bioenergy

- by Dr. Dorothy Robinson, Woodsmoke.3sc.net 

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"205","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","height":"465","style":"width: 333px; height: 323px; margin-left: 10px; margin-right: 10px; float: left;","width":"480"}}]]The most health-hazardous air pollutant is PM2.5 (tiny particles less than 2.5 millionth of a metre in diameter) that cause 10 to 20 times as many premature deaths as the next worst pollutant (ozone).  

PM2.5 penetrate the deepest recesses of our lungs.  As well as causing lung disease, PM2.5 can enter the bloodstream and transport the toxins in air pollution all round the body, causing inflammation, heart disease, cancers, dementia, genetic damage in babies, increased risk of childhood asthma, autism, reduced IQ when children start school and attention problems.

- May 27, 2014, Bioenergy Insight

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"199","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","style":"width: 222px; height: 221px; margin-left: 10px; margin-right: 10px; float: left;"}}]]Five new biomass plants with a total generation capacity of 10MW came online in the US last month, according to the Energy Infrastructure Update for April, published by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC).

Since the start of 2014, 12 biomass-fired facilities producing a total 20MW of renewable energy have commenced operations. During the first four months of 2013, 35 biomass units generating 112MW opened.

This reduced growth in capacity it not just limited to biomass-based energy. The report states that in April, the only renewable technology type to add more capacity than biomass was solar, with 52MW of combined capacity.

- May 21, 2014, WhoTV.com  

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"197","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","height":"226","style":"width: 422px; height: 255px; margin-left: 10px; margin-right: 10px; float: left;","title":"Photo: WhoTV.com","width":"402"}}]]A Nevada couple is suing a cellulosic ethanol plant after a fire threatened their home.

Ernest and Barbara Clark are suing DuPont Danisco.

They are claiming the company has acted recklessly and carelessly in storing the highly combustible corn stover across from their home.

On March 31st, at least eight of the bails caught fire and the wind pushed the fire toward their home. Some of their property was damaged. Embers burned the home’s exterior and smoke and ash covered the home’s interior.

- by Nicolas Loris, May 16, 2014, Source: The Foundry

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"116","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","style":"width: 333px; height: 304px; margin-left: 10px; margin-right: 10px; float: left;"}}]]

With the Senate considering extending a package of tax credits that expired at the end of 2013, six Senators have banded together to call on Congress to re-up the expired biofuel credits.

In particular, tax credits of $1 per gallon produced was offered for blended diesel made with agricultural products. Apparently, decades of handouts worth billions of dollars, a federal mandate for biofuel production, and numerous state “incentives” just aren’t enough stability for those feeding from the trough filled with taxpayers’ money.

The Senators pointed to a drop in biodiesel production in 2014 as evidence of the need for continued government support. Biodiesel production in January 2014 was 65 million gallons lower than December 2013. That’s because biofuel producers are gorging on taxpayers’ money to oversupply the market.

- by Rachel Smolker, Biofuelwatch

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"174","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","height":"293","style":"width: 375px; height: 266px; margin-left: 10px; margin-right: 10px; float: left;","title":"Photo: NOSAG","width":"480"}}]]I am fortunate to live in the tiny state of Vermont, a state that has boldly led the way on so many issues it's hard to list them all. We were the first to pass same-sex marriage and to take serious steps to make health care accessible to all. We outlawed billboards altogether and passed Act 250, a sophisticated mechanism for protecting the landscape against wanton development. That, in fact, led Vermont to be the last state in the nation to be colonized by Walmart. We were also the first state to ban fracking. We fought Entergy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission long and hard demanding they shut down the dangerously rickety Yankee Nuclear power plant. Recently, at long last and against all odds, we "won" a semi-victory on that front.

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"173","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","height":"480","style":"width: 400px; height: 400px; margin: 5px 10px; float: left;","width":"480"}}]]It’s typical for energy developers facing community resistance to proposed facilities to try to discredit opponents by calling them NIMBY (Not in My Backyard), steering the argument away from health and environmental impacts to simply one of aesthetics. Corporate profiteers argue that local opposition doesn’t have a problem with a given energy technology itself — so long as they don’t have to look at it.  

