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TOM WHEELER:

Welcome to the Econews Report. I'm your host this week, Tom Wheeler, executive director of EPIC, the Environmental Protection Information Center. This week, we're talking about the controversial proposed project brought forward by Golden State Natural Resources to build two biomass pellet plants, one in Lassen and one in Tuolumne, and an export facility to send those pellets to China or Japan or other foreign markets to be burnt for energy. So this is a big and controversial project. It has a lot of components and the draft environmental impact report, I should say, has just been released. So we are all reading through the document right now. I will give that caveat for our discussion. Joining me to discuss this project and concerns brought by environmentalists are Nick Joslin, the forest and watershed watch manager at the Mount Shasta Bioregional Ecology Center. Hey, Nick.

NICK JOSLIN:

Tom, thanks for having me.

WHEELER:

Oh, thanks for joining. And we also have Rita Vaughn Frost, the forest advocate at the Natural Resources Defense Council. Hey, Rita.

RITA VAUGHN FROST:

Howdy, Tom. Happy to be here.

WHEELER:

Rita, maybe from the "howdy" people can understand that you are a newcomer to the West Coast and you have spent a lot of time in the Southeast. Pellet plants are part of the Southeast at this point. They've been around for a while, they supply wood pellets to European biomass plants. And so a lot of our experience of what is being proposed here has already been experienced elsewhere in other communities in the United States. Can you talk about how you got into this work and why you're passionate about tackling this Golden State Natural Resources, or as we'll call it, GSNR project?

FROST:

Yeah. So I'm a Southerner. I was born and raised in the South, and I started my career in the Southeastern United States around 2014. I worked for a small organization in the Southeastern United States working to protect communities and work with communities that were facing impacts of industrial logging. When I started work in 2014, the biggest newcomer we saw on the stage was the wood pellet biomass industry, which had arisen only a few years earlier. It had really started operating around 2012 in the Southeastern United States in response to renewable energy policies in Europe that claimed that forest biomass burning was carbon neutral. As such, coal plants couldn't wait to get their hands on wood because they were getting the greenhouse gas emission reductions claims that they so wanted, and thereby they were subsidized to the tune of today, up to billions of dollars. Because of those renewable energy policies, the wood pellet biomass industry just exploded in the Southeastern United States. It is ground zero for wood pellet production.

Since those early years that we were watching this industry expand and grow, it has ballooned. It has grown 500% in a time span of just 10 years, and now countries in the Pacific Rim, such as Japan, South Korea, etc., they want to copy these renewable energy policies that Europe and the United Kingdom first set out all those years ago, back in 2009, 2010. Because of that, they need a new sourcing region. The United States has some of the greatest forests, and yet these forests are really susceptible to being exploited for industries such as the wood pellet biomass industry.

Now, again, I'll tie this back to the policy because renewable policies that incentivize forest biomass have taken the claims of sustainability around forestry and just sent those up in smoke. The reason being is that forest sustainability is no proxy for carbon accounting or the climate change emissions that come from wood pellet biomass. Wood pellet biomass burning as a smoke stack is even more carbon intensive than the fossil fuels it was meant to replace. And unfortunately, for communities on the ground back in the southeast, as well up in Canada, which is the second biggest producing region in the world, are facing some major air pollution impacts from these wood pellet production mills for segregation, as well as they're not seeing meaningful or significant changes to their own livelihoods in response to this industry cropping up.

WHEELER:

Well, Rita, you've introduced three main topics that I'd love to get into in this show, which are greenhouse gas emissions, the impact that feeding these biomass plants is going to have on our Western forests, our forests of California, and the impact of these biomass plants. We're turning biomass wood products into pellets and the export facility, how these are going to impact local communities.

I'm going to toss a question over to Nick Joslin. So Nick, you are the forest watch manager at the Mount Chester Bio-Regional Ecology Center. You're paying a lot of attention to both private and public, particularly public forest management. I know that you have concerns about how this new market for forest products, for biomass, for trees and limbs and all of these things is going to impact forest management decisions in your region. Can you talk more about that?

