A huge wood-pellet facility being proposed for Nubieber in Lassen County that will take in wood products within a 100-mile radius of the plant on both public and private lands. The wood pellets will then be shipped to former coal-burning plants in Asia to meet greenhouse gas reduction goals. The problem is that it will be devastating not only to our local forests, but using wood pellets for electricity generation has been shown to produce more CO2 than burning coal for the same amount of electricity produced. (See Table 1, page 16, in Mary S. Booth’s Trees, Trash, and Toxics: How Biomass Energy Has Become the New Coal. 2014. Pelham, Massachusetts: Partnership for Policy Integrity.)
The proposed Lassen County wood-pellet production facility is projected to produce 700,000 tons per year. Keep in mind that this is a dry-weight measurement, produced from at least twice the weight in fresh logs and chips brought to these facilities.
In the southeastern forests of the United States, vast reaches of private lands have been clearcut to produce wood pellets to ship to former coal plants in Europe. It has been estimated that wood pellets shipped to Europe produce 1.5 times as much greenhouse gases as coal when one takes into account the energy used from harvest to shipping dried wood pellets to Europe. This helps European companies meet greenhouse gas emission goals as wood pellets are rated as a renewable energy source. If you want to see a documentary on forest clearing for wood pellets in the Southeast, see the YouTube at: Burned: Are Trees the New Coal?
The scoping phase for this project just ended; a draft EIR will be available within 6 to 12 months. While this plant will be in Lassen County, it will affect the forests and woodlands of Shasta County, all within Shasta Chapter CNPS boundaries. I encourage Shasta Chapter to join the many other environmental groups that are opposing this project.
For more news on local conservation issues, please see Shasta Environmental Alliance’s April 2023 Newsletter. ~David Ledger, Conservation Chair
