With the bankruptcy of the world’s biggest wood pellet maker, Enviva and the forestry industry are reaching out to the Biden Administration for subsidies that could offer it a lifeline, but environmentalists are pushing back.
The company’s rapid downfall raises questions about how it can supply its annual 6 million metric tons of wood pellets to the UK, EU and Asia, and how nations relying on biomass to meet energy and climate commitments will cope.
Revisions to the long-debated European Union Renewable Energy Directive (RED) have been approved. Those policies still support the burning of wood pellets to make energy, despite evidence of harm to forests and climate, say NGOs.
Last July, as the Ukraine war raged, the EU barred all Russian woody biomass imports; even as South Korea took in Russia’s supply. Illicit woody biomass may also still be flowing to the EU from Turkey, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.
An existing regulation designating the burning of forests to make energy as being renewable has been reversed in Australia. That decision seems unlikely to alter the EU’s heavy commitment to biomass burning.