The Wood Pellet Association of Canada (WPAC), in collaboration with BioPower Sustainable Energy Corporation (BioPower), has completed a study that outlines the feasibility and economic implications of in-woods grinding to process forest biomass for wood pelletization in Ontario. The study, led by Dr. Fahimeh Yazdan Panah, WPAC’s Director of Research and Technical Development, highlights that forest biomass when processed with the right technology, such as in-woods grinding, can serve as an economically viable feedstock for wood pellet production in Ontario. The study was funded by the Ontario Forest Biomass Program, which supports the objectives set out in Ontario’s Forest Sector Strategy and Forest Biomass Action Plan and helps fund initiatives that secure and increase long-term wood utilization, including biomass. …By adopting advanced techniques and carefully weighing the benefits of owning versus outsourcing equipment, pellet producers can enhance operational efficiency and significantly reduce costs.
Today, Jaime Battiste, Member of Parliament for Sydney–Victoria, Nova Scotia, on behalf of the Honourable Jonathan Wilkinson, Minister of Energy and Natural Resources, along with the Atlantic Coastal Action Program (ACAP) Cape Breton announced a joint investment of more than $1.2 million to plant over 208,000 trees in eastern Cape Breton through the 2 Billion Trees (2BT) program… The 2BT program helps to clean the air, create jobs and fight climate change while protecting nature. By working together with provinces, territories, local communities, non- and for-profit organizations and Indigenous Peoples, Canada continues to build a strong, healthy and green future for generations to come.
The Wood Pellet Association of Canada’s 2024 conference last month focused on the critical role of biomass and wood pellets in the transition to a greener and brighter future. Over 160 people from nine countries came to Victoria, B.C., to examine the electrification revolution across Canada and worldwide. Participants tackled powering the shift from fossil fuels to renewable and responsible energy, innovations, solutions, current and future market conditions, new opportunities, emerging markets, and potential headwinds. …PowerPoint presentations from the WPAC 2024 Annual Conference: Powering Sustainability: The Role of Biomass in Electrification have been 
Chapleau is initiating the Chapleau District Heating Project, in partnership with 
The American Forest Foundation (AFF) will launch a carbon credit auction for its Family Forest Carbon Program in February 2025. The American Forest Foundation Carbon Auction offers companies a transparent, efficient pathway to secure high-quality carbon credits while supporting family forest owners and rural communities. The auction aims to address a critical funding gap by providing upfront capital essential for scaling nature-based climate solutions. With AFF estimating that just 1.2% of nature-based solutions’ potential is currently being utilised, this auction model enables corporations to make partial upfront payments tied to project milestones, such as land enrolment and carbon verification. …This hybrid payment model offers an alternative to traditional carbon credit purchases that require payment upon delivery. By allowing partial payments upfront, the auction removes barriers to funding, links financial commitments to measurable outcomes, and offers participants early investment discounts, thus securing competitive credit prices and supporting long-term decarbonisation strategies.
Despite huge enthusiasm for shifting from fossil fuels to green energy, this transition just isn’t happening. Implementing a significant change in our current trajectory would be prohibitively expensive. A major policy overhaul is needed. On a global scale, we are investing nearly $2 trillion annually to create an energy transition. In the last 10 years, solar and wind power use has reached unprecedented levels. However, this increase hasn’t led to a reduction in fossil fuel consumption. In fact, fossil fuel use has grown during this period. Numerous studies show that adding renewable energy adds to energy consumption instead of replacing coal, gas or oil. …Solar and wind are entirely deployed in the electricity sector, which makes up just one-fifth of all global energy use. We are dealing with a small part of a vast challenge and ignoring all the “too hard” problems like steel, cement, plastics and fertilizer.
SEATTLE — A groundbreaking law that forces companies in Washington state to reduce their carbon emissions while raising billions of dollars for climate programs could be repealed by voters this fall, less than two years after it took effect. The Climate Commitment Act is under fire from conservatives, who say it has ramped up energy and gas costs in Washington, which has long had some of the highest gas prices in the nation. The law aims to slash emissions to almost half of 1990 levels by the year 2030. It requires businesses producing at least 25,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide, or the equivalent in other greenhouse gases including methane, to pay for the right to do so by buying “allowances.” …Many programs already are or will soon be funded by money from polluting companies, including projects on air quality, fish habitat, wildfire prevention and clean energy.
