BURNING BIODIVERSITY

 The Redbank Power Station currently lies idle near Singleton in the Hunter Valley. When operating, the 151-megawatt coal fired plant, deemed to be among the dirtiest in Australia, was retired in 2014 after operating for only 14 years.

In 2012, as part of the federal government's Clean Energy Future package, National Power, the former owners of Redbank, received $8,766,418 from the Energy Security Fund to close the plant.

In late 2023, Verdant Earth Technologies Limited (VETL) proposed the reopening of the power station after converting it from coal to wood-fired generation.

The idea had first been muted as far back as mid-2021, the original intent being to obtain what was described as “ultra-low-quality logs, sawmill residues and the sourcing of wood waste from both forests and other wood processing facilities”. Unsurprisingly, the idea of burning native forests to generate electricity was widely condemned.

This latest proposal now suggests the wood fuel will mostly come from private property and plantations. However, the claim that 56,000 ha of biomass crops will be planted over a four-year period to provide 70% of the feedstock is not credible and is unlikely to eventuate, and any move towards such plantation development will only clash with current plans to expand the plantation estate to rescue the ailing timber industry.

The ongoing ‘spin’ that attempts to claim that, because wood is renewable, burning it for electricity generation is clean, has to be rejected. The millions of tonnes of CO² that will be released into the atmosphere by this proposal will only add to the already escalating climate crisis.

That atmospheric pollution will be compounded by emissions from the 40,000 truck movements, often several hundred kilometres, to supply the 850,000 tonnes of timber required annually. Other costs associated with heavy transport include road maintenance and construction, road crashes involving trucks, pollution, and urban road congestion.

 The reality is, not only does wood-fired electricity generation produce even greater greenhouse gas levels than coal-fired power plants, but it poses a direct threat to biodiversity and to human health and should never be approved!

 

-        John Edwards

 Published in the "Voices for the Earth" column in The Clarence Valley Independent , April 17, 2024.

LABOR'S CLIMATE CHANGE POLICY LEAVES FORESTS IN THE FIRING LINE

In a recent Media Release the North East Forest Alliance (NEFA) condemned the Labor Party for its plans to develop a bioenergy industry to burn native forests for electric power.

“Federal Labor's climate change policy released today is potentially disastrous for Australia's native forests,” said NEFA spokesperson Susie Russell.

“In a week where we've seen even the National Party Federal Agriculture Minister recognise the importance of forests in sequestering carbon, the Labor Party has completely ignored one of country's most important carbon capture and storage systems, its forests.

“Worse than that, they have pledged millions of dollars to develop a bioenergy industry both here and via exports. The only current fuel source of scale for bioenergy is native forests. The burning of wood for electricity is a major international perversion of greenhouse gas accounting rules, that sees it counted as a no emission energy, when in reality it produces more carbon dioxide than coal for the same amount of energy produced, as well as removing the trees needed to absorb the carbon released,” she said.

“We know the NSW Government is full steam ahead with a logging regime that will see hundreds of thousands of tonnes of trees from our forests, available for export. We know that Boral and Forestry Corporation of NSW along with other State government logging agencies went to Japan offering our forests to meet Japan's growing bioenergy demand.

“Now we have the Federal Labor party pledging to throw money at an industry that will devastate our forests, dry out our catchments, push our native wildlife closer to extinction and increase our carbon emissions while removing the very trees we need to take up the carbon we release. 

“To say we are disappointed with Labor's backflip over burning native forests for electricity is an understatement. We're devastated. We thought Labor really understood the climate change issue, but they've completely missed the elephant in the room.

“We will be withdrawing our ads from circulation that suggest Labor will do something about forest destruction. All they've got on offer is a Forestry Summit and a Forestry Industry Strategy. There's nothing there for those of us who see forests as more than wood,” Ms Russell said

ELECTRICITY GENERATION FROM BIOMASS

For decades the Australia Government has been lobbied to allow electricity generation from burning biomass to attract clean energy credits. Lobbyists promoted this as a way of disposing of waste vegetable matter as a renewable energy source, a win-win situation they explain.

Electricity generation from biomass is already occurring. Millions of tax-payers dollars have gone to businesses, such as timber and sugar mills, to establish co-generation plants, utilising heat they were already using in their manufacturing processes, to also generate electricity.

Both industries create significant amounts of waste, and are ideally placed to benefit from co-generation, a win-win situation indeed. However, while it is undoubtedly renewable energy, it is far from clean. Reports from the USA, which has a long history of wood-fired power generation, show the resultant emissions are actually worse than those from burning coal.

