Back in April, Peter Ritchie wrote Hon. Michel Samson Minister for the NS Department of Energy, outlining  the evidence that forest biomass actually produces more CO2 than coal, and asking “At a time when Canada, along with 195 other countries, has committed to reducing its green house gas emissions, how can the Nova Scotia government actively support the generation of electricity from a fuel which is (at least) 50% more CO2-intensive than coal? At a time when carbon pricing is finally set to become a national priority, how can Nova Scotia justify the attendant costs, ultimately borne by ratepayers, which will come with this essential price on carbon?
 
Receiving no response, Peter wrote again on June 21 and finally received a response on July 25 prepared by Nova Scotia Depts. of Natural Resources, Environment, and Energy. The best they could come up with was “We recognize that the science around forest biomass carbon accounting is evolving”, while touting the amendment of Renewable Electricity Regulations so that the Port Hawkesbury biomass plant is no longer a "must-run" facility and stating that “harvest of primary forest products for all uses from Nova Scotia… remains within sustainable harvesting levels.”
 
 I guess we should all sleep well.  
 
Read correspondence...

                                     
Since the Paper mill half-reopened at Point Tupper, we have looked on in disbelief at the vast areas that have been clear cut, especially the hardwoods in Cape Breton.    NSP have built and run a very large biomass electric power generating plant alongside the mill so as to provide steam and electric power for the mill.   Many transport trailer loads every day arrive at the mill from Nova Scotia Crown land forests. 

 Last week we read a Government announcement that they are looking for other uses for N.S. forests.   This is baffling because the huge biomass clear cutting to feed the point Tupper boiler left at least four sawmills in eastern N.S. short of logs.    When sawmills shut down, there is less waste wood material available to ship for the Point Tupper boiler.   The result is more trees must be cut to sustain power and steam production.    Apparently saw logs were being chipped to feed the NSP plant.

Let's look at CO2 absorption by trees.     Saplings store as much as 48 pounds of CO2 by age 10.  By age 40 each tree may be storing one tonne of CO2.   These numbers are highly variable depending upon the soil nuitrients, soil water during growing season, sunlight days, air quality and length of growing season.   An acre of trees may sequester 2 to 6 tonnes per year as well as some sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxide and ozone. (International Society of Arboriculture)

The typical Acadian forest is mixed species and of multiple age trees.   White Birch, Poplars and Balsam Firs have short life spans of 30 to 75 years.  Spruce and Pines have medium life spans of 100 to 200 years.  Hard Maples, Oak, Beech, Yellow Birch have longer lives of 100 to 325 years.   As they grow bigger and taller, they capture and store more CO2 from the air.  An acre of mixed species trees of varying ages can absorb enough CO2 over a year to equal the amount of CO2 produced by a medium size car or pickup truck driven 42000 KM.  Driving an economy car on gasoline for 20,000 KM/year puts about 6 tonnes of CO2 out into the air.  A heavy truck fuelled by diesel driven 80,000 KM/year puts out about 104 tonnes of CO2/year.  (North Carolina State University)

Thus, if we do the math, we see that it may take 400 saplings growing robustly to absorb the CO2 from an economy car per year.  Trees only absorb CO2 during the growing season.   Other seasons the CO2 falls into the oceans or rises far up into the upper atmosphere and adds to the greenhouse gases there.
 The heavy diesel truck above will need as many as 7600 saplings to absorb the CO2 it puts out.   Or about 104 of the age 40 years plus trees to absorb its output of CO2. Forest acreages contain from 150 to 700 maturing trees per acre.     

Here's where I'm going with this:  The biomass-fuelled electric/steam plant at Point Tupper is hauling in excess of 20 trailer loads per operating day (some say as many as 50 loads/day).    Often these loads include prime mature hardwoods, which make more BTUs than softer woods.  Each load contains 50 to 100 trees of ages 30 to 150+ years of age.  Two or three loads can clear an acre of hardwood.  Thus removing about 175+  tonnes/acre  of storage for CO2 for a very long time. 

