Wood pellets are highly flammable by design. Small pieces of compressed woody leftovers, like sawdust, are used in everything from heating to grilling in your home. However, their flammable nature is made for dangerous working conditions. Since 2010, at least 52 fires have been occurring at timber pellet facilities across the United States, according to a database of incidents compiled by the Southern Environmental Law Center.
Of the 15 largest timber pellet facilities, at least eight people have had a fire or explosion since 2014. According to To the Environmental Integrity Project, a nonprofit organization founded by a former director of the US Environmental Protection Agency.
At the same time, Drax, the world’s largest biomass company, is cutting trees across North America, pledging to sell them as a replacement for fossil fuels. However, even that track record has been checked in accidents.
At South Shields, UK, wooden pellets aimed at Drax plants Burn spontaneously During storage at Tyne Port, 40 firefighters started a 12-hour firefighter firefighter fire. In Port Allen, Louisiana, the Draxwood Pellet Facility fell into flames in November 2021.
Now, despite finding himself in the midst of a lawsuit over an accidental fire damage, Drax is pushing a new business proposal. The company claims to not only cut down the trees to make the wood, but also to help stop wildfires.
In October 2023, after purchasing two land in California and building two pellet plants, one in Tuolumne County and one in Lassen County, met with residents of Tuolumne County, a partner organization of Drax, or Tuolumne County, to address concerns about making Wild Fellets available.
The GSNR has since promoted close work with community members. However, residents living near the proposed pellet factory site were not always aware of the plans, according to Megan Fisuke, who directs rural workers at local community colleges. “People 100 feet away from [proposed] The pellet factory didn’t know about that,” Fisuke said.
Both of the proposed factories are located in forest areas threatened by wildfires. “We wanted to learn from these incidents. The design features can go a long way in reducing the risk of fire,” said Patrick Blackrock, executive director of GSNR, when asked about the risks that wood pellets would be equipped.
If a county representative approves the plan, loggers will be permitted to obtain “dead or dying trees” and “woody biomass” from within a 100-mile radius of a pellet mill within the two counties, which overlap with the Stanislaus National Forest and Yosemite National Park.
Fisuke said he saw an instance that was unrelated to Drax, whose loggers were not properly trained and ended up taking away more wood than would have been allowed in the wildfire resilience scheme. “What’s the difference [the loggers] It’s been said, and what happens on the ground is very different,” Fisuke said.[You have] There are many barriers for those who are underpaid and young people, as English may not be the first language. ”
Residents in Lassen and Tuolum counties are fighting Drax’s plans to build a pellet mill, gristing that making timber pellets and simultaneously thinning the forest in the woodland would only exacerbate the risk of fire in the community. “They have downplayed the scale of this again and again,” said Renee Orth, a Tuolumne County resident who opposes the development plan.
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In January 2024, Drax formalized its partnership with GSNR Memorandum of Understanding. A few months later, the company announcement He had taken over work in California and created a new subsidiary called Elimini to focus on “carbon removal” in the United States. However, before Elimini and GSNR build the factory, they want to ensure a viable plan for transporting the timber pellets. GSNR plans to build the facility in Stockton, about 100 miles west of Pellet Mills, to transport wood pellets overseas. The plan is subject to strong opposition.
Little Manila Rising – a community-driven group of residents in South Stockton – has decided to counter Drax, which requires city approval before beginning construction of the transport facility.
“Now, our community has the opportunity to determine if they want the industry at a port with a track record of fires, explosions and fugitive dust emissions,” says Gloria Alonso Cruz, environmental justice coordinator at Little Manila Rising.
Cruz believes that the GSNR “reliant on the voices of marginalized communities and has never heard of them.” “We’re not going to let that happen.”
A Drax spokesman told Grist “no decisions have been made regarding potential final markets or future arrangements with GSNR,” but GSNR has not signed other companies and other MOUs. Drafting Environmental Impact Reports It states that Europe and Asia are intended final markets for wood pellets.
