wood pellets are making the news here in BC
Demand for wood pellets fuelling B.C. forest loss, report claims
Forests Minister says source materials are actually sawmills, shavings, chips, forest residues
Lauren Collins
April 25, 2024
A new report claims a sharp increase in wood-pellet exports is fuelling the loss of primary forests in B.C., but Forests Minister Bruce Ralston says that is not the case.
The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives released a 40-page report Tuesday (April 23), which tracks the surge in B.C. wood-pellet exports. It says B.C.’s forests are in crisis after decades of “intense logging” that has “depleted and fragmented” the forest industry, and now the demand of wood pellets is adding to the loss of B.C.’s primary forests.
Authored by Ben Parfitt, a resource policy analyst and former journalist, it includes six policy reforms from “dramatically” increasing the protection of remaining and primary old-growth forests to zoning the province’s forests and existing plantations into three broad categories to requiring by law that all timber-processing – includin g wood-pellet mills – must submit annual reports.
In the report, Parfitt says that unless there are significant changes in forest policy, “the likelihood is that even more of the shrinking stock of primary forests in BC and Canada will be logged to supply bioenergy companies with wood pellets.”
However, Ralston told reporters Wednesday (April 24) that “forests are not being turned into pellets,” adding that the source material for making pellets is sawmills, shavings, chips and forest residues.
He said all of those materials, which are taken to the Drax mills and made into pellets, would otherwise be burned in slash piles that “releases a lot of carbon and it wastes a lot of valuable forest products.”
The report notes that B.C. produces more wood pellets than any other Canadian province, and production is “dominated” by U.K.-based company Drax, which owns the world’s single-largest wood-burning facility. Drax also owns, or partially owns, eight of B.C’s 12 pellet mills and is responsible for 80 per cent of the province’s exports.
B.C.’s wood-pellet exports are mainly driven by Japan and the U.K. which both burn millions of tonnes of pellets each year in thermal plants to generate electricity.
The report says B.C.’s trade in wood pellets has doubled in the past decade, led by massive increases to Japan following the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. The country switched to increase energy production from other sources, including thermal electricity plants that burn wood pellets after being faced with the loss of nuclear reactors that were damaged by the tsunami.
In the last decade, Japan has imported nearly 1.7 million tonnes of wood pellets, up from 61,700 tonnes in 2014, the report says.
But the report adds that in the same decade that Japan’s demand for wood pellets soared, logging rates in B.C. fell by 38 per cent – and are expected to decline further.
...
https://www.revelstokereview.com/new...claims-7349842
Prev
Linear Mode