So, how far are dirty energy opportunists off base when they toss the NIMBY label around in an attempt to sway public opinion and influence government policy in regards to their pollution factories?

Industry Labels

Public Strategy Group’s focus is to give its corporate clients — including nuclear, bioenergy and natural gas corporations, along with offshore investment companies and Wal-Mart — “strategic advantage over their opponents in the public” and government by “countering community opposition.”

Company President Al Maiorino claims that “opponents may favor clean energy, however they don’t want it located anywhere they can see it.” Industry’s main talking point is that members of the public don’t actually have a problem with the concept of a biomass incinerator or natural gas-fired facility, simply its location.

Incinerators have such a stigma associated with them that the Merriam-Webster Dictionary definition of NIMBY actually includes a specific mention, as “opposition to the locating of something considered undesirable (as a prison or incinerator) in one's neighborhood.”  A community is only NIMBY if it fights the siting of a facility without articulating a complete rejection of that form of energy.

In the case of mountain top coal removal, we frequently see public blowback at the site of extraction in Appalachia, along the thousands of miles of transportation routes across the country, and at the coal-fired power facilities themselves. This far-reaching opposition, from the source to the burners, has also recently popped up in regards to hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” for natural gas. The end result is that the fossil fuel industry faces conflict wherever it turns.

More often than not, with some notable exceptions, the anti-fossil fuels movement tends to defy industry’s NIMBY slur by giving a thumbs down to the use of that dirty energy source entirely, no matter where it’s located.

Think Locally, Act Locally?

While fossil fuel opponents typically employ a local, regional, and national strategy, the majority of resistance to biomass energy occurs at the facility level only — due, in part, to communities simply having a limited amount of time and resources to expend.

However, on many occasions, communities fighting a proposed biomass incinerator have made the case that “biomass isn’t right” for their town — implicitly (and in some cases, explicitly) suggesting that another area would be better suited for the facility. In some cases, communities have successfully chased an incinerator developer out of town, only to have them set up shop in a poorer community a few dozen miles down the road, bringing up environmental justice concerns. 

So, what makes the biomass fight different from, say, other types of dirty energy resistance?

First, unlike concentrated deposits of uranium or natural gas located only in specific regions around the country, biomass fuel — forests, trash, crops, manure or other organic materials — is more plentiful and typically found within a hundred miles or less of a facility (except in the case of  wood pellet exports to Europe and Asia). The relative abundance of forests and other biomass fuels means transportation routes aren’t as long and can go by truck over existing roadways, so they don’t generate the sort of opposition that comes where new rail lines or pipelines are required. 

Second, unlike mining or drilling for energy-dense coal or oil, the sheer number of trees needed to feed a biomass incinerator requires thousands of acres of isolated forest stands spread out over the landscape. This lack of one or a few large, central extraction locations makes it tricky to launch on-the-ground monitoring and publicize environmental impacts.

Third, biomass opposition does not enjoy the massive foundation funding that goes to fighting fossil fuels, so the movement is far more grassroots — without as heavy a presence of Big Greens facilitating opposition where it might not form organically.

Whatever the reasons, when dirty energy opponents focus exclusively on stopping the construction of a facility in their town without tying into a nation-wide movement, they lend credibility to industry’s NIMBY label — diluting the health and environmental arguments against the polluting energy source itself.

Weakness as Strength

The far-flung nature of forests is both the main reason why biomass energy opposition tends to be so localized and is also a great opportunity for national solidarity.

More and more, the biomass industry has been setting its sights on public lands — National Forests and Bureau of Land Management tracts — to feed their incinerators. Inflaming fears of wildfire and insects, the biomass industry has teamed up with Big Timber and vote-hungry politicians to demand a rapid uptick in logging on public lands owned by all Americans. 2003’s Orwellian Healthy Forest Restoration Act and more recently Senator Ron Wyden’s (D-OR) Senate Bill S.1784 and Senate Bill S.1301 seek to get out the cut by insisting that, counter to sound science and common sense, the only way to “save” forests is to log them.

Perhaps, once Americans realize that the millions of acres of oxygen-producing, carbon-sequestering forests to be chipped and burned for smokestack energy are under their control, they will understand the importance of snuffing out biomass incineration nation-wide. One such response to public lands protection, the Act to Save America’s Forests, has enjoyed bi-partisan support from over 140 members of Congress and been introduced into both the Senate and House of the U.S. Congress for over a decade.