 The highway tractor trailer, like the one above driving 80,000 to 100,000 KM/year, is one of many hauling the cut wood from the forest to the mill. Each puts out in excess of 104 tonnes of CO2/year.    Then we add the CO2 put out by the cutting and forwarding machines plus the road building machines and the various service trucks. Cutting machines often run 20 hours a day. I can't estimate what this total might be, but it's a very big number.

The Paris agreement says that Canada will reduce CO2 emissions.  Our Premier, however, didn't bother to attend this conference.  His government continues to allow the clear cutting of vast forested areas thus allowing huge outputs of CO2 so that a biomass plant can make electricity and steam.  And the Province has lost an incalculable amount of trees that could be absorbing CO2 in the stems, trunks and roots.   That's a double loss.      The roots slowly give up the CO2 over many years after the tree is cut.

And they plan to increase biomass cutting of trees.

When the totals are counted, clear cutting for biomass is anything but GREEN.  It's madness.  There are affordable alternatives if only they would stay up-to-date on technologies.    HRM / Solar City are showing one way forward.   Townhomes using geothermal for heat and cooling is another.

Guest blogger, D.G. Wilson, Brule Point, N.S.

While you're reviewing the sunny stats put forward by NSDNR in their 5-year review of their Natural Resource Strategy, "The Path We Share," cited elsewhere on this blog, do take a close look  at the National Forestry Database, Canada's official "Compendium of Forestry Statistics."  It serves as our national source of credible, accurate, and reliable forestry statistics."   http://nfdp.ccfm.org/index_e.php
 
On the menu along the left side of the page you need to click Silviculture >> Jurisdictional Tables >> and then "NS" in the row labeled "6.1.0.0   Area harvested by ownership and harvesting methods"  (Here is a direct link -http://nfdp.ccfm.org/data/detailed/html/detailed_6100_p_NS.html)
 
Stats current to 2014 for now.  Since this website breaks down the various types of clearcutting (including "shelterwood" - a two-stage clearcut, and "seed tree" - a clearcut with a few standing trees left), you need to scroll down a bit for the totals.  For 2014, it reports that clearcutting was used on 8,035 of 9,364 ha cut on Crown, and 20,315 of 22,823 ha cut on private, or 28,350 of 32,187 ha total (88%).  The footnotes at the bottom provide some background on where the data comes from.

My petition against the use of forest biomass for power generation grew out of my frustration with the "green-washing" of policies that keep us going down the same old paths, rather than seeking new ways to mitigate our impact on the environment. Specifically, this winter, at a gathering of provincial ministers seeking a national climate change strategy, Nova Scotia’s Minister of the Environment claimed that our province had made great strides in increasing the proportion of electricity generated from renewable sources. She announced that by 2017, Nova Scotia would triple its use of forest biomass for power generation as part of our increasing use of renewable energy. After having seen the forest biomass arriving at the Port Hawkesbury Mill, piles of green, wet wood in truck after truck, after hearing folks speak of the nearby lands being harvested for biomass, after reading about of our poor soils and the slow regeneration of our forests, it just seemed ridiculous. After thinking about this for a while, the only avenue I saw was this electronic petition. It was quite an experience, particularly the period during which the petition went "viral" increasing by 5000 signatures in a few hours, and reaching nearly 29,000 signatures. Many folks provided comments to accompany their signature. These comments strengthen my resolve to work against this misguided practice and for better forestry practices.

 While you're reading DNR's sunny 5-year review of the province's Natural Resource Strategy, "The Path We Share," you might want to take a boo at the National Forestry Database, Canada's definitive "Compendium of Forestry Statistics, serving as our national source of credible, accurate, and reliable forestry statistics."  http://nfdp.ccfm.org/index_e.php
 
On the menu along the left side of the page you need to click Silviculture >> Jurisdictional Tables >> and then "NS" in the row labeled "6.1.0.0   Area harvested by ownership and harvesting methods"  (For your convenience, here's a direct link:  http://nfdp.ccfm.org/data/detailed/html/detailed_6100_p_NS.html)
 
Stats current to 2014 for now.  Since this website breaks down the various types of clearcutting (including "shelterwood" - a two-stage clearcut, and "seed tree" - a clearcut with a few standing trees left), you need to scroll down a bit for the totals.  For 2014, it reports that clearcutting was used on 8,035 of 9,364 ha cut on Crown, and 20,315 of 22,823 ha cut on private, or 28,350 of 32,187 ha total (88%).  The footnotes at the bottom provide some background on where the data comes from.
 

