from AOL Energy post
By Peter Gardett Published: October 20, 2011
Utility executives appeared confident in the projects’ appeal for regulators as they signed an agreement with biomass fuel producer Enviva to provide woody biomass fuel to two of the power plants. Both plants, one located in Southampton and the other in Hopewell, Virginia, are set to convert from 63MW coal-fired facilities to 50MW biomass-fueled plants under current plans.
Enviva CEO John Keppler noted that Dominion was leading other utilities in embracing “the power of biomass.” The fuel has come under attack from environmentalists concerned about its carbon dioxide emissions profile and the impact it could have on local forests.
Enviva stressed that it is certified by the Sustainable Forestry Initiative and that it will contract out for its wood from loggers practicing “sustainable, responsible” forest management. The popularity of biomass in states like Virginia, where the paper and wood construction businesses have suffered through the extended economic downturn, is underpinned by the prospect of keeping forestry operations and sawmills in operation.
“The supply agreement with Dominion will create jobs throughout Enviva’s logging and forestry supply chain,” the company said in announcing the agreement.
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With this minute and a half imonfercial dedicated to advancing the bottom lines of the corporate interests and funders of Earth and Sky, a line has been crossed, ethically, journalistically and scientifically.Please, in what little remains of the eleventh hour of our planet, refrain from such obfuscation and misinformation around turning our forests into ethanol as a good thing. The explicit message is food versus fuel is all we have to be concerned with. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Most people can rightfully intuit forests have functions that go beyond corporate profiteering from ethanol blends. That the taxpayer is subsidizing 51 cents a gallon for ethanol production is reprehensible in itself.While we can understand Earth and Sky’s deep appreciation for its corporate funders such as the American Forest Foundation, Shell, Monsanto, BP and others deeply invested in the biomass industry, there’s two decades of science to draw from to give us serious pause. From that science we can grasp the foolishness of thinking biomass is going to solve our problem of fossil fuel dependence creating catastrophic climate change. Reducing forests to ethanol greatly worsens the mass extinction going on, and accelerates ocean acidification and global climate change. Biomass removal destroys structure and function of forest ecosystems and massive species declines are already our fate. The harm resulting from carbon released by forest biomass removal far exceeds any purported efficiencies your report blithely claims. Forests have functioned as carbon sinks, carbon reservoirs, essential plant and animal habitat, regulators of weather, and are necessary to sustaining watershed functions to name a few other benefits besides corporate commodities.