Guest Column
Biomass Potential for Old Montana Mill Raises Many Questions
By Thomas Power, Guest Writer, 1-25-10
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In the trauma associated with the closing of the Missoula paper mill, business and political leaders have been frantically searching for a way to put that industrial mill site back into production, replacing at least some of the lost jobs. One possibility that many have suggested is to use the site for a large wood-fired electric generating facility. The idea is to use the same wood fiber that the mill had been converting into paper as biomass fuel to generate electricity. This would keep loggers busy in the woods and some of the same skilled blue collar workers busy at the mill site firing and tending high pressure boilers and associated machinery.
This is not at all far fetched. The paper mill has been generating electricity for a long time, providing for its own electric needs, providing heat needed in the paper-making process, as well as selling a lot of electricity into the grid. The total electric production has been relatively modest, 17.5 megawatts, only about one percent of NorthWestern Energy’s peak demand. Those enthusiastic about this possibility envision a much larger electric generating operation that would burn a lot more wood.
NorthWestern Energy has indicated an interest in exploring that possibility but has pointed out that the U.S. Forest Service would have to allow a lot more logging in federal forests to fuel such expanded electric generation. That does not worry advocates since they see the beetle-killed trees in many of Montana’s forests as an obvious source of supply. In fact, before the closure of the Missoula paper mill, there was already a buzz within the forest products industry about using forest biomass, that is, trees, to fuel electric generation. That idea is actually built into Senator Tester’s proposed Forest Jobs and Recreation Act and has also been promoted by Governor Schweitzer.
Before getting too enthusiastic about putting a large wood-fired electric generator in the Missoula Valley, there are a lot of problems to puzzle through.
First, wood-fired generation tends to produce considerable air pollution because the wood has less heat value than coal and the conversion of the intrinsic heat value of the wood to electricity is less efficient than when using coal. The complex mix of organic compounds in the wood produces a complex mix of pollutants. Missoula has been struggling to clean up its air for a long time. Assumedly we want be careful not to slide backwards in that.
Second, wood-fired generation is expensive because of the large volume of low-energy wood that has to be hauled considerable distances to the electric generation site. The further it is hauled, the more costly that fuel becomes and the more it embodies diesel fuel rather than biomass. Such electric generation is often economic at lumber and paper mills because waste wood that had already been hauled to the mill or waste materials such as the black liquor produced by paper mills can be used as the fuel. In addition, the waste heat from the electric generation can be used to dry the lumber and paper. Large stand-alone wood-fired electric generators often are very high cost sources of electricity that are used only when no cheaper source is available. Avista Utilities’ Kettle Falls wood-fired generator in eastern Washington is a good example. Wood-fired generation often is not economic. That is especially true if there are no government subsidies available.
Third, for a half-century or more to come, the impact of burning trees to generate electricity means increasing the release of carbon into the atmosphere. While it is true that if new forests grow up to replace the burned trees, carbon will slowly be removed from the atmosphere, in Montana’s slow growing forests, that will take many, many decades. Meanwhile we will be making the greenhouse gas problem worse, not better.
Fourth, as NorthWestern Energy has pointed out, this could require a substantial increase in logging on public lands. Logging and the roads required to support it have significant impacts on water quality, soil erosion, and wildlife. This fundamental fact has been recently obscured by the increasingly shrill claims that our forests are in desperate need a lot more logging to make them “healthy,” to fight bark beetle infestations, and to reduce wildfire danger that threatens our homes and our towns.
These scary stories of what will happen if we do not log our forests are largely based on “rural myth,” supported by timber interests, and built around the fantasy of natural forests as a open, park-like areas, full of very large, towering trees. In comparison, our contemporary forests are degenerative dense thickets of relatively thin trees that, we are told, are the result of some combination of the failure to log and thin the forests or misguided fire suppression. For most of our forests, this simply is not true.
It is far cheaper to protect our homes and communities by managing the vegetation within a few dozen feet of our homes and by maintaining our homes so as to reduce the likelihood of fire ignition. That is much less costly and much more likely to work that trying to fire-proof millions of acres of forestland.
