Category Archives: Carbon, Climate & Bioenergy

A new timber industry net zero roadmap aims to accelerate the productivity, sustainability, and innovation of the sector to better meet the needs of a low-carbon world. Commissioned by Timber Development UK (TDUK) in collaboration with eleven UK timber trade associations, the Timber Industry Net Zero Roadmap was developed following a comprehensive effort to map and measure carbon emissions across the whole supply chain. The first step of the roadmap has been to outline the size of the challenge, with 12 months of expert analysis showing the timber supply chain is responsible for 1,575,356 tonnes CO2e territorial emissions – which is about 0.35% of the UK total. While this is very low compared to other manufacturing industries such as UK steel production, which is responsible for 12 million tonnes CO2e (2.7% of UK emissions), and concrete, which is responsible for 7.3 million tonnes CO2e (1.5% of UK emissions), the Roadmap starts from the position that no emissions are acceptable.

Nest and Cushon, two UK pension schemes with combined assets of more than £26bn, are in a joint search for asset management partners to develop new forestry investment strategies to address climate change pressures. Both pension schemes believe that allocating money to forestry projects will offset environmentally damaging emissions from other investments. …The schemes have set aside an initial £600mn for a joint investment mandate and, by combining forces, aim to secure lower fees with third party managers. Nest presently manages about £25bn and expects to invest some 2% of its assets into forestry. …Cushon, which expects to have assets of around £1.7bn, could grow its allocation to 5% of its assets over time, including controversial carbon credits. …Both say they will avoid forestry projects where logging contributes to deforestation.

In July 2022, the European Union responded to the war in Ukraine by banning the import of Russian woody biomass used to make energy. At roughly the same time, South Korea drastically upped its Russian woody biomass imports, becoming the sole official importer of Russian wood pellets for industrial energy use. The EU has reportedly replaced its Russian supplies of woody biomass by importing wood pellets from the U.S. and Eastern Europe. But others say that trade data and paper trails indicate a violation of the EU ban, with laundered Russian wood pellets possibly flowing through Turkey, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan to multiple EU nations. EU pellet imports from Turkey grew from 2,200 tons monthly last spring to 16,000 tons in September. Imports from Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan reportedly rose too, even though neither has a forest industry. A large body of scientific evidence shows that woody biomass adds significantly to climate change and biodiversity loss.

UK — Greenpeace has accused the government of misrepresenting its stance on burning trees for electricity, giving a minister the impression of public support for the highly controversial practice in meetings with the power company Drax. Greenpeace is firmly opposed to most forms of biomass burning for power generation, and suspicious of claims that the resulting carbon dioxide can be captured. …Doug Parr, the chief scientist at Greenpeace UK, said Greenpeace opposes biomass burning for power, except in special circumstances, for several reasons: burning wood releases carbon dioxide now, but regrowing trees to reabsorb the carbon can take decades; growing trees for power generation takes up land that could be better used; cutting down trees destroys wildlife; and there are few safeguards to ensure that wood for burning comes from well-managed sources. 

The forest carbon offsets approved by the world’s leading provider and used by Disney, Shell, Gucci and other big corporations are largely worthless and could make global heating worse, according to a new investigation. The research into Verra, the world’s leading carbon standard for the rapidly growing $2bn (£1.6bn) voluntary offsets market, has found that, based on analysis of a significant percentage of the projects, more than 90% of their rainforest offset credits – among the most commonly used by companies – are likely to be “phantom credits” and do not represent genuine carbon reductions. The analysis raises questions over the credits bought by a number of internationally renowned companies. …However, Verra strongly disputed the studies’ conclusions and said the methods the scientists used cannot capture the true impact on the ground, which explains the difference between the credits it approves and the emission reductions estimated by scientists.