JOSLIN:

So, forest health initiatives recently have become heavily subsidized by a couple of different federal mechanisms that are essentially paying for the removal of trees from the forest and looking for new markets for them. The biomass industry has had a couple different phases of development over the last couple decades, and this, I would call about the third wave of biomass interest. Also, seeing probably the biggest subsidies they've ever received, which actually covers the fact that none of this material actually would pay for itself to be removed from the forest, and that's one of the major proxies that I think a lot of timber companies use to describe the need as well, it's gotta pay for itself. And so, these initiatives now are essentially using taxpayer money to get unmarketable material and move it to central locations for processing. This Golden State Natural Resources facility would need a large area to source from. These are new pathways for this material to end up being utilized.

WHEELER:

Listeners in Humboldt County, I should also note that portions of Humboldt County are included in the area that are anticipated to be the pull area for this Lassen plant. So effectively kind of draw a hundred mile radius around the town of Bieber, California, and anything within that zone is where they anticipate that they will be able to pull materials from. So a portion of Eastern Humboldt County is included in that pull radius.

So we have a new way to fund logging, right? So previously logging had to be done in such a way that the forest products that are being pulled out would have to pay for the material, or it'd have to pay for all the logging equipment, all the haul, whatever. Here now, because we're subsidizing biomass, we are able to take a lot more from a lot further distances than is desirable. One thing that I've noticed in presentations from Golden State Natural Resources is when talking about the feedstock for these biomass plants, they often will point to things like slash piles or maybe wood chips already coming from timber mills as the source of this material, which seems to suggest that this is already stuff that is going to need to be disposed of in some way, and that this is just disposing of it in a different way and adding value in the process.

But in reading the draft environmental impact report, we get a totally different picture. In that document, the company emphasizes that they're going to take all round wood, trees functionally, trees that have been cut down, and turn those into these pellets. Trees up to 40 inches in diameter. A 40 inch diameter tree, Nick, in your region, that's a pretty old tree, right?

JOSLIN:

I would consider mature or old growth.

WHEELER:

And so we are potentially going to have new market pressures driving folks to do logging projects that don't really make sense for any reason, but to supply biomass to these plants to be pelletized, to then be shipped to Asian markets to be burned for energy. So we lose our forests, but we accept pollution as the consequence of this. It doesn't seem like it's a great deal for us.

So one concern that I've had, and I think that you share it too, is that we are going to have the tail wagging the dog here. GSNR says that these sorts of plants are going to be great because they're going to provide a market for unmerchantable material, for things like slash piles, so that we can have more forest fuels reduction work. But ultimately, these are going to be large facilities that put out a lot of product, and they're going to need to run. So we're going to ultimately have to log to supply the materials to be turned into pellets. And that's scary for folks like us who are forest and watershed advocates.

Nick, there's also this issue of pollution in the adjacent community. Can you talk about the effect of all of the trucks and all of the whole other world of activity that's going to be necessary to do this? What that's going to mean for communities near you who are going to have such an increase in truck traffic and other work associated with this biomass project?

JOSLIN:

Sure, from what I can glean so far from the DEIR is that 120 trucks will be needed per day to come into this plant to keep it running. The plant itself will actually either burn material to generate its own heat for drying this material and or potentially generate its own power on site to supply its energy needs. Once these trees show up from the forest, which is in and of itself a pretty intensive process, they will be chipped, sorted, dried. And then, like you had mentioned earlier, Tom, these pellets, there's actually like a pretty specific recipe for making these pellets work the way they need to.

And so that does require a large percentage of the material to be from whole trees. They cannot just use branches and twigs and pine needles. They will actually probably just burn that stuff on site as a drying mechanism for the whole trees. And so the machine will be needed to be fed constantly. And that process of stockpiling that material and running those facilities 24 hours a day, seven days a week, is going to require a continuous supply chain that the operator will not want to interrupt for any reason. So once this thing fires up, they're not going to take a day off.

WHEELER:

So, we have a lot of truck trips coming from the forest to these plants. Then the pellets are going to be shipped via rail or truck to South Stockton, where there is a proposed export facility. So then the pellets will sit, be loaded onto ocean-going ships, and be brought to market in other countries. Rita, can you talk to me about South Stockton and the fence line communities that will live near this pellet export facility, and what the pellet export facility might mean to these communities?

