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Future Of Forestry Is A Growing Problem
Forests can combine a working environment with places for recreation and nature. Picture: Jon Savage by STUART GOODALL Published on the 07 August 2013 FORESTRY is a Scottish success story, supporting almost 40,000 jobs and contributing nearly £1.7 billion to the economy every year. It is also a backdrop to Scotland’s tourism industry – many iconic Scottish landscapes and images feature forests, and tourists and locals alike enjoy walking, biking or viewing wildlife in these special areas. Our forests are unique in that they can combine a working environment with places for recreation and nature. Most are actively managed and produce wood to supply the materials for our everyday lives. Our ancestors used wood for shelter, fire and hunting. While we no longer need to hunt for food, we still build with wood, and use it for fuel. This sounds wonderful, and indeed Scotland’s forest industry has bucked the economic downturn with continued investment of around £50 million a year. Increased production and expanding exports have had an annual beneficial impact of £1bn on the UK’s balance of payments. But all is not green in the forest garden. The public image of forestry is stuck in the 20th century; think forestry, and many imagine dark, impenetrable blocks of trees where nothing lives. When trees are harvested, it’s assumed they will not be replaced. These misconceptions make it harder to achieve support for new woodland creation, especially those containing a proportion of trees grown to supply future stocks of wood. If we do not overcome this, we will damage rural employment, undermine carbon reduction targets and, ironically, undermine much of the wildlife that popular perception believes is damaged by forestry. The successful reintroduction of the sea eagle has seen these majestic birds set up home in forests managed to produce wood, alongside other birds of prey and the iconic red squirrel. Long-term Wood production and availability is at a modern-day peak due to high levels of historic planting, but forestry is long-term, with planning horizons stretching 15-25 years – and investment will only continue if Scottish businesses can guarantee a supply of wood. The problem is the stark fall in softwood planting (the mainstay of the forestry sector) since the early 1990s. In more than 20 years since 1991, only 41,000 hectares (ha) has been planted, compared to 215,000ha in 1981-90 alone – an astonishing drop. Successive Scottish Governments have committed to 6,000ha of new softwood planting annually, which would provide the required confidence in future supply. Scotland is also losing large swathes of softwood forestry to windfarms, conversion to other habitats, and changes to the make-up of existing productive forests to make them more diverse and attractive to wildlife. This cannot continue. Wood availability will peak around 2025-2030, then fall steeply. This is a long-term problem with short-term consequences; reduced confidence in future raw material supply will lead to a drop in investment, job losses and reduced economic growth. We have to plant far more trees in the next decade than we are doing now, to secure the future of a successful industry, vital also for our existing forests. If forests are not managed, they do become dark and impenetrable, and unwelcoming to wildlife and people. Businesses Scotland’s wood-using businesses generate the income to pay for management; if these businesses decline, so will our forests. There are people who want to plant trees and we need to ensure Scotland’s regulatory and grants system for land allows them to do so, to achieve what all of Scotland needs – new, well-managed, multi-benefit forests that provide the wood we need for our everyday lives, while allowing people and wildlife to enjoy the woodland environment. The forestry sector is campaigning on this issue and had a productive meeting recently with forestry minister Paul Wheelhouse and enterprise minister Fergus Ewing, who recognised the significance of softwood forestry and reaffirmed the commitment to plant 10,000ha a year until 2022, with a 60:40 split in favour of productive softwoods. The ministers also delivered a clear message to the sector to keep planting, stressing that the latest reform to the Common Agricultural Policy should not lead to unnecessary and potentially damaging delays. There was also support from Mr Wheelhouse and Mr Ewing for ensuring that grants do not dissuade landowners from planting productive softwoods. This is encouraging, but it is important that it leads to real action; the future of a sector that can do great things for Scotland depends upon it. • Stuart Goodall is chief executive of Confor: promoting forestry and wood (www.confor.org.uk) More information on becoming Continue reading
Biomass: Wood Pellets Muscle In On Old Role Of Coal
