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Large scale cutting and burning will produce a only a small increase in energy supply

• Taken together, the Russell, Palmer, Pioneer, and Tamarack plants would produce at most 185 MW, just 1.3% of the State’s current energy generation capacity of 13,932 MW.
• Energy generation using biomass is on average 24% efficient – 76% of the energy in the fuel is blown off as waste heat.

BIOMASS EFFECTS ON FOREST CUTTING, AND THE MYTH OF CARBON NEUTRALITY

Click here for biomass burning effects on air and water pollution

Click here for fact sheets and comment letters on biomass plants in Western MA

The Massachusetts Environmental Energy Alliance opposes large-scale biomass for energy generation because:

Logging will have to increase significantly to provide wood for biomass plants

• The “waste” wood generated by current logging operations will not provide enough wood for proposed plants, meaning logging levels will have to increase significantly to meet fuel needs. According to a state study, a 50-MW plant like Russell Biomass will require 650,000 tons of wood per year, far in excess of waste wood generated at current logging levels. A realistic cutting level for non-merchantable wood that can be used as biomass fuel is 10 - 20 tons per acre. At this level, it would require 32,500 - 65,000 acres to be cut each year to provide wood for just one 50-MW plant. In comparison, the average number of acres cut in Massachusetts between 2001 and 2005 was less than 30,000.

Biomass is not carbon neutral and will dramatically increase production of greenhouse gases

• The “carbon neutrality” concept states that burning biomass results in net emissions of carbon dioxide close to zero, because biomass grows back and “locks up” into organic carbon the carbon dioxide released by burning.
• However, since the average age of trees in forests of Western Massachusetts is 75 – 100 years, it will take a similar amount of time to regrow trees that are burned for biomass and resequester their carbon. Scientists agree that society must reduce our carbon emissions immediately – we don’t have 75 years. The best available science shows that forests lock up atmospheric carbon dioxide best when they are undisturbed by forestry operations.