The EU, together with Japan and South Korea, subsidizes wood pellets as renewable fuel as renewable fuel, based on carbon accounting, which assumes that it will replace the CO2 burned after the wood is removed. However, over the past few years, evidence has emerged that burning US-made wood is currently releasing comparable annual greenhouse gas emissions in between. 6 and 7 million passenger cars. One study Proposed It can take between 44 and 104 years for a new tree to reabsorb the carbon released during the clear cut of the wooden pellet. letter A group of 772 scientists sent to the European Parliament concluded: [for biomass] In 2050, gigajoules of final energy can produce 2-3 times more carbon in the atmosphere. ”
To move forward, the GSNR must first wait for approval from Stockton Port. Port Director Kirk Dejes say They are waiting for the Environmental Impact Report to be completed before signing the contract. GSNR released a draft of the Environmental Impact Report on October 22, 2024 with a 90-day review period. Comments will be submitted, incorporated into an amended version, and sent to the nonprofit that owns the GSNR. The GSNR will then need to obtain local permits for Tuolumne and Lassen counties and demonstrate compliance with the California Environmental Quality Act.
Photo: Lab Ky Mo/Sopa Images/Lightrocket by Getty Images
Among them Drafting Environmental Impact ReportsGSNR said it would be expected that “if the proposed project is fully operational, it would be handled by a biomass-only logging project, which on average deals with approximately 85,779 acres of woodland per year.” If the project is greenlight, approximately 2,640 square miles will be recorded over 20 years. This corresponds to a miles wide forest that stretches from Sacramento to Boston. BlackRock told Grist that the organization turned off the wildfire project. the study Known as the TAMM Review, it has been found that combined with thinning and prescribed burns can reduce the severity of wildfires by 62-72%.
However, climate scientist Dominique Delasala said the author of Tamm Review had mistakenly misled his work and ignored 37 papers that contradicted the findings. “The forest is no longer a forest,” added Delasala. “The issues that have been fired are very narrowly covered to gain preconceived notions. We don’t look at collateral damage to the ecosystem and climate.
Kim Davis, a research ecologist at the USDA Forest Service and lead author of the 2014 TAMM Review Study, said she was not included in the 37 studies cited because they did not adequately suppress the scientific standards, and that mechanical treatment could reduce the severity of future fires. “The study underwent rigorous statistical, technical and peer review,” Davis said. “We oppose it in honor of the statement that our work improperly cited or misrepresented research and data.”
In any case, the US Forest Service has already blocked densely forested areas, particularly those seen as dangerous from wildfires, burning them in controlled areas known as slash piles. BlackRock said the partnership between Drax and GSNR shares this same purpose. From the perspective of the GSNR and from the perspective of many local politicians, the use of wood that would otherwise be unnecessarily burned in wooden pellet facilities is advantageous for both parties.
But campaigners say in other markets Drax and its subsidiaries have expanded their operations beyond the broken mountains, cutting down healthy trees to create timber pellets. in 2022the BBC revealed that the wood used at the Drax facility came from Canada’s clear cut primary forest. A year later, after residents of the town of British Columbia, Canada, he asked Drax to help clear the nearby slash pile, an employee at the Ministry of the Environment said. Tyee Tens of thousands of trees from healthy forests had been transformed into wooden pellets.
According to Delasala, large trees, a chopped variety, act as wind buffers. If these trees are removed through cutting operations, such as opening air vents in the wood stove, the fire can spread quickly due to increased ventilation. “If a fire occurs, wind speeds can increase and trees can spread rapidly into the forest as dendritic retraction causes dryness from the lower floors,” Delasala said. “Therefore, the forests are over-ventilated, making them more likely to move faster and the wind is spreading.”
Pellet factories, which have a history of igniting fire and producing piles of flammable dust, must be cleaned up and built in the forest to provide woody fuel. Although the GSNR was guaranteed to follow strict fire protocols, proximity to the forests has strained some residents and exacerbated concerns that wildfire treatment plans would be more likely to cause more fires.
Drax’s involvement doesn’t reassure them either. The company has been under scrutiny from regulators recently. UK energy regulators have made the company $25 million fine In August 2024, sustainability data was incorrectly reported. Three months later, Land and Climate Review reported that Drax had broken US environmental rules Over 11,000 times According to official records. The violations encouraged action from communities across the Golden State. 185 organizations We ask California to reject the suggestion of wood pellets.
Speaking to Grist, one of Tuolumne County residents, Orth captured the arguments against Drax and the GSNR in a very concise way.