COLUMBIA, Mo. – Forestry faculty from the University of Missouri School of Natural Resources will share findings of their recently published report showing wood products can play an important role in long-term carbon storage. A presentation will be held Oct. 24, on the MU campus. The report, “
The world is on a path to get 1.8 degrees Celsius (3.2 Fahrenheit) warmer than it is now, but could trim half a degree of that projected future heating if countries do everything they promise to fight climate change, a United Nations report said. But it still won’t be near enough to curb warming’s worst impacts such as nastier heat waves, wildfires, storms and droughts, the report said. Under every scenario but the “most optimistic” with the biggest cuts in fossil fuels burning, the chance of curbing warming so it stays within the internationally agreed-upon limit “would be virtually zero,” the United Nations Environment Programme’s annual Emissions Gap Report said. ..Instead the world is on pace to hit 3.1 degrees Celsius (5.6 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times. But if nations somehow do all of what they promised in targets they submitted to the United Nations that warming could be limited to 2.6 degrees Celsius (4.7 degrees Fahrenheit), the report said.
BRASILIA – The government of the Brazilian state of Para in the Amazon will consult Indigenous communities on how they will benefit from the future sale of carbon offset credits that U.S. companies have agreed to buy to try to protect the rainforest. In a statement, the Para government’s environmental secretariat Semas said it “will begin a new phase of dialogue” with Indigenous peoples and other traditional communities in the rainforest. Scientists say preserving the Amazon rainforest is vital to combating global warming. Amazon.com Inc, and a group of companies agreed last month in New York to buy carbon credits in a deal valued at $180 million through the LEAF Coalition conservation initiative, which it helped set up in 2021 with other firms and governments, including the United States and United Kingdom. …But last week, 38 Indigenous and community organizations signed a public letter saying they had not been consulted properly.
Drax found that it was “highly likely” to have burnt wood sourced from old forest areas in Canada deemed to be environmentally important, according to internal emails, as the UK’s biggest biomass power station operator battled to maintain its green credentials. The wood received by pellet plants owned by Drax from its suppliers in British Columbia was traced to areas local authorities classed as ecologically significant, as well as “high-risk” private land. While the material was not illegal to use, many environmental experts said old-growth woods and forests should be protected given their ecological benefits, including absorbing and storing atmospheric carbon for centuries. A lengthy investigation by Ofgem into its reporting concluded recently after the UK regulator cleared it of a deliberate breach, and Drax agreed to pay a penalty of £25mn into a voluntary scheme for failing to record adequate data about the wood it imported.
A plan by the British government to burn biomass imported from countries including North Korea has been described as “bonkers”. A bioenergy resource model calculates that only a big expansion in the import of energy crops and wood from a surprising list of nations would satisfy the UK’s plan to meet net zero. …About a third of the biomass used in the UK is imported. In 2021, about 76% from North America and 18% from the EU. But there is not enough wood in these regions to supply the large expansion that the government is banking on. The resource model sets out potential sources of bioenergy. Only the most ambitious scenario outlined would theoretically provide enough biomass to meet this demand, and it involves a huge increase in imports. …Serious concerns have been raised about the affect of large-scale use of biomass on biodiversity, air quality, agriculture and soil health in the UK and abroad.
LISBON, Portugal — For three days in mid-September, wildfires rapidly tore through parts of Portugal… cutting off the top half of the country. …Few people in Europe and the US would have realized that some of their everyday products may have played a role in making these fires worse. Certain toilet paper, tissue and office paper brands are made with materials from eucalyptus trees, a non-native species to Portugal. The eucalyptus globulus is an ideal tree for commercial cultivation because it’s faster-growing, has a larger amount of fiber and produces more pulp than most other species. The problem is eucalyptus trees are particularly flammable. …Proportional to its size, Portugal has more eucalyptus than any country in the world. But in California, the eucalyptus tree has been naturalized. …A debate over the role of eucalyptus in wildfires is brewing, with some studies showing they have little influence in making blazes worse.
Forests with a greater diversity of trees are more productive—potentially leading to greater efficiency in capturing planet-warming carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, a new study reveals. Researchers found that trees that grow quickly, and capture carbon faster, tend to be smaller and have shorter lifespans, leading to lower carbon storage and faster release back into the atmosphere. Slower growing species live longer and grow larger, tending to capture more atmospheric carbon—particularly in the setting of more diverse forests. Analyzing 3.2 million measurements from 1,127 species of trees across the Americas—from southern Brazil to northern Canada—an international team of experts mapped life expectancies for trees ranging from 1.3 to 3,195 years. …Co-author Dr. Adriane Esquivel-Muelbert, Brazilian researcher based at the University of Birmingham, commented, “Tree growth and lifespan trade-offs are crucial for the planet’s carbon balance.