Possibly relevant to new biz here: Are "biomass" and "biochar" related?
I'm hoping to learn the answer, not start a wildfire, so PLEASE read both of the short articles that I've linked to below before responding. The excerpts are to highlight what I read as red flags. To be clear: The excerpts are to get you interested (or not), but please click through and read the full articles before responding.
I'm probably way off base, but I also know what Rayonier did and left us with for 24 years and counting. So if there's a startup that just wants to exploit our "resources" and create health and environment problems in doing so, then leave, it's better that people think about that now rather than after they're here. I'm hoping some of you have some expertise and know if my concern is warranted or not. And I'm sincerely hoping "not."
Company wants to build carbon sequestration, energy plant to Port Angeles
Posted By: Radio Pacific, Inc October 1, 2021
PORT ANGELES – Port Angeles may be the site of a new concept in sequestering carbon, generating energy and creating jobs.
EXCERPTS: The Myno Carbon Corporation is a startup that is looking to create biochar. Biochar is a stable, solid form of charcoal and generate electricity.
Biochar is produced by pyrolysis, that’s a thermal decomposition in the absence of oxygen. Myno would primarily use forest slash, sawdust, and hog fuel as its feedstock here. That feed supply is what made Myno’s Thor Kallestad turn to developing a plant in Port Angeles....
The company estimates about 190-thousand dry tons of materials will be consumed each year. The pyrolytic processes will convert the feedstock into about 40-thousand tons of biochar each year, and about 75-thousand megawatts of electricity each year. Plus, he anticipated the facility will create about 50 new jobs in Port Angeles.
Biomass is promoted as a carbon neutral fuel. But is burning wood a step in the wrong direction?
Many scientists and environmental campaigners question the industry’s claims to offer a clean, renewable energy source that the planet desperately needs
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/oct/04/biomass-plants-us-south-carbon-neutral
EXCERPTS:
Thick dust has been filling the air and settling on homes in Debra David’s neighborhood of Hamlet, North Carolina, ever since a wood pellet plant started operating nearby in 2019.
The 64-year-old said the pollution is badly affecting the health of the population, which has already been hit hard by Covid.
“More people are having breathing problems and asthma problems than ever before,” David said. She started suffering from asthma for the first time two years ago and other people in Hamlet have been getting nosebleeds, which she also puts down to the dust....
The plant, owned by Maryland-headquartered Enviva, the world’s largest biomass producer, is one of four the company operates in North Carolina, turning trees into wood pellets, most of which are exported to the UK, Europe and Japan to burn for energy.
Biomass has been promoted as a carbon-neutral energy source by industry, some countries and lawmakers on the basis that the emissions released by burning wood can be offset by the carbon dioxide taken up by trees grown to replace those burned.
Yet there remain serious doubts among many scientists about its carbon-neutral credentials, especially when wood pellets are made by cutting down whole trees, rather than using waste wood products. It can take as much as a century for trees to grow enough to offset the carbon released.