Biomass

Say It Ain’t So, Cathie; No Biofuels in Elk Country?

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I guess the “Empty Quarter” (see Colors of Elk Country post) will be empty of biofuel research.

Cathie Wotecki is the Undersecretary for the Research Education and Economics area at USDA.

Here’s the link to the story.

The USDA says five regional biofuels research centers would be created. The centers, a collaboration between the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) and the U.S. Forest Service (FS), would be established at:

* Northeast Center — Madison, Wis., led by the Forest Service

* Central East Center — UNL, led by ARS

* Southeast Center – Boonesville, Ark., and Tifton, Ga., (both ARS) and in Auburn, Ala. (FS)

* Western Center — Maricopa, Ariz.

* Northwestern Center — Pullman, Wash., (ARS) and Corvallis, Ore. (FS)

Funds are also to be made available to assist in the construction of new biorefineries, starting in 2011. One refinery would be built in each of the regions serviced by the new biomass research centers, but no locations were announced.

OK, I guess Pullman counts as Elk Country, but associated with Oregon State and called “Northwest” not so sure that the east side will get attention… also Maricopa may not quite be Elk Country.

The photo is of Maricopa, Arizona. Disclaimer: I once worked in the REE mission area for an agency then known as CSREES and now known as NIFA.

Shrinking the Carbon Footprint -Biomass Grants to U of M

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Here’s an article on biomass at U of M- “University of Montana officials hope to shrink the carbon footprint of campus by nearly a quarter by building a $16 million, wood-fired, biomass boiler onto the existing heating plant.”

Julie Kies coordinates the Fuels for Schools and Beyond program with the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation. She said the biomass plant proposal represents proven technology, as forest-products mills have used similar technology to heat their facilities for decades. In addition, 10 Montana public schools already use similar technology, as does UM-Western in Dillon and the University of Idaho in Moscow.

“What sets the UM plan apart is its scale, though it still won’t be as large as the co-generation facilities used by mills,” Kies said. “But it would be the largest such plant used at a Montana educational facility.”

Duringer said the University of South Carolina completed a similar project with mixed results that UM has learned from. Other campuses now introducing biomass plants include the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash.

In addition to the University of Montana, the DNRC awarded grants to two other area projects. Mineral Community Hospital in Superior received $175,000 for its biomass energy facility that will serve the hospital, elementary school, and high school. Clark Fork Valley Hospital in Plains received $104,000 for its wood pellet-based biomass energy system.

Here is another piece:

Julie Kies, DNRC Biomass Program Manager, sees the expansion of biomass utilization in Montana as a positive for both local economies and the state’s forest industry. The Montana Fuels for Schools and Beyond Program has helped to fund and implement 10 other biomass energy projects in Montana, starting with the pilot project at Darby School in 2003. We’re pleased to see woody biomass energy expanding to other facilities in the state including hospitals and university campuses, she said. Information about DNRC’s Biomass Utilization Program can be found online at http://dnrc.mt.gov/forestry/assistance/biomass

The Montana Conundrum- Guest Post by Derek Weidensee

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All decked out but no place to go: photo of roadside hazard tree removal in bark beetle country.

And then we come to Montana, which still has a timber industry. Even though many environmentalists have stopped litigating, some groups still litigate even “healthy forest” timber sales. Why hasn’t Montana succeeded in ending litigation where the other areas have? The majority of the public in Colorado, Arizona, and Lake Tahoe tend to consider themselves “environmentalists”. The majority in Montana wouldn’t. Could it be that we have a very ironic anomaly where increased logging can only occur where the majority consider themselves to be environmentalists?

Sometimes in order to better understand a hotly debated issue such as logging we get sucked into the details. This has the unfortunate result of losing sight of the “big picture”. We get so lost in the micro, we lose sight of the macro. Big numbers by themselves don’t mean anything, only percentages can lead us to perspective.

Perhaps it would be informative to discuss how much has been logged. The following percentages come from the USFS forest inventory analysis (FIA) reports (can you find the misspelling on this web page?) and the USFS “cut and sold” reports which list harvest acreage for every national forest for every year back to 1945. The following percentages are based on “forested acreage”. No water, rock, or grass acres were used in my calculations.

The following table represents the amount of “forested acres” that were logged in the past 50 years: Lolo…………………………………..17%
Kootenai……………………………..25%
Beaverhead-Deerodge……………5%
Helena………………………………..7%
Flathead…………………………….13%
Gallatin……………………………….7%
Let’s focus on the 5% that was logged on the Beaverhead Deerlodge National Forest since it’s the focus of Tester’s Beaverhead Partnership collaboration. 5% sounds pretty sustainable to me. I mentioned the above numbers to two prominent Montana environmentalists. It was the first they heard of it. I think it would help us all to learn together to start from a joint basis of facts.

The Partnership plan proposes to log 70,000 acres in ten years. Sounds like a lot-until you find out it’s only 2.5% of the “forested acreage”. If you projected that out 50 years, that would mean that 18% would be logged in 100 years. By that time the sapling that grew up in a clearcut done in 1960 would be ready for harvest. If 80% of the landscape for natural processes is not enough, what is?

In the five years ending in 2008, the BDNF logged an average of 500 acres/year. That’s .02% of the forested acreage. At that rate it’ll take 50 years to log 1%! In the last five years the Lolo harvested 2500 acres/year. At that rate it’ll take 50 years to log 7%. A lot of these groups had, in the past, advocated a “zero cut” on national forests. Isn’t 500 acres per year close enough to zero?

