climate change

Bioenergy Markets, Fuel Treatments and EESI

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A reader sent in this link to an EESI report.Here’s a link, and below is an excerpt.

In a similar story in its June 27 edition, the Los Angeles Times reported on an interview with forestry expert Peter Fule of Northern Arizona University. “Firefighting technology has meant fewer fires. Fuel to feed massive blazes has built up. And, Fulé said, climate change has brought warming conditions over the last couple of decades — meaning longer fire seasons, starting early in the spring and extending late into the fall. Even if rain and snow mounts
remain the same, he said, warmer temperatures mean more evaporation, drying out the landscape. Individual drought years increase the risk of huge fires.”

Better forest management could help prevent and reduce such conflagrations in the future and make forests healthier and more resilient in the face of a changing climate. But federal and state forest management budgets are already stretched too thin. Steven Running says: “The single biggest factor is keeping forests thinned out, and dead trees removed. I really wish we had a forest bio-energy industry to use all this forest biomass and pay for the work by buying the material.”

The U.S. Forest Service (USFS) Four Forests Restoration Initiative in central Arizona may provide a model for intergovernmental and public/private partnerships to help restore forest health and reduce the risk of intensely destructive wildfires. This multi-year project is one of ten demonstration projects in the federal Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program. According to the USFS web site, “The overall goal of the four-forest effort is to create landscape-scale restoration approaches that will provide for fuels reduction, forest health, and wildlife and plant diversity. A key objective is doing this while creating sustainable ecosystems in the long term. Appropriately-scaled businesses will likely play a key role in the effort by harvesting, processing, and selling wood products. This will reduce treatment costs and provide restoration-based work opportunities that will create good jobs.”

Another example of collaborative ecosystem management is occurring in the Flathead National Forest in Montana. This project is also supported through the federal Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program. See this recent news story from the Missoulian on how diverse stakeholders came together to develop and implement this landscape management plan.

Forest fuel reduction activities have already generated positive results in terms of reducing the intensity of wildfires and protecting property. See this recent report from USFS, How Fuel Treatments Saved Homes from the 2011 Wallow Fire in Arizona. Will forest thinning and fuel reduction increase greenhouse gas emissions? Research has
shown that forest fuel reduction efforts can result in a net reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and provide other environmental benefits compared to business as usual (namely unmanaged, over-stocked forests with intense wildfires) when the woody materials that are removed are used for building materials, other wood products, and bioenergy. See for
example the October/November 2011 special edition of the Journal of Forestry, entitled “Managing Forests Because Carbon Matters: Integrating Energy, Products, and Land Management Policy”. Section 2 on “Forest Carbon Stocks and Flows” surveys the recent literature on carbon accounting for various forest management approaches.

More, intense, highly destructive forest fires need not be the future of the American west. The federal government has a critical role to play both in managing its forests better and in building successful collaborations among diverse stakeholders on the ground to help restore resilient and healthy ecosystems across public and private lands. Allowing and encouraging the development of local biomass energy markets can be an important part of this. By creating economic value for fuel reduction and restoration activities, more forest acreage can be treated and scarce public dollars can be conserved for other purposes. This could be a win-win for public safety, public lands, climate change mitigation and adaptation, ecosystem health, local economies, and local and regional energy security.
Congress could help. In addition to sustaining investments in public and private forest health initiatives, reauthorizing and funding the Forest Biomass for Energy Program (which would provide competitive grants for research and development on the use of low-value forest biomass for energy, among other priorities) and the Community Wood Energy
Program (which would provide grants to state and local governments to develop community wood energy plans and systems) would be a step in the right direction. The House version of the Farm Bill (see Title IX in this summary), which is scheduled to be marked up by the Committee on Agriculture July 11, would repeal the Forest Biomass for Energy Program and reduce funding for the Community Wood Energy Program from $5 million per year to $2 million per year.

So who is EESI? Do they have an axe to grind (so to speak ;))? They don’t appear to be any of the usual suspects…here’s the Board of Directors. Here are their funders.
Here’s a link to their forest initiative.

WSJ analysis: 80% of wood-burning biomass plants generate violations

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Today’s Wall Street Journal includes this very detailed article, from Justin Scheck and IantheJeanne Dugan, about wood-burning biomass plants in the United States.
…biomass plants nationwide [have] together have received at least $700 million in federal and state green-energy subsidies since 2009, a calculation by The Wall Street Journal shows.