As important, all of those trees out there, whether healthy, dying, or dead, are not, in and of themselves, dangerous fuels. Recall all the pictures you have seen of forests that have burned. Those lands are characterized by the standing trunks of the trees. In addition, all of the trees do not burn. Wildfires create a mosaic of heavily burned, lightly burned, and unburned lands that lay the basis for natural regeneration of our forests. Fires and insects may kill a lot of trees, but they do not kill forests. If they did, we would not have the forests that surround us now.
We need to look carefully and critically at any proposal to turn our forests into wood mines for electric generation and our river valleys into sewers into which to dump large quantities of air pollution. Maybe the problems can be worked out; maybe not. Whatever we do, we should not simply assume that wood-fired generation is “green.” That would be the worst sort of “green-washing.”
Dr. Thomas Michael Power is former Chair of the Economics Department at the University of Montana, where he currently serves as a Research Professor. Dr. Power is also the author of Lost Landscapes and Failed Economies: the Search for a Value of Place and Post-Cowboy Economics: Pay and Prosperity in the New American West.
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Comments
No matter where it is done, under what conditions, trees grow and trees die, and the wood becomes air pollution no matter how it is disposed of. If it burns, it burns under no controls, and no permits, and both "green house gases" and particulates fill the air. That is followed by dry ravel and then debris torrents in winter. Witness last week in California. And mass watershed reconstruction after which the "erosion" will be blamed on logging. Erosion, by the way, is a natural process, and as forthcoming and sure as wildland fire. Natural procedural events in the workings of the planet.
Erosion from logging is akin to blaming floods on human activity, like in New Orleans. A hurricane flooded NO, not man, and the man made structures to mitigate high water failed and caused no end to the logistical problems of moving people who did not heed warnings. But Government was blamed for all of it. You can prevent a forest fire. And you do have the ability to put out small fires before they become big fires. There is no ability to deter or prevent hurricanes. If you do not heed the warnings to get the hell out of there, don't blame anyone but yourself.
If you don't clear vegetation from around your belongings, that is your fault, and not the fault of fire or fire fighters. And if Missoula can't bring itself to cut down trees to make power, or if the smoke from bioenergy production is not acceptable and wildland fire smoke is, live with your outcomes. And don't ask America to help. Ask your source of economic information, the Green NGOs who are in control of all things environmental. Ask the Defenders of Wildlife for help. Ask the Sierra Club. Ask PETA.
If the trees are burned, and killed, then they begin to decompose. Micro organisms, and invertebrates begin to consume the fiber, and that activity produces green house gases every bit as efficiently as wildfire. There is no end to the process of green house gas production by decomposition and then we get forest renewal, and another cycle of use in a zero sum deal of tree growth and tree death. The question is merely that of how the green house gas is produced, and what side benefit there is to humanity. Burned in a furnace to produce heat to generate electricity and perhaps biochar to renew soils is maybe a more socially acceptable solution that "fire for resource use" or "wildland fire use" as the now lazy and acceptable alternative to logging and use of wood fiber for humankind. That use is still there, only in the US, we import the wood from elsewhere. We have not stopped any logging in the world. We in the US have just moved it elsewhere in the most conceited of economic realities there could be. No wonder there are no jobs in the US. Our Environmental leaders and their political counterparts have decided to starve American workers under the guise of saving the world, and in doing so, have merely shipped the jobs and resource values elsewhere. How arrogant can you get!!!
I could give a rat's ass whether or not Montana burns peckerpoles in a biomass generation plant. But don't sell it as a plus for the environment if you do not. All you have done is grown more fuel for the certain wildland fires to put more green house gases and particulates in the air, while transferring energy production offshore with the solution to wood products demand.
And of course, the answers forthcoming will be about the need to grow more hemp and medical marijuana.
However, to apply for a new permit to generate power from wood exclusively would require millions of dollars and years in the permitting process.
I believe a much better use of the facility would be to make bio fuels from our wood base. Jet fuel and ethanol are already being made in other parts of the country from woody biomass. The wood supply, water source, grinding equipment, power source and a significant supply of tanks are either on site or readily available. There are many grants available from the DOE and other government sources for green energy that would make this type of project much more feasible.
Another point is the beetle kill is not necessarily available. Much of it is in road less areas and strictly off-limits.
