The Loophole: How American forests fuel the EU’s appetite for ‘green’ energy

Carson Vaughan

...At the end of the lane, a company called Enviva — the “en” for environment, the “viva” for “life” — processes trees and scraps to make more than 500,000 metric tons of tiny, compressed wood pellets every year, nearly all of it trucked to its port facility in Chesapeake, Virginia, and bound — like the product of more than 20 other pellet mills in the America South — for Europe. Once a merely residential product, fueling wood stoves and backyard smokers, wood pellets now power massive electric utilities in countries like the UK, where the government has subsidized the transition from coal and other fossil fuels to renewable energy sources. In 2015, the Drax power station alone, the largest in the UK, generated enough electricity from its “biomass” units to power 4.1 million homes, or 3 percent of the country’s entire energy needs.Enviva’s Northampton plant powered up in 2013, four years after the European Union published its omnibus Renewable Energy Directive and began promoting woody biomass — chiefly wood pellets — as a so-called “carbon neutral” energy source akin to wind and solar. Quickly exhausting its own domestic timber reserves, the EU looked to the United States for more, making it the largest exporter of wood pellets in the world. Concentrated primarily in the American Southeast, home to 40 percent of the country’s private timberland and recognized as a global biodiversity hotspot, the industry is growing bigger all the time. Between 2012 and 2016, annual wood pellet exports from the U.S. tripled, from 1.7 to 4.9 million metric tons. With new markets expanding in Asia and elsewhere, those numbers are expected to grow...MORE