Yet of 107 U.S. biomass plants that the Journal could confirm were operating at the start of this year, the Journal analysis shows that 85 have been cited by state or federal regulators for violating air-pollution or water-pollution standards at some time during the past five years, including minor infractions.

WSJ: U.S. to Seek Claw Back of Closed Montana Biomass Plant’s Funds

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Justin Scheck of the Wall Street Journal has the full story. Snips are below:

The U.S. Treasury Department plans to demand back more than $5 million it granted a Montana power plant that later filed for bankruptcy, in what would be a rare foray by the government into the courts to claw back job-creation funds distributed under the 2009 economic-stimulus package….

The Treasury paid Thompson River $6.5 million in 2010 from a piece of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act known as Section 1603 that reimbursed developers of renewable energy with cash payments equivalent to 30% of their projects’ costs. The program has given out more than $11 billion, the Treasury Department says….

The grant to Thompson River, majority-owned by a Minnesota private-equity firm, was to convert a coal-fired plant to burn wood, which is considered a “renewable” power source. But since receiving the money, the plant never operated either as a coal- or wood-burning plant, according to Montana regulators, and has produced neither power nor new jobs. It is now mothballed. It is not known how many new jobs the firm promised to create, or how many currently are employed at the plant….

Thompson River was an old coal-fired power plant on which a new ownership group, led by Wayzata, spent more than $20 million to bring into compliance with emissions rules and burn “clean coal,” said people familiar with the project. After finishing the work, said a person involved in the project, Wayzata announced that the plant would burn only wood—making it eligible for the Recovery Act money as long as the plant was technologically capable of producing power. But its owners found they couldn’t operate the plant profitably by just burning wood, said three people with knowledge of the project….

UPDATE: The Missoulian’s new columnist, George Ochenski, also takes a look at the Thompson River Biomass Debacle in today’s paper:

“It’s not hard to recall the fiasco of the University of Montana’s recent biomass proposal, which ignored both economics and environmental impacts while being endlessly promoted by the university, Sen. Jon Tester and his handful of industry and environmental collaborators.  It is equally important to remember that the Thompson River venture was initially sold to the public as a wood-burning plant, but quickly morphed into a super-polluting coal-burner once the economics of wood chips kicked in. Could that happen elsewhere? You bet it could.”

Video: Wyoming’s Noble Basin – Too Special to Drill

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The Center for American Progress and the Sierra Club have released a series of three short video documentaries, “Public Lands, Private Profits,” outlining threats to public lands.  Today, we’ll highlight “Too Special to Drill,” which looks at how proposed natural gas drilling would impact the pristine Noble Basin section of the Bridger-Teton National Forest.

Summertime Blame-Game Ritual: Ash Creek Fire and the Beaver Creek Logging Project

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Ash Creek Fire along Highway 212 in extreme southeastern Montana.

You may have noticed that within the past few days some people are attempting to make a connection between the 186,800 acre Ash Creek Complex Wildfire burning in grass, sage, juniper and pine in extreme southeastern Montana with the Forest Service’s proposed Beaver Creek project, which in March was halted by a federal court judge due to a number of deficiencies in the agency’s Environmental Impact Statement (EIS).  That project, proposed for the Ashland Ranger District of the Custer National Forest, called for commercial logging on 1,487 acres and prescribed burning on 8,054 acres and also would have required 35 miles of new road construction and reconstruction.

According to a late March 2012 article in the Billings Gazette [emphasis added]:

A federal judge has ordered the Forest Service to halt implementation of [the Beaver Creek] logging project in the largest island of public land in southeastern Montana and to issue a supplemental environmental impact statement to address deficiencies in its first one.

On Monday, District Judge Donald Molloy ruled in favor of the Alliance for the Wild Rockies and Native Ecosystems Council on some of their complaints filed in July, and dismissed others.

Molloy found in favor of the environmental groups concerning the failure of the EIS to consider stormwater runoff from road construction. Molloy also said the Forest Service failed to explain why it analyzed road density only at the project level and ranger district level, why it applied the road density standard only to forest land and for failing to analyze road density during the project’s implementation.

