Tag: carbon

Woody Biomass: One step forward, two steps back?

Woody Biomass: One step forward, two steps back?

image

Last week I was a guest in my colleague’s Renewable Energy Law class.  One of the questions I was asked had to do with Maine’s Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS).  Maine’s RPS seems, at first glance, to be an ambitious goal (40 percent of Maine’s electricity is to come from renewable sources by 2017). However, at the time the RPS was made law, Maine was already mostly meeting that goal, thanks to Maine’s booming woody biomass industry. 

Other states in the New England Power Network can help fulfill their own RPS by purchasing renewable energy certificates (RECS) from other states in the network.  If a particular unit of energy is produced by a renewable source, that unit of energy could earn a REC, which could then be sold elsewhere.  However, even though every state in New England has a RPS (except Vermont, which has a goal), they don’t all accept the same types of energy for their RPS. Hence, there are some RECS that can be sold in some states, but not others.

Maine is the only state in New England that accepts biomass and large scale hydro to help fulfill its RPS. Therefore, any biomass facility that produces RECS can only sell them in Maine. In a report that came out detailing the performance of Maine’s RPS during the past year, a good 95% of the  Maine RPS was met through RECS generated from biomass.  And the fact that biomass credits can only be sold in Maine will depress the price of those credits -leading to less revenue for those facilities.

Which lead to one of the students’ questions: why don’t the other states accept biomass?  It’s a good question.  Leaving aside the (obvious) conclusion that Maine accepts biomass as an energy source in order to prop up its ailing wood products industry, why would other states not accept it? Isn’t biomass a renewable source of energy? And isn’t it carbon neutral ?

The answer, as any good economist knows, is “it depends.”  (My father used to say -paraphrasing Harry Truman – that what the world needs is a one-handed economist, because we’re always saying ”on the one hand….  But on the other hand…” ) Biomass is certainly a renewable source, in the strict physical sense that the “fuel” used – plant matter – is renewable.  The time it takes to regenerate, of course, depends on the growth rate of the plant matter used.

But there’s also no escaping from the grim third law of thermodynamics – that matter (or energy) can neither be created nor destroyed.  It takes power to make power.  How efficient the energy source is depends upon the energy content of the fuel and the energy used up in the process of making it.  Think lifecycle analysis.  If a unit of energy generated requires two units of energy in order to generate it, then that source isn’t really renewable – is it?

UPDATE: As my colleague Bill Strauss of FutureMetrics points out, “Every solid or liquid fuel whether coal, pellets, gasoline, diesel, natural gas, etc., gathers a carbon footprint from mining, extraction, refining, transport, etc.  Only biomass, if the net carbon stock is not depleted (i.e., the growth rate equals or exceeds the harvest rate), captures the CO2 from combustion contemporaneously…  Wood pellets are a low carbon solution… they are carbon neutral in combustion but are not carbon neutral over the supply chain.  Of course neither is anything else that depends on fossil fuel for transport etc.”

Absolutely, Bill, and thanks for that. (So people actually do read this stuff…) Check out their website!

Biofuel can be made from a number of things: corn, switch grass, trees, wood  manufacturing waste, to name a few.  And there are a number of ways biofuel can be produced – burned, fermented, digested by bacteria, or “gasified.”  The energy content of the fuel as well as the energy input needed vary widely for each process. 

As for whether it’s carbon neutral – well,  anyone who makes that claim is doing some pretty funky carbon accounting.  In the sense that the carbon released when the tree is burned is the same amount of carbon that was “stored” in the tree – then yes. But what about the carbon used in harvesting the tree?  Getting it to the processing site,  and from there to where it will ultimately be used? There’s also the fact that trees uptake carbon at different rates in their lifecycle, and that different species of trees uptake carbon at different rates. So for it to be carbon neutral, the net stock of carbon in the forest needs to remain unchanged. It’s possible, but it’s not as simple as “cut a tree, plant a tree.”

What about the claim that it’s sustainable? Again,  it depends.  If the trees are harvested at the same rate they regenerate, then yes. And, Maine’s biomass is mostly from residue from the forest products industry, so the use of waste product for energy gets a thumbs up in my book.