FROST:

Yeah, I would love to because this is extremely concerning for many of the advocates and many of the community members in Stockton. We heard this loudly and clearly at the public meeting that was held in Stockton last night, October 30th. And I, from my experience, what we're seeing in Stockton is an environmental injustice unfolding. South Stockton is already an incredibly overburdened community.

There's no true insight in the DEIR why Stockton has been chosen as a sacrifice in this project. They're inevitably going to be facing more rail traffic, more ocean going vessels, the exact sort of transportation that the South Stockton community for years has been advocating to the state of California to please lessen. And yet, based on the DEIR, DSNR expects to use up to 10,000 rail cars a year to deliver their material. This would come from an estimated 100 trains, two to three engines each.

Furthermore, a million tons of material coming out of that port calls for nearly an additional 30 ocean going vessels, which from what I'm told from those advocates that know their community best, those are by far the dirtiest sources of pollution for Stockton. Just to put it in context, the Port of Stockton already has some of the highest pollution burdens in California. In fact, they're ranked the 99th percent of that. They have high rates of asthma, which are between the 96th and 99th percent. This is so egregious. The Stockton is listed as a non-attaining area for particulate matter and ozone. They've been selected as a community to receive additional supports for reducing air pollution under California AB617.

And yet, this project is getting pushed through. Some other concerns to really elevate here based off of experience in the Southeast is the catastrophic fire and explosion hazards that come from gas released during pellet production, transportation, and handling. There have been fires and explosions at pellet storage silos at ports across the Southeastern United States for the past 20 years or in over 50 fires or explosions. In my home state of Texas, a fire at a wood pellet storage silo actually burned for 102 days in 2017, which sent smoke into the adjacent neighborhood, caused the hospitalization of many residents.

Another thing to bring up here in relation to the wood dust, aside from the fires and explosions, is the fugitive wood dust itself. So by handling pellets, they inevitably release fine dust. This includes forms such as PM2.5 and PM10. That is important to the community of South Stockton considering their asthma risk. One community I've had the honor to work alongside includes Sunset Park in Wilmington, North Carolina. They have a wood pellet storage and export terminal. This community was guaranteed fully enclosed operations of wood pellet handling to lessen the fugitive stuff. And yet, the community has sent in complaint after complaint week after week to North Carolina DEQ for the past seven years complaining about the wood dust that showers down on their houses, their lawns, their barbecues, even their animals when they just play fetch in their yard.

WHEELER:

You are listening to the Econews Report. This week, we're talking about the controversial proposed project brought forward by Golden State Natural Resources to build two biomass pellet plants.

FROST:

It's so egregious that North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality has actually forced the wood pellet facility and storage terminal to adopt additional fugitive death control measures, yet the community members continue to speak out. It's very difficult to manage this industry. It's not just the wood pellet storage and export terminals, it's also the wood pellet production facilities themselves. They often act in almost with a style of impunity in relation to the Clean Air Act, both in the United States as well as up in Canada.

Just to put a finer point on that, they've faced 189 violations up in Canada. Over 180 of those are air quality violations. I think for the state of California, particularly in communities that have air pollution issues, such as Stockton, the Central Valley, the Tuolumne County facility area, we need to be highlighting that issue because we don't need additional pollution sprints at this time for criteria pollutants, nor the greenhouse gas emissions that we were talking about earlier.

WHEELER:

Something that has me concerned is that, I haven't checked today, but translations of the environmental documents have not been made available either. The community in South Stockton includes a lot of non-English speakers or individuals where English is not their first language. And so there's been this issue where the Golden State Natural Resources is pushing forward with this project is holding public meetings, but has not made documents accessible to residents.

I want folks who are going to be burdened by this project, should it occur, to understand and to be able to advocate for themselves in the best way possible, that the public comment period is ticking along without translations and all the documents being available to them. So we've talked about the energy intensity in some respects of a project like this. So we are going to have logging activity in the forest. So we're going to have heavy machinery being used there to fell limb trees, to stack those onto trucks. Those trucks will then 120 a day, per Nick Joslin, to the Lassen facility alone. So bringing materials to the plants, and then we'll have railcars deliver the pellets from the factories to Stockton, and then ocean-going vessels taking those pellets to foreign markets where they'll be burned.