We need one of our congressmen to step up to the plate and lead on this.
So, Tom Power says we should just whack out a little of a fuel zone around the house and let the rest burn? Guess what, running a hot, efficient fire in a boiler with emissions controls does a lot more to address "organic compounds" in the emissions than just letting it randomly burn and smoke at what are usually the worst possible times, often in the worst possible place.
How can that be "cheaper" or "cheapest?"
Never mind that it's a pretty simple concept to deliberately go out into the forest and CREATE a mosaic through integrated programs of mechanical removal and pre/post burns.
Never mind that Indians conducted major management programs in a deliberate fashion before smallpox killed them, on huge portions of the landscape, because it made sense to them -- and had clear benefits in increasing the products they wanted...meat, edible foods, AND relative safety from ambush.
Finally, for now anyway, is that a whacking lot of these major kills are in lands with lodgepole. The trunks are standing, for now, but lodgepole roots are pretty feeble and rot fast. You wanna see jackstraw jungle like Lewis and Clark? Oh, baby, you're gonna get it, and if you are really lucky, you'll also get to see what happens when the wood has laid down and the fine fuels from regrowth and herbaceous species are all mixed in nice. Whoopeee! Ecotopia Unbound!
The State of Montana is tired of getting saddled with poor USFS planning and resource management, and sticking the State with attendant costs not caused by State action or inaction. I had to laugh, and it was one of those "it's about time" things that was sure to come.
Fire loves bad housekeeping. As a former wildland fire fighting person, I have vivid memories of how fire would burn up to Mr. Neat's house, with the manicured lawn, no brush, limbs and duff all raked up, and the cement shake roof, and just run around it to the house with the wood piles, junk cars, weeds and brambles, and burn the whole of it. In minutes, there was little left off Mr. Messy's house, and not even paint bubbles on Mr. Neat's house. And the fire was off and running, having by passed Mr Neat, getting a head of steam from Mr. Messy, and it was now hundreds of yards downwind, burning with abandon. There are Mr. Neat forests and Mr. Messy forests, and Uncle Sam has the most of Mr. Messy forests, and suffers accordingly. That Mr. Messy's fire seems to impact the budgets and sensibilities of the State and private sectors, you do wonder how support for the Federal government in any form is waning as such a rapid rate as change does not come and hope fades.
Or, you can get old and gradually not give a damn. Let is burn. Make it burn. Get rid of it all, then the problem is gone. Bother someone else.
"New technologies, new laws and an increasingly aware public are ushering in a new materials base for the 21st century - plant matter. Carbohydrates, the building blocks of plant matter, can be converted into chemicals, energy, textiles, building materials, paper, and many other industrial products. We call this new materials base a "carbohydrate economy." A carbohydrate economy reduces pollution, builds stronger rural communities, and supports a rooted farmer-owned manufacturing sector."
Then again, if forest fuels removal and power generation can be shown as a net energy gain/capture and results in less "organic volatiles" on a net-cost basis, shouldn't it play some kind of role?
Quote is from Peter Huber's "The Bottomless Well." “To improve on wood-burning fires, or grass-eating cows, perfect the cellulose-splitting enzyme. Then watch what 7 billion people will do to your forests and your grasslands.”
If forest fuels removal and power generation have the potential to yield attractive profits, then U.S. firms will enter the game. If a technology is not economically competitive, no amount of public subsidy or special political favors will make it so.
Mr. Power has the typicle liberal opinion. Let er burn in the forests. No more global warming, now it's climate change. Ignore the fact that several ice ages have come and gone. Man wasn't there to heat the atmosphere then.
Mr. Powers undoubtably headed out after writing this article in his fossil fuel burning Suburu and donned his plastic laced snow shoes for a little hike in the woods.
Freakin pin head...
I have a Huber book from 2001 or so, it was interesting but lacking in some respects.
Seriously, I think dispersed power generation using forest waste or thinning detritus is getting pretty close to a lowest-cost option, or at least competitive. Call it a least-of-many-evils. It'll play a role, whether TMP agrees or not. Won't be a primary player, but as a supplemental option. And if there's an actual, real, gen yoo wine willingness to pay for a green option in the power markets, mandates notwithstanding, I can live with it.