PFPI responds to requests from communities and advocacy groups from around the country for input on a wide range of issues, including individual facility air permits, rebutting biomass industry claims, greenhouse gas emissions accounting, and state policies related to biomass bailouts and subsidies. We also engage directly in legal and regulatory proceedings and legislative advocacy. See more about our state campaigns and featured reports below.
Key resources:
The Bioenergy Boom from the Federal Stimulus: Outcomes and Lessons (2018)
Maine Bioenergy at the Crossroads: Costs of a Failing Industry (2017)
Trees, Trash, and Toxics: How Biomass Energy Has Become the New Coal (2014)
Burning Money: Biomass Gasification and the DOE Loan Guarantee Program (2013)
The Hu Honua plant, an old coal burner which is being converted to burn wood, will emit 20 to 30 tons per year of toxic chemicals like formaldehyde, benzene, and hydrochloric acid, dangerous metals like arsenic and mercury, and harmful combustion byproducts including dioxin.
Air Pollution, All posts, Hawaii, States
Carbon dioxide emissions from the biomass boiler will be 3,120 pounds per megawatt-hour, more than six times the 510 pounds per megawatt-hour allowed for the facility’s new natural gas burner.
Air Pollution, All posts, Carbon emissions, States, Wisconsin
Many public officials don’t seem to recognize the threat that large-scale biomass plants and wood pellet manufacturing plants present to the State’s forests.
All posts, Carbon emissions, Forests, States, Vermont
The Manomet study relies on a number of assumptions that minimize the calculation of net carbon emissions from biomass, meaning that actual emissions are likely significantly greater than the study concludes.
All posts, Carbon emissions, Massachusetts, States
The only independent, multi-stakeholder study of the carbon impacts of burning trees to generate electricity found that it would take 40 years of forest regrowth just to get to parity in carbon pollution with burning coal for those same four decades. To get to parity with natural gas would take almost a century.
All posts, Carbon emissions, Forests, Massachusetts, Reports
Acting as if the carbon emitted from trees cut and burned here will be sequestered by trees over there makes as much sense as letting a coal plant write off its emissions because it’s not cutting trees over there, either.
All posts, Carbon emissions, States, Washington