On forests that aren’t litigated, the NEPA mandated EA’s get pretty small. I compared one in Montana to one in Colorado. They were both MPB salvage timber sales. The one in Montana treated 1300 acres and ran to 200 pages, the one in Colorado treated 4,000 acres and ran to 57 pages!

Finally, the biggest cause of all should be knowing that environmentalists are good people at heart. They’re not evil. They’re good fathers and husbands. I’ve read the 1985 Lolo forest plan. There’s no doubt they planned to convert 90% of the Lolo to a tree farm by the year 2050. I’ve read USFS inventories from 1950. A third of NW Montana was old growth. There’s no doubt there’s less today. You’ve stopped old growth logging. You’ve set aside roadless. Our life ambition is to be successful at our work. You have been successful.

I also know that the pendulum of public policy in this country swings to the extremes. I’m sure the “zero cut” groups never dreamed they would have stopped all logging so easily. The USFS responded to “changing public values” in the 90’s by scaling back timber harvest. I’m sure they never dreamed it would go too far (I’ve always wanted to ask Jack Ward Thomas where he wanted it to be). Let’s hope the pendulum stops somewhere in the middle.

Note from Sharon. I tried to check Derek’s facts on the internet, but it wasn’t as easy as a person might think without going into corporate databases.

Montana has more litigation and appeals (as described in the GAO study) due to (here are a variety of hypotheses):

Venue shopping by organizations who want to win
The old timber industry built up an associated appeals and litigation industry which is continuing
People only trust that fuels treatments are needed if they aren’t sold to the timber industry.
People in Colorado just want those dead trees outta there and don’t care who takes them.
Other hypotheses?

I also tried to run down all the ongoing litigation of timber and fuels projects in Colorado. I could only find two. One deals with a lawyer/neighbor of the project; the other is a law school class project. So litigation does not seem like a serious problem here.

I also attended a speech by Secretary Vilsack and one by Governor Ritter on Friday in Fort Collins who were both very strongly for using the dead trees that we have everywhere in stacks in bark beetle country. If it is about using wood, as opposed to cutting trees, a biomass industry could start the litigation dynamic all over again. Yet those hazard trees in the photo could be used for various purposes, including to reduce fossil fuel usage. That’s why it would be good to understand the real reasons behind litigation in different areas of the country.

Finally, while trying to check on acreages, I ran across this link to a study that described 8-10 K acres of treatment on the San Juan (this study is entirely very interesting) with the goal of getting up to 20-30 K (only 10% mechanical, most prescribed burning). My colleagues assure me that there are plenty of environmental lawyers in Durango, yet they are not litigated on fuels treatment projects.

Also I see this AP report of a hazard tree removal project along roads on the Helena that is about 10K acres on the Helena over 5-7 years. Will the advent of bark beetle mortality make Montana become more like Colorado in terms of appeals and litigation?

What do you think about the Montana Conundrum? Is your state more like Montana or Colorado?

The Woody Biomass for Energy Debate- Manomet Study

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As I watch the climate debate, I’ve noticed that biomass has a bad rep in some climate circles. Sometimes it is as simple as biomass is ethanol ethanol is bad therefore biomass is bad. Sometimes it is more nuanced. Seldom is it discussed in a way that reflects differences among places and the variety of possible technologies and material to be used.

Last weekend there was an article in the NY Times on a Manomet study. In this Q&A, John Hagan and Thomas Walker go into some depth describing their findings. Here are some considerations:

The framework we developed for carbon accounting could be used for an individual power facility, a state, a country, or even the European Union (which is importing wood chips from the U.S. and other countries to meet its renewable-energy goals). In order to assess the greenhouse gas implications of using wood for energy, you have to know four things:

• The life cycle of the wood (e.g., logging debris, whole trees, trees vulnerable to catastrophic events) in the absence of the biomass energy opportunity.

• The type of energy that will be generated (heat, electricity, combined heat and electricity), because different types have different efficiencies and thus different CO2 emissions profiles.

• The type of fossil fuel being displaced (coal, oil, or natural gas), because different fuels have different emissions profiles.

• The management of the forest — management can either slow or accelerate forest growth, and therefore recovery of carbon from the atmosphere.

To further complicate the story, while our life cycle analysis looked at greenhouse gas emissions from production and transport of both biomass and fossil fuels, we couldn’t evaluate every possible environmental impact of energy production, such as broken blowout preventers 5,000 feet under water or mountaintop removals to access coal. Rarely (maybe never) does society really weigh the full array of costs and benefits of our decisions. But as the world gets more complicated, and as resources get more scarce, and as the human population climbs to nine billion (and then some), we’re going to have to become more serious about analyzing these kinds of trade-offs.

And

But our study suggests that it’s important to be specific about how you define biomass. Energy generation from harvests of live whole trees from natural forests has different life cycle implications than energy generation from wood wastes that otherwise would have released their carbon to the atmosphere relatively quickly. The choice of biomass energy generation technologies also matters. Biomass fueling thermal and combined heat and power systems typically produce greenhouse gas benefits sooner than large-scale biomass electricity generation.

Finally, we’d emphasize that there are many other considerations besides greenhouse gas emissions when making energy policy — these include energy security, air quality, forest recreation values, local economics, other environmental impacts of extracting fossil fuels (and not just greenhouse gas emissions of burning fossil fuels), and quality of place, among others. Policymakers need to weigh all these factors in making energy policy.

What we’ve done is put a much sharper point on one piece of the story — greenhouse gas emissions. Until our study came out, it was widely assumed that using wood for energy was immediately carbon- neutral. How this new insight factors into the public’s view of using wood for energy remains to be seen.

As for Manomet, our role is to inform society with science, with the hope that a better informed society will make better decisions.