From NIMBY to NOPE

Fighting facilities at a local level is the foundation of the dirty energy resistance. But, without tying into a national framework, such as the Anti-Biomass Incineration Campaign, the smokestack industry will simply keep playing its game of musical chairs, siting facilities in the poorest towns and/or communities of color.

Pushback to a dirty energy facility, be it a biomass incinerator or “clean” coal-fired burner, needs to be accompanied by disapproval of its siting anywhere else, condemnation of all forms of its technology, and refusal to endorse a dirty energy “alternative.”

Anything less than national anti-dirty energy solidarity negates the genuine concerns of harmful health, climate, and ecosystem impacts from smokestack energy by lending credence to industry’s NIMBY name-calling. The day that dirty energy opponents finally close their ranks in unity, the pollution pushers will have nowhere left to run.

[Biomass industry pushing for even less regulation of their dirtiest fuel source. -Ed.]

- by Erin Voegele, March 27, 2014. Source: Biomass Magazine

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"171","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","height":"384","style":"width: 333px; height: 272px; margin-left: 10px; margin-right: 10px; float: left;","title":"Photo: http://teknologi-bahanbinaan.blogspot.com/","width":"470"}}]]On March 27, the U.S. EPA released a proposed rule to amend its Non-Hazardous Secondary Materials regulation under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. The NHSM rule was finalized in February 2013 and establishes standards and procedures for identifying whether non-hazardous secondary materials are solid wastes when used as fuels or ingredients in combustion units.

Information published by the EPA explains that if a material is classified as solid waste under RRA, a combustion unit burning it must meet Clean Air Act section 129 emission standards for solid waste incineration units. Alternatively, if the material is not considered a solid waste, combustion units that burn it are required to meet the CAA section 112 emission standards for commercial, industrial and institutional boilers.

- by Paul Gottlieb, February 27, 2014. Source: Peninsula Daily News

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"170","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","style":"width: 274px; height: 222px; margin-left: 10px; margin-right: 10px; float: left;","title":"Photo: Peninsula Daily News"}}]]PORT ANGELES — Fuel-system problems with Nippon Paper Industries USA’s newly expanded biomass cogeneration plant have caused a two-week shutdown of the mill, according to a union official.

Darrel Reetz, vice president of the Association of Western Pulp & Paper Workers Local 155, said Thursday he is confident the plant will be up and running again by about March 9.

“We are having some issues that need to be fixed on the fuel system,” Reetz said.

- by Phil Ciciora, March 5, 2014. Source: University of Illinois News Office

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"16","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","height":"240","style":"width: 369px; height: 299px; margin-left: 10px; margin-right: 10px; float: left;","width":"320"}}]]Debates surrounding the sustainability of bioenergy have emerged in recent years relating to water quality and quantity, and those debates will only grow louder as big urban areas in the U.S. start running out of water and environmental groups and the Environmental Protection Agency push for more stringent policies to address nutrient pollution, said Jody Endres, a professor of bioenergy, environmental and natural resources law at Illinois.

“From a bioenergy standpoint, that’s when we’re going to have to figure out how we prioritize growing crops for bioenergy,” said Endres, who also is an affiliate of the Energy Biosciences Institute, a collaboration involving the U. of I., the University of California at Berkeley, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and BP, an energy company.

- by Christopher Martin, March 18, 2014. Source: Bloomberg Businessweek

[Read more about Khosla: Cellulosic Ethanol: A Bio-Fool's Errand -Ed.]

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"119","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","height":"374","style":"width: 333px; height: 277px; margin-left: 10px; margin-right: 10px; float: left;","width":"480"}}]]Kior Inc. (KIOR:US), the Vinod Khosla-backed operator of the first U.S. commercial-scale cellulosic biofuel plant, fell the most on record after management told regulators they have serious doubts about staying in business.

Kior declined 41 percent to 63 cents at 10:23 a.m. in New York, the most intraday since its June 2011 initial public offering at $15.

The company needs additional capital by April 1 and its only potential source of near-term financing is a March 16 commitment letter from billionaire investor Khosla, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission yesterday.