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As for the larger reconciliation project that is still being negotiated, the language would also fund the exploitation of both federal and private land, as well as forest biomass energy, wood pellet facilities and production. cross-laminated wood (a type of prefabricated wood panel used in home construction) under the title “wood innovation”.
In their letter, the scientists wrote that promoting more commercial timber and wood-fired electricity “ignores the advice of hundreds of climate and forest scientists, who previously informed Congress that these industries are significantly increasing emissions and exacerbating the climate crisis.”
But not all experts agree on that point. Bob Abt He has spent more than 40 years researching the ecology and economics of southern forests, and is an emeritus professor of natural resources at North Carolina State University. He says that under the right economic and environmental conditions, the carbon footprint of wood pellets can be smaller than that of coal. The operation of this equation — to compensate for the amount of carbon burned for electricity today with the growth of future trees — has a couple of conditions. First, Abt says, tree owners need to collect fast-growing trees, such as pines found in the South or tangled wood. The same process would not work well in the forests of New England or the Pacific Northwest, as they need much more time to regenerate.
The second thing is that landowners who sell wood to pellet companies continue to produce their land as a working forest. Abt says as wood demand for energy grows, so do wood prices. This will serve as an incentive for timber owners to continue growing until the trees mature, instead of turning the land itself into pasture for livestock grazing or seasonal crops, or selling it to home developers. A Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory 2017 study They found that spreading from residential and commercial areas could endanger these forests. “Urbanization — currently the largest cause of forest loss in the southeastern United States — is likely to spread to forest landscapes if forest landowners do not have a suitable opportunity to generate income for their timber,” the report said.
If the land where the wood pellets are harvested is later converted to other uses, the carbon that is now easily released for electricity by the pellets will not be recovered by these trees in the future. This means that the wood pellet industry’s claims of carbon neutrality may depend on the prices landowners in North Carolina, Georgia, or Mississippi can get for their land, something that is difficult to predict for decades to come.
Abte says using forests for energy may not be perfect, but it is a step in the right direction. He says all solutions to tackling the climate crisis must be on the table. “Because of the wood that comes out of the south,” he says, “I’m comfortable saying it’s better than coal in most situations.”
In places like the UK, where there is no domestic gas supply, there has been a major push to burn wood pellets. In fact Drax of the United Kingdom It became the nation’s largest coal-fired power plant on the island of North Yorkshire in 2013. It currently produces enough electricity for 4 million homes with wood pellets imported from the US. Drax currently has 13 pellet plants in the U.S. and Canada, and three more are under construction in Arkansas, according to Ali Lewis, Drax’s head of media and public relations.
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