One of the world’s biggest renewable energy players may be misleading the public about its product. Earlier this month, Mongabay published a damning report on Enviva, the world’s biggest producer of wood chips used for biomass energy, based on allegations from an anonymous former employee, who claimed that the company is producing its chips in a much less environmentally friendly way than its PR materials claim.
Biomass energy, the practice of burning wood to generate power, is one of those ideas that sounds great in practice: trees regrow, after all, so they should, theoretically, be a renewable resource. Trees, however, are a key carbon sink; destroying forests to burn energy could actually do more harm than good since trees take years to regrow back to their full carbon-sequestering potential. It can take more than 90 years, some analyses have shown, to pay back the “carbon debt” incurred by chopping down trees for fuel—time we simply don’t have.
Accordingly, pellet producers like Enviva claim that they use scrap wood from other production processes that would prevent wide-scale deforestation and keep the process efficient. “Displace Coal. Grow More Trees. Fight Climate Change,” an enormous banner on the front page of the company’s website reads. The website has a whole section devoted to the sustainability of its products, as well as a ...
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