Not deterred by the fact that the Ash Creek Complex wildfire burned across nearly 300 square miles of grass, sage and scattered pockets of trees on various land ownerships before finally reaching a portion of the proposed Beaver Creek logging project, some people seem to have no problems trying to tie the current wildfire with the proposed logging project in some sort of ridiculous summertime blame-game ritual.

Even the Forest Service couldn’t resist trying to make a connection in this recent article [emphasis added]:

“Had we been able to move forward with the [Beaver Creek] project, the management action could have helped,” said Marna Daley, a public affairs officer for the Gallatin and Custer national forests. “But it’s impossible to predict to what degree.“

“The project would not have prevented a [186,800 acre] fire from occurring,” Daley said. “That was not the purpose of the project. But it could have moderated the fire behavior. I say ’could’ because with the extreme fire activity and behavior we’re seeing, it’s unknown.“

“Impossible to predict.” “Could have.” “It’s unknown.”  Well, if that’s all the case, then why in the world is the Forest Service trying to make hay with a ridiculous attempt at trying to connect a wildfire that burned through 180,000 acres of grass, sage and scattered trees before finally reaching portions of a proposed logging project?  And in reality, it’s not as if a logging project always results in less fire risk, as we pointed out back in 2004 when we produced this Wildfire primer, which was inserted into newspapers across the western United States.

Finally, speaking of “extreme fire activity and behavior” it’s worth pointing out today’s official weather forecast for the Ash Creek Fire:

There is a Red Flag Warning for the fire area today with temperatures forecasted to reach up to 106 degrees, relative humidity levels between 5 to 15% with southerly winds at 10-20 mph and gusts that could reach 35 mph.

Best of luck to the firefighters, as that’s not exactly ideal firefighting weather.  Since the firefighters are already dealing with plenty of hot air, hopefully those people looking to play the annual Wildfire Blame-Game will take a break and cool it.

Cattle herd in post-fire area.

Goodbye to Mountain Forests?

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Thanks to Marek Smith for this piece in the New York Times Green blog:

Here’s an excerpt:

Using data from tree ring studies, scientists have reconstructed a history of fires in the Southwest. The wildfires of the past were frequent and massive, but they stayed close to the ground and mainly helped prevent overcrowding. Take 1748. “Every mountain range we studied in the region was burning that year,” Dr. Allen said. “But those were surface fires, not destroying the forest but just keeping an open setting.” Cyclical wildfires were the norm.

But beginning in 1900, when railroads enabled the spread of livestock, cattle devoured the grassy surface fuels and the fire cycle stopped. A decade later, a national policy of forest fire suppression formalized this new normal. Over the next century, forest density went from 80 trees per acre to more than 1,000.

Then in 1996, the climate emerged from a wet cycle into a dry one — part of a natural cycle for this region. Winters became drier. And “we immediately began seeing major fires,” Dr. Allen said.

With so many trees crammed into the forest, fires climbed straight to the canopy instead of remaining on the ground.

“These forests did not evolve with this type of fire,” said Dr. Allen. “Fire was a big deal in New Mexico, but it was a different kind of fire.” The result, he said, is that the species that now live there — ponderosa pines, piñon, juniper — cannot regenerate, and new species are moving in to take their place.

“Ecosystems are already resetting themselves in ways big and small,” Dr. Allen said. The challenge for managing these ecosystems, he said, is to try to help them adapt.

Seeking to preserve existing systems is futile, he said.


Note from Sharon: While I can’t disagree with his conclusions in the last two sentences (although I don’t believe in the concepts of “ecosystems “resetting” themselves”) (note that Dan Botkin said much the same thing in Discordant Harmonies), I wonder about a couple of things.

First, is that getting trees back in dry climates has always been a bit of a stochastic process; seed source, ground conditions, wetness of years of establishment. Humans can help this out by planting. Could we? Should we? It doesn’t come up in this piece and I wonder if it’s because that’s not the expertise of the interviewed person. A

Second, as did some of the commenters I’m not sure of this version of history. Cattle used to be driven to the railroads which implies that they did not require railroads to spread.

The comments are fairly interesting also.

Standing trees better than burning ones for carbon neutrality

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DURHAM, N.C. — The search for alternatives to fossil fuels has prompted growing interest in the use of wood, harvested directly from forests, as a carbon-neutral energy source.