So if you don't know where I'm going with this, I think that there are a lot of big greenhouse gas concerns for a project like this. Wood is not a very energy dense material, and transporting it far distances increases the energy intensity of the fuel when it is ultimately burned. Rita, what do we know about greenhouse gas emissions from other pellet plants, and what can we expect perhaps from this proposed facility?

FROST:

So you did a really great job of detailing all the upstream emissions, those are uncapturable emissions as such, you don't, we don't have a way to capture emissions from harvesting drying pellets. One of the places that they make the most fatal flaw though, that is not about the upstream emissions, it's actually the emissions that come from the smokestacks themselves when wood pellets biomass is burnt. Just to detail those European Union and British policies earlier, GS&R has made the same fatal flaw of assuming burning wood pellets of a smokestack will produce zero emissions. Let me just be very clear, this disregards the basic laws of physics, it's scientifically indefensible.

We really need to get into the cradle to great emissions of forest biomass. Scientists across the world, including our own EPA scientific advisory board, have discounted any sort of policy notion that burning biomass could be carbon neutral. The categorical assumption that GS&R and other policymakers have made is that the emissions released through the combustion of forest biomass are somehow inherently offset by forest regrowth, that they are mitigated through that biogenic process, and thus they should not be counted. However, firing forest biomass at a smokestack increases stack emissions and introduces a carbon debt period, and it relies on uncertain future mitigation. The best estimates that we have based off of the forest type, where it's coming from, where it's eventually burned, those estimates can be anywhere from four decades to over a century. For anybody who's paying attention to the climate change impacts all around us, we do not have the time to wait for that.

When you burn forest material at the smokestack, it's immediately released at that time and place of combustion. This is enormously concerning for a state like California, because even though we're not proposing, at least not yet, the burnies would tell us that any of the bioenergy facilities, they will be burned somewhere in the world. That increase in carbon emissions is very detrimental and scary for a state that is seeing wildfires that are right now being climate-driven themselves.

So there's very minimal confidence that GSNR is going to guarantee any sort of carbon dioxide emissions, and we should not be pointing to them as any sort of mitigation tactic. Rather, especially in relation to these large trees that somebody may source and the increase in logging that the state may face because of them, we should be investing in forest protection and forest resilience measures. And then in relation to wildfires, we really need to be putting our resources, our time and energy towards home hardening and vegetation management that is going to be effective at protecting those homes and livelihoods, which is within a 60 to 100 foot buffer of homes and communities.

WHEELER:

So Nick, there's something funny about all of this, right? Funny in the most depressing sense, where they are, GSNR is using climate change and the impact that climate change is going to have on Western forests as a justification to increase logging. This increased logging will then result in more carbon emissions that is only going to further and worsen our global climate crisis. We also know that Golden State Natural Resources is partnering with some really bad players, including Drax. Nick, do you feel confident being able to talk to us about who Drax is? One of their partners in developing this scheme?

JOSLIN:

So Drax is, as far as I am aware, the operator of many of the Southeast pellet mills. They are also a power generation company, predominantly in England. They are basically responsible for coming up with the financial capital for this plant to even be proposed in California. So the facility alone is gonna cost several hundred million dollars. This is not something that GSNR is capable of coming up with. And so this partnership will rely heavily on this multinational corporation that does not have a good track record with abiding by environmental regulations. So it represents perhaps one of my greatest concerns about this partnership that's forming between GSNR and Drax.

WHEELER:

We've had a really concerning report coming out of British Columbia related to Drax, where Drax has sourced wood pellets for its biomass plants that have ultimately been traced to old growth logging in British Columbia. So if we're talking about what the kind of worst case scenario is, it's that we're putting new pressures on our forest to log our primary forests, these forests that are relatively untouched by us so far, that are hot spots for biodiversity. This is who GSNR is partnering with to bring this forward. That's a concern. Rita, do you have anything else to add about Drax?

FROST:

Yeah, I would love to, because I'm very familiar with Drax's operations in the Southeast. Drax is one of the most notorious wood pellet producers for breaking the law in the Southeast. They've racked up millions of dollars of fines, just to list out a couple, two and a half million dollars of fines in Mississippi and the 3.2 million in fines in Louisiana. Not exactly your most polluter, I guess, I guess I would say they're pretty polluter-friendly states, right?

