stopped new biomass plant construction in Massachusetts. A stakeholder process and regulatory review are now underway.

The process could have major implications and even downgrade biomass' value as an energy source to meet state renewable portfolio standard requirements. That process could take up to six months.

Bill Holmberg the chair of the biomass coordinating council at the American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE), is requesting the study be withdrawn and subject to peer reviews.

ACORE represents all renewable technologies, and its letter directly addressed the study. The group "strongly disagrees with the findings that `[f]orest biomass generally emits more greenhouse gases than fossil fuels per unit of energy produced' in the report.

"In addition, the recent study in Massachusetts concurrently ignores the untold positive efforts of local, state and federal governmental organizations, environmentalists, and wildlife and wildlife habitat proponents who are actively engaged in collaborating on optimized land use, best available agriculture and forestry practices, soil vitalization, and water conservation and management," the letter continues.

 "We created wealth through the extraction of coal, oil and natural gas, but those are resources that we are going to run out of, so we need to work with resources that are sustainable," Holmberg told me. "If we develop biomass in the way that they have in Austria and Denmark, then it is done sustainably and we have nothing to worry about."

In the meantime, biomass proponents have a lot more work to do closer to home.

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