Recently,  two major biomass facilities in Maine went offline,  alarming the logging industry and others in the forest products supply chain. It also should alarm environmentalists.  The decline in oil prices has not only boosted demand for oil,  but depressed demand for biomass and other renewable sources of energy. Biomass may not be a perfect source of energy,  but it needs to be part of the energy solution in Maine.

The Clean Power Plan: is Maine already there?

The Clean Power Plan: is Maine already there?

image

On July 17, the Portland Press Herald ran an Op Ed advocating for the Clean Power Plan (the name that has been given to President Obama’s Climate Action Plan).  The Op Ed reads, “the goal of the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed Clean Power Plan is to cut U.S. carbon pollution 30 percent from 2005 levels by 2030. Each state will be allowed to develop its own approach to producing power with less pollution, whether that means increasing energy efficiency, closing or updating coal plants or building new renewable energy systems, like solar or wind farms.”

The Op Ed then proceeds to point out that Maine has the highest asthma rate in the country (true) but that the majority of the asthma-causing pollution in the air Mainers breathe wafts over to us from coal fired plants in the mid West.  Also true.  One could be forgiven, then, for wondering why Maine needs to cut carbon pollution when the majority of the pollution is caused elsewhere?

The devil, as always, is in the details. Maine is not obligated to reduce carbon emissions 30% from 2005 levels by 2030. The entire US is obligated to do that, under the proposed plan.  The EPA has set targets for each state. Maine’s proposed target is actually the second lowest of the 49 states subject to the plan (Vermont has no power plants that qualify as an affected Electricity Generating Unit, or EGU.  Maine has four, although the EPA and the Maine DEP disagree about which power plants classify and which don’t).  Under the proposed plan, then, Maine would be required to reduce its emissions by about 14% below 2012 levels.

It’s actually not entirely clear, by the way, exactly how much Maine would have to reduce.  In typical bureaucratic fashion, the “goals” that EPA are proposing are not mass-based (i.e., a certain number of tons of carbon dioxide emitted.  EPA’s proposed goals are a rate, as in how much CO2 per unit of electricity generated.  However, it’s not even that simple.  The target rate is actually the following:  pounds of CO2 emitted in the numerator, and the sum of the amount of electricity actually generated PLUS the amount of electricity avoided by investing in energy-efficiency in the denominator).  EPA constructed the ratio this way in order to give credit to states that encourage conservation and energy efficiency.  (Update: the EPA has recently proposed to let states convert their targeted rates to a mass-based rate.  How this is going to occur and who is going to make the conversion is still up in the air.)

Moreover, the proposed goals are set using a method that EPA calls BSER, or “Best System of Emissions Reduction.”  This system includes four “blocks,” which include: improvements in emissions rates from coal-fired power plants (Maine has one); the replacement of coal-fired power plants with natural gas or renewable sources; and conservation.  (Only the first of these, apparently, is directly under the EPA’s jurisdiction. But I’m not an environmental lawyer, so that’s about as far as I’ll go there.)  That’s why some states who are large polluters have targets that seem relatively high (meaning more pollution allowed) when compared to other less polluting states that have a relatively stringent goal (Texas versus Washington, for example).

EPA does not specify how individual states should achieve their targets. They do, however, require that states submit plans detailing how they will achieve the targets and demonstrating compliance.

Here is where the bulk of Maine’s objections arise.  Maine already participates in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI – see my post here) and is already on course to exceed EPA’s target.  The Maine Department of Environmental Protection argues, with justification in my opinion, that Maine should not be penalized for being a “first mover,” and should, in fact, be exempted from the Clean Power Plan.  (I’m not sure if I’d go that far, but I do believe Maine should be able to submit streamlined documentation.)

Others of Maine’s objections are predictable, given Maine’s power and industry mix: what about co-generation? Biomass? Hydropower? The EPA’s rules either don’t include them as eligible renewable sources or are unclear in the way they are treated.

It doesn’t seem, then, that compliance with the Clean Power Plan will be an undue burden on Maine’s energy consumers.  I agree that some rules and calculations need to be clarified, and that Maine should be praised, not punished, for being a “first mover.”  But the biggest effect of the Clean Power Plan in Maine will not be felt in our wallets.  It will be felt in our lungs – and perhaps in our climate.

This post is already too long to get into the benefits – both direct and ancillary -of the Clean Power Plan. So I’ll leave that to the next one.

Any thoughts?