So it's not a very good record that we're looking at in bringing those sorts of operations to the state of California. Communities that face Drax in the Southeast are frequently complaining about their operations, and this isn't alone to the Southeast. Policymakers even in the UK, where Drax is based, have spoken out against the obscene subsidies that Drax received just this week down at the COP16 Biodiversity Summit in Columbia. Barry Gardner, who's a member of Parliament, spoke out vigorously against forest biomass energy, specifically calling out Drax and saying that the nine billion dollars that the UK has spent has really been a waste, as it's made air pollution and carbon emissions even worse while raising forests. What that raises to our attention is that Drax is under a very watchful eye and they are under scrutiny in the UK. Drax is reliant on the subsidies that the UK government gives Drax. Right now, their subsidies to extend past the 2027 period are under review. If Drax doesn't receive those subsidies, these mills are going to go belly up. There is no way that they are going to be able to exist.

As Nick so rightly pointed out, it's not profitable. In fact, it's very expensive to accumulate wood pellet material, to process it into wood pellets, to transport it. They're relying on public funding that apparently is supposed to be helping them face the climate crisis. So I think that given these situations, and especially knowing that they're under some harsh review at this time in the UK, it should also make us very wary from opening up our doors to them.

WHEELER:

Absolutely. Well, so this is just a taste of the concerns that we all have. There's going to be more to come. As I said, at the beginning of the show, the draft environmental impact report for this project has just been released. So we are waiting through it. The DEIR itself is 1300 pages. And then when you add in all the appendices, it's thousands of pages more. So we are steadily working our way through it in our drafting comments. Rita, anyone is concerned about this project? And wants to get involved. How can they interact with you and with NRDC?

FROST:

Thanks for asking. So, for Natural Resources Defense Council, we are trying to mobilize a public action, so we would like to be able to send comments to Golden State Natural Resources on this forest resilience demonstration project. So, around mid-November, we will have an action alert on our website that folks can go to and take. It's just on NRDC.org. I would say that that is the best option right now. The other option is to go to CEQA.net, that's the overall California holding house of this project, and to look up the project itself, go through the draft environmental impact report, come up with comments on your own, and even reach out to us as advocates to let us know your questions, if there's anything that we can support you with, or do some fact-finding on. Everything that Nick and I have said, everything that our coalition says, is scientifically back. So, we would love to be able to support the public in elevating any concerns that they have.

WHEELER:

Nick, Mount Shasta Bio-Regional Ecology Center. Y'all do great work in what is sometimes a hostile environment. Northeast California is not terribly welcoming or friendly to environmentalists. How can folks get involved and understand what you're working on and help support you?

JOSLIN:

I think, much like Rita said, we're going to be looking over this document for the next month, trying to weed out some of the more detrimental components of it. I think I've looked just briefly at what is the health risk analysis component of it, which is an appendices that is about 3,000 pages long that documents the expected increase in asthma, respiratory disease, heart disease, cancers related to living near or around these facilities or the port facilities. That should be concerning. Like Rita said, these places around these facilities are sacrifice zones. It's pretty incredible to think that California would allow this type of industry to spring up, especially given that the Port of Stockton is identified as already being heavily burdened with these disease risks. We are a very small grassroots organization. Our capacity is actually assisted by NRDC. We gather a lot of scientific information from them, and we are looking for anybody to help support us, always available for questions. We are working with a pretty broad group of conservation-minded organizations to work on a collective comment for this project.

WHEELER:

And this has been a really fascinating and already a tremendously impactful coalition of groups that has come together. We have international players, we have biofuel watch, we have big green national groups, natural resources, defense council center for biological diversity, Sierra club, and then we have regional groups that are terribly effective like Nick's at the Mount Shasta bio regional ecology center.

So if you are concerned about this project, feel better that it has the full attention of the environmental movement and we are working on it right now.

Okay. Hey, thanks, Nick. Thanks Rita. Well, this has been another issue of the Econews Report. Join us again next week on this time and channel for more environmental news from the North Coast of California. Thanks, all.