Conservationists in Australia have long been concerned that any up-take in biomass burning here would ultimately lead to the burning of native forest timber, to the detriment of those forests. The fact that some of the most strident supporters of biomass use are from the timber industry adds to those concerns.

The co-generation at sugar mills, originally promoted as a way of disposing unwanted bagasse and cane tops during the short crushing season, has turned more to burning wood because it is more efficient.

Initially this was promoted as a way to dispose of pest species such as Camphor Laurel. However, as feared, some sugar mills have seized the opportunity to turn themselves into full-time wood-fired power stations, and are burning wood chips which they claim is waste.

One Clarence Valley timber mill is currently applying to Council to increase its wood-chip output from 1,000 to 50,000 cubic metres annually to feed the sugar mills' furnaces. Clearly this is not waste timber, but logs that have no commercial value, hence the state government's current move to allow clear-felling in state forests, a practice that has been happening illegally for a decade or more.

If we value our unique wildlife, and amazing biodiversity, this madness has to stop.

- John Edwards

 This article was originally published in the VOICES FOR THE EARTH column in The Daily Examiner on October 16th, 2017. 

NORTH COAST CONSERVATIONISTS CONDEMN RENEWABLE ENERGY TARGET AGREEMENT

The North Coast Environment Council (NCEC) and the North East Forest Alliance (NEFA) have condemned the agreement on the Renewable Energy Target (RET) reached by the Liberal-National Party Federal Government and the Federal Opposition Labor Party because of the inclusion of biomass (timber) as an electricity source in the target.

The timber to be burnt for power is claimed to be forest "waste". However, the two conservation organisations believe that this decision will lead to further unsustainable logging and decimation of native forests.

"We know from nearly 50 years experience of woodchipping that the logging industry views everything except A Grade sawlogs as 'waste'.  So the likelihood of intensive damaging logging has just got worse," said NCEC spokesperson Susie Russell.

"The renewable industry didn't want this. They know that not only will it damage their brand, but that it steals from the limited funds available to kickstart renewable energy projects, as well as cheating and effectively lowering the Renewable Energy Target as energy created from this dirty, high emission and unsustainable source will be counted in our fight to decrease greenhouse gas pollution."

She  added that consumers would be likely to be reluctant to pay more for renewable energy "if they have a reasonable suspicion that it is koala homes that are going up in smoke."

NEFA spokesperson Dailan Pugh said, "Burning trees is not carbon neutral."

"Feeding trees into furnaces for power is just as polluting and environmentally damaging as coal.  This needs to be clearly ruled out as a substitute for genuinely renewable power such as solar and wind."

He also pointed out that as well as the increased carbon emissions the increased logging would result in damage to biodiversity, soil and water catchments.

GENERATING ELECTRICITY FROM TIMBER

What are the problems?

The timber industry believes it has had a big win with the NSW Government proposing to change the Protection of the Environment Operations Regulation, so that “waste from land rehabilitation activities involving the removal of invasive native scrub and logging debris from approved forestry operations on State forest or private land may be burnt to generate electricity”.

Some timber mills have long been using waste material from the milling process, to kiln dry timber and generate electricity. Sugar mills have also operated co-generation plants, burning a mixture of cane trash, mill waste, and noxious trees like Camphor Laurel.

However, building power stations specifically to burn logging residues is fraught with financial danger, because tree crowns and stumps, what most people see as forest waste, cannot be economically field chipped and transported large distances to power stations. Wood-fired power stations cannot compete with coal-fired generators, built adjacent to a mine where coal is fed straight from the pit into the furnaces by conveyor belt.

Environmentalists fear that, in the same way the wood-chip industry gained a foot-hold, claiming it would only use logging waste, biomass proponents will end up burning enormous quantities of logs from native forests when they find that 'waste' simply isn't an option.

Other than the fact that there are no convenient mountains of logging waste available, burning wood, as with coal, emits greenhouse gasses and toxins, with some 90 different compounds released during the burning process. A 2008 Canadian Government report identified 45 that are seriously detrimental to human health, including formaldehyde, hydrogen sulphide, cadmium, hexavalent chromium, cobalt, lead arsenate, phosphorus, mercury, hydrochloric and sulphuric acids, and sulphur dioxide.

The crunch is that while it's possible to filter out those compounds, it's prohibitively expensive. Even an adequate filtration system, one that reduces emissions to acceptable levels, costs about the same to run as the generation plant itself. Therefore, in order to make a wood-fired power station economically viable, we need solid logs sourced nearby, and a filtration system that filters out enough of these toxins to comply with whatever some bureaucrat proclaims to be “safe levels”.

- J Edwards