“To limit warming to 2C or lower, we need to accelerate emissions reductions. But the findings of this report are clear: we also need to increase carbon removal too,” says lead author Dr Steve Smith from Oxford University. “Many new methods are emerging with potential.” …This new report titled “The State of Carbon Dioxide Removal” says that to restrict and reduce global temperatures in the future there needs to be investment in developing technological solutions now. …One, known as BECCS, involves incorporating CO2 capture into biomass-based electricity-generation, in which organic matter such as crops and wood pellets are burned to produce power. Other options include: huge facilities where the carbon is extracted from the air before being stored in the ground; the use of specially treated charcoal (biochar) that locks in carbon; and “enhanced rock weathering” – loosely based on the carbon removal that occurs with natural erosion.

Petteri Orpo & Riikka Purra

SCIENTISTS at Natural Resources Institute Finland (Luke) have expressed their surprise at comments from policy makers that question the credibility of their latest carbon sink calculations.  Petteri Orpo, the chairperson of the National Coalition, hinted last week during an election debate that the calculations may not be on a sound footing by drawing attention to what he described as “incomprehensible” variation.  …Luke in December unveiled calculations that confirm that the land-use sector has turned from a carbon sink to a source of emissions for the first time ever in 2021, in part due to record-high logging volumes and in part due to the slowing growth of pine forests.  ….Raisa Mäkipää, a research professor at Luke, told Helsingin Sanomat that she is surprised and disappointment with the comments of policy makers. Luke, she reminded, has a statutory obligation to make the calculations and does so in a peer-reviewed fashion with internationally approved methods.

Biomass Magazine checked back in with industry experts on the impacts Russia’s invasion has had on the industry over the past year. Russia being banned from the market left a 2.5 million to 3-million-metric-ton shortfall, says Tim Portz, executive director of the Pellet Fuels Institute. …High demand for wood pellets—stemming from a combination of the Russian market exclusion and other sanctions—has pushed prices up drastically, explains William Strauss, of FutureMetrics. …Strauss says prices have reached up to over 800 euros ($846) per ton, with a long-term average of between 200 and 220 euros. Prices shifted downward in late November and early December due to warmer-than-normal autumn temperatures, allowing industrial pellet producers to scale back on the quantity of pellets sent to some larger buyers.

A new study from the University of Stirling, published in Nature Ecology & Evolution, has found that climate is the dominant driver in determining how quickly dead plants decompose, allowing scientists to make more accurate predictions about carbon emissions and climate change globally.  Decaying dead plants and leaves, known as plant litter, release 60 petagrams of carbon into the atmosphere every year—six times more than all human emissions—and contribute around 10% of the total amount of carbon in the atmosphere.  Although these emissions are natural and key to functional ecosystems, any increase in their rate could further accelerate climate change. Knowing about the conditions in which dead plants decompose more or less quickly has crucial impacts on predicting and understanding CO₂ concentrations and fluctuations in the Earth’s atmosphere.

A new study finds that tropical forests recovering from logging are sources of carbon for years afterward, contrary to previous assumptions. Tropical forests that are recovering from having trees removed were thought to be carbon absorbers, as the new trees grow quickly. A new study, led by Imperial College London researchers, turns this idea on its head, showing that the carbon released by soil and rotting wood outpaces the carbon absorbed by new growth. The researchers say the result highlights the need for logging practices that minimize collateral damage to improve the sustainability of the industry. …The study measured how much carbon was coming from the ground to calculate the carbon budget from the incoming and outgoing carbon flows for logged and unlogged (old-growth) forest. …The team say carbon monitoring should be conducted in other forests in different regions to build a more accurate picture of how logged forests contribute to global carbon budgets.

The electricity produced in Britain was close to the greenest it has ever been last year. …Prices for gas and oil has led to the Government signing a deal which would keep two coal power plants as backup. …However, this did not stop zero-carbon energy sources from making up a much larger portion of the country’s electricity mix than fossil fuels. The use of coal in our day-to-day energy mix has continued to decline, with coal responsible for only 1.5% of generation in 2022, down from 43% in 2012. …The lion’s share of the green electricity was from wind turbines. In total 26.8% of Britain’s electricity came from wind, second only to gas, which produced 38.5%. Nuclear power was responsible for 15.5%, biomass – which includes burning wood pellets in power plants – contributed 5.2%, solar produced 4.4%, while coal power plants produced 1.5%.