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/b83d5050-c3a3-11e2-aa5b-00144feab7de.html#ixzz2VGGRqFHl By Guy Chazan Drax, the UK power supplier, is pushing ahead with what is shaping up to be a huge bet on biomass. The company, which has a big coal-fired power plant in Yorkshire, has launched a £750m investment programme to convert three of its six units to wood pellets, a renewable source of energy. It started commissioning the first converted unit in April. For Dorothy Thompson, chief executive, the attraction of biomass is obvious. “It’s a lot cheaper than offshore wind, there is security of supply and it’s more flexible,” she says. The pellets burnt in biomass boilers are made from the “cheapest part of the forestry industry product – harvested residues and thinnings” – and a “supply chain is developing”. Drax’s interest in biomass is part of a wider industry trend. New EU emissions regulations have put pressure on many of the continent’s old coal-fired power stations but some operators have realised they can keep the plants alive by converting their boilers from coal to wood pellets. The discovery of biomass has given a new lease of life to ageing coal assets that would otherwise have been shuttered. Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) says between 3.6 and 6.8 gigawatts of biomass generating capacity could be commissioned between 2012 and 2016, though it warned that slow governmental decisions on future subsidies “risks unnerving manufacturers and investors”. Interest has been driven by EU laws that stipulate member states must source 20 per cent of their energy from renewables by 2020. That will not present much of a problem for Germany, with its massive investments in wind and solar power. But the UK and others may struggle, hence the embracing of coal-to-biomass conversion. “It’s an easy, quick and capital-lite way to meet the renewables targets,” says Harry Boyle, an analyst at BNEF. “Coal plants are already connected to the grid and what’s required are relatively minor modifications to an existing asset.” Biomass is also a consistent source of supply, in contrast to the intermittency of wind and solar. Such considerations have pushed the UK to create a generous subsidy regime for the fuel. Previously, developers were awarded half a renewables obligation certificate (ROC) for co-firing coal with biomass. Now, the government is offering operators a whole ROC if they fully convert their boilers to biomass from coal. It was this decision that underpinned Drax’s big investment programme. As a result of this and other subsidies, generating capacity is expected to grow quickly across Europe. BNEF says European pellet demand will rise to 25m-30m tonnes by 2020, up from about 12m tonnes now. Most of that will be imported from outside the EU. Yet biomass remains much more controversial than wind and solar. This is partly because when wood is burnt, it releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere – just like fossil fuels such as oil, gas and coal. Advocates like Ms Thompson stress that these emissions are neutralised by regrowth in the forest from which the wood was harvested. “You’re not using trapped carbon.” Partly because of that, she says, the carbon footprint of biomass is “70-80 per cent smaller than that of coal”. Environmentalists are unconvinced. A recent study put out by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds together with Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth says it may take “many years for the end-of-pipe emissions to be neutralised” by regrowth of forests. It disputes the industry’s assertion that pellets used in power generation are made of residues from timber production, saying there is evidence that whole trees are often used. The study claims that the UK government’s proposed sustainability standards for biomass will not prevent wood being used that comes from forests “where management regimes cause problems for biodiversity”. The report’s authors say there is a risk the UK will be “locked into financially supporting an industry that results in increasing greenhouse gas emissions and other serious sustainability issues”. Biomass developers face other difficulties, aside from the objections of green groups. A big challenge is finding enough pellets to supply their hungry biomass boilers. “It takes time to build up the supply chain,” says Ms Thompson. “Each [converted] unit requires 2.3m tonnes of biomass a year – and the total global cross-sea trade is only about 7m tonnes.” So a chunk of Drax’s £750m investment will go on building a wood pellet factory in the southeast of the US to fill Drax boilers. Some people worry about the carbon emissions involved in transporting pellets from the US to Europe. BNEF’s Harry Boyle says the problem is not necessarily the emissions released by tankers bringing huge cargoes of pellets across the Atlantic, but those of trucks transporting the wood from pellet factories hundreds of miles to ports in the US. Continue reading