But a new study by researchers at Duke and Oregon State universities finds that leaving forests intact so they can continue to store carbon dioxide and keep it from re-entering the atmosphere will do more to curb climate change over the next century than cutting and burning their wood as fuel.

“Substituting woody bioenergy for fossil fuels isn’t an effective method for climate change mitigation,” said Stephen R. Mitchell, a research scientist at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment. Wood stores only about half the amount of carbon-created energy as an equivalent amount of fossil fuels, he explained, so you have to burn more of it to produce as much energy.

“In most cases, it would take more than 100 years for the amount of energy substituted to equal the amount of carbon storage achieved if we just let the forests grow and not harvest them at all,” he said.

Mitchell is lead author of the study published in the peer-reviewed journal Global Change Biology Bioenergy. Mark E. Harmon and Kari E. O’Connell of Oregon State University co-authored the study.

Using an ecosystem simulation model developed at Oregon State, the team calculated how long it would take to repay the carbon debt – the net reduction in carbon storage – incurred by harvesting forests for wood energy under a variety of different scenarios.

Their model accounted for a broad range of harvesting practices, ecosystem characteristics and land-use histories. It also took into account varying bioenergy conversion efficiencies, which measure the amount of energy that woody biomass gives off using different energy-generating technologies.

“Few of our combinations achieved carbon sequestration parity in less than 100 years, even when we set the bioenergy conversion factor at near-maximal levels,” Harmon said. Because wood stores less carbon-created energy than fossil fuels, you have to harvest, transport and burn more of it to produce as much energy. This extra activity produces additional carbon emissions.

“These emissions must be offset if forest bioenergy is to be used without adding to atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations in the near-term,” he said.

Performing partial harvests at a medium to low frequency – every 50 to 100 years or so – could be an effective strategy, O’Connell noted, but would generate less bioenergy.

“It’s a Catch-22,” she said. “Less intensive methods of harvesting release fewer emissions but yield less energy. The most intensive methods, such as clear-cutting, produce more energy but also release more carbon back into the atmosphere, prolonging the time required to achieve carbon sequestration parity.”

Given current economic realities and the increasing worldwide demand for forest products and land for agriculture, it’s unlikely that many forests will be managed in coming years solely for carbon storage, Mitchell said, but that makes it all the more critical that scientists, resource managers and policymakers work together to maximize the carbon storage potential of the remaining stands.

“The take-home message of our study is that managing forests for maximal carbon storage can yield appreciable, and highly predictable, carbon mitigation benefits within the coming century,” Mitchell said. “Harvesting forests for bioenergy production would require such a long time scale to yield net benefits that it is unlikely to be an effective avenue for climate-change mitigation.”

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The research was funded by a NASA New Investigator Program grant to Kari O’Connell, by the H.J. Andrews Long-term Ecological Research Program, and by the Kay and Ward Richardson Endowment.

Cascading species shift looms in fire-starved Eastern woods -E&E News

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Managing smoke is a continual challenge for prescribed burns, even in rural Arkansas. Plumes like this column, from a 1,400-acre burn of the Big Piney Ranger District in 2001, must be carefully monitored for dispersal and escapes. Photo by Steve Osborne.

I really liked this article and it is right up our discussion alley and also about the East. It might be worth getting a temporary subscription for those who don’t get Greenwire. Fundamentally the story is about fire in Eastern forests. I could have quoted any part and it would be interesting but here is the last section. The author is Paul Voosen, E&E reporter.

Here’s a quote from early in the piece:

On a hot spring morning, foresters and scientists tromped through the charred understory of a burned patch of the Ozark National Forest. They had recently wrapped their work, dripping fire this way and that beneath an open canopy of oaks. Soon, they hoped, a succession of grasses would bloom in blackened soil, bathing in restored light.

The site is an atonement for the Forest Service’s past sins.

I think it’s kind of funny to think of a prescribed burn as “atonement for sins”… maybe it would be cheaper for the taxpayer for the Chief to just sign a confession ;)..or we could have an atonement ceremony and be done…

Big questions

If there’s a model for a restored Eastern forest in Arkansas, it’s Buck Ridge.

An upward-sloping 29-acre woodland tucked in state wildlife land north of the Ozark National Forest, Buck Ridge is a gateway to the past. About 250 species of plant can be found in its understory, an astounding diversity. Through the year, each wave of grasses flowers taller than the last, chasing light. By midsummer, they are waist high; by the end of the year, the big bluestem grasses reach 6 feet high.