Big announcement today, with taxpayer dollars going to study “innovative uses of [Nova Scotia] forest products and new market opportunities…Being studied are things including new market opportunities and alternatives for petroleum products with bio-based fuels in marine diesel and heating oil applications. Another initiative is looking at how forestry contractors can integrate technology, innovation and best practice to help improve their performance.” It would be nice if words such as “while maintaining forest life and the productive base of forestry” could be added to such statements but perhaps they can’t.

View Innovacorp/Natural Resources Press Release

As long as we're talking about better ways to make electricity than clearcutting, this 2014 blog by Peter Ritchie is interesting.  He begins...

You can pay now and play later OR you can play now and pay later. Either way, you have to pay.
                                                                                                                                                                     − John C. Maxwell

I think Mr. Maxwell might have borrowed liberally from the FRAM oil filter slogan of the 1970s when he made this remark. Regardless, I have a lot of respect for this sentiment and I believe it is a notion that often goes unheeded in North American society. Allow me to illustrate its intent with a personal anecdote…

By the spring of 2011, I had become painfully aware that I, personally, needed to do something to shelter myself and my family from the impending energy crisis we currently face and the worsening effects of climate change. Not only was the federal government of the day failing to act on renewable energy opportunities and climate change, but actively stifling alternatives to dwindling fossil fuel supplies and ignoring the reality of climate change. So, after much research and soul-searching, my wife and I decided to invest in the PV solar system detailed here.

We made this decision based not only on a moral principle but on a solid financial argument. It had to be, as we did not have the money to fund this project independently and, therefore, needed to re-mortgage our home to pay the capital cost. I prepared a financial proposal for our mortgage holder (Bergengren Credit Union), which was approved on the spot, based on the facts I had presented.

So, off we went on our solar odyssey and, in September 2011, we started collecting and using our own energy from the sun to power and heat our home. The first year passed and everything worked just as predicted. We produced half of the electricity we used that year, at a price (13.8¢/kWh), just slightly higher than that charged by NSPI at that time (13.3¢/kWh). In other words, for that first year we paid about a half a cent premium for the electricity collected by our system. Not bad, right? We figured the extra money we spent that year (about $50) was money well spent on the health of the planet.

Something interesting happened on that first anniversary, however. I felt I had somehow fallen short of doing my part to help mitigate climate change. I thought, “Well, producing half of our electricity is okay but…what if we could produce 100% of our electricity? How cool would that be?” Well, we had already “maxxed out” the amount of PV we were allowed to install, so the challenge became, “How to live within the constraints of our solar infrastructure?”

Again, after exhaustive research, I discovered that we Canadians are the most wasteful consumers of electricity in the world, while paying the least for this electricity of any country in the world (see: Lindsay Wilson). It turned out that by monitoring our usage and employing some easily attained conservation measures, we were able to reduce our consumption to the point where, since 2013, our PV system has produced all the electricity we have used at our home (with a little left over, each year, to sell to NSPI!). Again, not bad, right?

Well here’s the real treat: we will continue to produce our own electricity, at 13.8¢/kWh, for at least the next 20 years while NSPI is currently charging almost 16¢/kWh (with another rate hike expected in the new year). That’s right, for every future NSPI rate increase (averaging 5%/year over the last ten years), we will be saving that much more money on future electricity costs. Our system will have paid for itself in about 10 years from now and will then continue to provide us with “free” electricity afterwards, while still having ten years of warranty remaining on all major components of the system.

In the spirit of the opening quotation, I would characterize what I have done as paying now and playing later. We will all have to pay, one way or another, for the energy we use now and into the future. In essence, I have chosen to pay now, as I find the future difficult to predict. Everybody has to make their own choices for their own reasons. This story is meant to explain some of the choices I’ve made regarding the costs of energy.

by Peter Ritchie
guest blogger

An expanding market?  Check out this interesting item from the Globe & Mail...