This story initially appeared on Grist and is a part of the Local weather Desk collaboration.
Wooden pellets, by design, are extremely flammable. The small items of compressed woody leftovers, like sawdust, are utilized in all the things from house heating to grilling. However their flammable nature has made for harmful work situations: Since 2010, at the least 52 fires have damaged out on the amenities that make wooden pellets throughout the US, in keeping with a database of incidents compiled by the Southern Environmental Regulation Heart.
Of the 15 largest wooden pellet amenities, at the least eight have had fires or explosions since 2014, in accordance to the Environmental Integrity Venture, a nonprofit based by a former director of the US Environmental Safety Company.
On the similar time, the world’s largest biomass firm, Drax, is chopping down bushes throughout North America with a promise to promote them as a substitute for fossil fuels. However even its monitor report is checkered with accidents.
In South Shields, UK, wooden pellets destined for a Drax plant spontaneously combusted whereas in storage on the Port of Tyne, beginning a fireplace that took 40 firefighters 12 hours to extinguish. In Port Allen, Louisiana, a Drax wood-pellet facility burst into flames in November 2021.
Now, regardless of discovering itself within the midst of a lawsuit over unintentional fireplace damages, Drax is urgent on with a brand new enterprise proposal; it entails not simply chopping down bushes to make wooden pellets, however, the corporate argues, additionally to assist cease wildfires.
In October 2023, after buying two parcels of land in California to construct two pellet mills, one in Tuolumne County and one other in Lassen County, Drax’s companion group, Golden State Pure Assets, or GSNR, “a nonprofit public profit company,” met with residents of Tuolumne County to deal with issues about its imaginative and prescient for a way the method of producing wooden pellets can mitigate wildfire threat.
GSNR has since touted its shut work with neighborhood members. Nonetheless, in keeping with Megan Fiske, who instructs rural staff at a local people school, residents residing near the proposed pellet mill websites weren’t all the time conscious of the plans. “Individuals who had been 100 toes away from the [proposed] pellet plant had no thought about it,” mentioned Fiske.
Each of the proposed mills are in forested areas which have been threatened by wildfires. When requested concerning the dangers that manufacturing wooden pellets poses, Patrick Blacklock, govt director of GSNR, advised Grist, “We sought to be taught from these incidents. The design options can go an extended approach to mitigating the chance of fireside.”
If county representatives approve the plan, loggers can be allowed to take “lifeless or dying bushes” and “woody biomass” from inside a 100-mile radius of the pellet mills throughout the two counties, which overlap with the Stanislaus Nationwide Forest and the Yosemite Nationwide Park.
Fiske mentioned she’s seen situations, unrelated to Drax, the place loggers weren’t skilled correctly and ended up taking extra wooden than ought to have been allowed beneath a wildfire resilience scheme. “There’s a distinction between what the loggers are advised and what occurs on the bottom,” mentioned Fiske. You might have “inexperienced or younger people who find themselves underpaid, perhaps English isn’t their first language, so there are numerous boundaries.”