“Everything is adapted to work well in this system,” said Witsell, the botanist.

Possessing the rare ability to identify nearly any plant on sight, Witsell scrambled around the ridge like Darwin first alighting on the Galapagos. He listed off rare species that could only be found in a sun-drenched forest: Chapman’s purple top; Nuttall’s pleat leaf; snakeroot; all kinds of legumes; four different violets since leaving the car.

Above the grasses, the “swee-swee-swee” call of a redheaded woodpecker rang out.
Prescribed burns

Managing smoke is a continual challenge for prescribed burns, even in rural Arkansas. Plumes like this column, from a 1,400-acre burn of the Big Piney Ranger District in 2001, must be carefully monitored for dispersal and escapes. Photo by Steve Osborne.

“Those redheads are woodland birds,” said Steve Osborne, a retired Forest Service officer from Ozark National Forest. “You hear them all over the place right now. They’re here because of this treatment. I can tell you in the years past, I could go for months without seeing one of them in the national forest.”

For all its success, Buck Ridge’s restoration was not easy. The state has burned the ridge seven times in the past 15 years. Even then, the restoration did not truly take hold until a second tool was added: targeted herbicides. The dense pack of young trees did not easily give way, and so, in 2008, the forest managers injected herbicides into all the woody stems measuring from 1 to 10 inches in diameter.

From an ecological standpoint, the herbicides are not a problem, Witsell said.

“It’s a surgical approach,” he said. “You’re not spraying this from an airplane. You’re injecting it into the tree trunks. And it’s obviously not hurting the flora on the ground.”

But the hard truth scientists have found is that fire is often not enough to restore the forest. Most often, prescribed burns have to be combined with logging and herbicides, an active type of management that makes some environmentalists queasy. But perhaps it’s no surprise that such drastic steps are needed. Keeping fire out of the forest was itself a massive management choice, if one belatedly known.

“It’s been many years since fire was an active agent on our landscape,” said Nowacki, the Forest Service ecologist. “We’re dealing with decades here. And so it shouldn’t be surprising it might take decades to rehabilitate the forests.”

Indeed, much of the Forest Service’s interest in the historical fire conditions of the Eastern forest has been driven by the notion that logging can be ecologically justified. It’s the subtext for much of its financial support, Duke’s Christensen said. Even Abrams is studying how well harvesting and herbicide injections can take the place of fire.

For Christensen, efforts like Buck Ridge bring together larger questions of restoration. If humanity created and maintained these open, Eastern forests in the first place — if these are the first forests of the Anthropocene — then shouldn’t foresters actively choose the woodland they want, rather than using an arbitrary, uncertain historical baseline?

“It puts the burden on defining a restoration target on the managers themselves,” Christensen said. “They say, ‘I get to decide what’s going to be here in the future.’ Justifiably, public agencies are really uncomfortable with that. Do they even have the social license to do that?”

Despite sounding the alarm for 25 years, Penn State’s Abrams has doubts that much can be done to get the Eastern forest back to where he’d like, especially with fire. There’s too much settlement and too much land in private hands. Liability is a huge concern for those rare escaped fires. Climate change could make it difficult for the trees to survive.

A threshold has been passed. The oak and pine forest will never be what it was.

“I would like to see increased used of burning in the East for these fire-adapted forest types,” Abrams said. “But I realize we’re never going to have the extent of burning that we [had] before European settlement.”

What will survive are pockets, traces of humanity’s original sway over nature.

Standing near the top of Buck Ridge, where the post oaks spread their limbs wide, their girth a sign of the savannah forest this was and is again, Anderson, the hustling fire coordinator, stopped to survey his team’s work. This is an ecosystem that hasn’t been seen since the American Indians hunted in Buck Ridge, since the early settlers, he said.

And yet, in the soil, the seeds waited, returning in full bloom.

“It all says, ‘Yes, yes, yes. We want more of this,'” he said.

I wonder who is saying “we want more of this”; not sure there is a Nature, nor does She speak with one voice. Back to Christensen’s point, the future will bring tough decisions about what we (people) want or don’t want. Best discussed (dare I say it?) collaboratively, IMHO.