We have only a few posts on this part of the bureaucrat's dream, links after the jump.
From Inside Climate News, November 9:
A financial crisis has enveloped Enviva, the Maryland-based company that’s been harvesting large swaths of forest in the Southeast United States to make wood pellets for electricity production in the United Kingdom and Europe.
Enviva calls itself the world’s largest producer of biomass wood pellets, and in recent years it’s faced a cross-Atlantic campaign attempting to debunk the company’s claims of environmental sustainability. It has 10 pellet manufacturing plants in six states: North Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Virginia, South Carolina and Georgia, where local residents and environmental groups have raised ecological and environmental justice concerns from logging practices and emissions from pellet production.
The company has active plans for two more pellet plants, one in Alabama and the other in Mississippi. But the future of the company is now in doubt, by its own admission.
Enviva’s stock price, which has been falling all year from a high of $51 in January, sank to under a $1 a share on Thursday after a new interim chief executive officer delivered a sobering third-quarter earnings call that raised questions about the company’s viability, blaming unfavorable wood pellet pricing, problems at a plant in Virginia, higher interest expenses and other factors.
In its third quarter Security and Exchange Commission filing, Enviva cautioned that “these conditions and events in the aggregate raise substantial doubt regarding the company’s ability to continue as a going concern.”
As investors rushed for the exits, Bloomberg reported a one-day stock price drop of 79 percent.
“To address these near-term headwinds we are moving with urgency to execute a multifaceted transformation plan,” said Glenn Nunziata, the company’s chief financial officer who, has also taken on the new role of interim chief executive officer, according to a transcript of the call. He promised a review of the company’s contracts and debt.
The company’s press office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Environmental advocates were quick to suggest that all the questions they have raised about Enviva’s business model and environmental impacts may be catching up to the company.
“Enviva built a business model based on environmental injustice (and) forest destruction,” wrote the North Carolina-based Dogwood Alliance, in a press release. “The industry operates on a model of greenwashing, bad climate science, large scale clearcutting, and cutting corners on community protections.”
The environmental group has fought the company’s logging and wood pellet manufacturing for years and has been part of the “Cut Carbon Not Forests” campaign, along with the U.S.-based Southern Environmental Law Center and the Natural Resources Defense Council. The coalition worked with U.K.-based Biofuelwatch to fight lucrative subsidies to Drax, a major British utility and Enviva wood pellet burner. The environmentalists have seen Drax as a key driver of what’s been a booming wood pellet industry in the South.
Enviva has benefited from British and European policies that effectively considered the practice of burning wood pellets to make electricity as carbon neutral, even though scientists have shown the practice can emit more greenhouse gases than burning coal.
Heather Hillaker, a staff attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center, said she’s not sure exactly what caused the company’s financial crisis. But, she said, “it’s all really coming to a head right now—the science, the policy, the community stories and everything we have been talking about for years.”
In 2021, more than 500 scientists wrote a letter to President Biden and European leaders, defending the need to protect Southern forests from biomass energy.
“Trees are more valuable alive than dead both for climate and for biodiversity. To meet future net zero emission goals, your governments should work to preserve and restore forests and not to burn them,” they wrote.
Hillaker noted that Enviva’s stock took a tumble last October, when the activist investment services company Blue Orca Capital issued a blistering critique of the company, largely endorsing criticisms from scientists and environmentalists....
....MUCH MORE
June 2022
"Ban on Russian wood pellet exports to Europe to cause difficulties with waste disposal at Russian sawmills"
Ah ha! Maybe these sanctions will be the ones that bring the Russians to their knees.
Previously:
Thursday, May 30, 2013:
Bonfire of the Subsidies: Europe Returns to Early Stone Age Fuel as Putin Mocks
From Nov. 2012:
Mocking Europe's Energy Policy: "Putin invites Europeans to Siberia for firewood"
From RT:
European countries should pursue a balanced energy policy, otherwise they will have to buy the firewood in Siberia, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has joked.Good yuks from the old propagandists at the former Russia Today.
Putin made it clear again that Europe and Russia are dependent on each other. He was speaking with German businessmen in Berlin on Friday. They gathered at a business conference organized by the German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung.
“The German public does not like the nuclear power industry for some reason,” Putin said, adding that he would not comment on it. “But I cannot understand what fuel you will take for heating,” he said anyway.
“You do not want gas, you do not develop the nuclear power industry, so you will heat with firewood?” Putin asked, as reported by Itar-Tass. “Then you will have to go to Siberia to buy the firewood there,” he said, adding that Europeans “do not even have firewood.”
*Drax is the largest power plant in Britain at just under 4 megawatts capacity and has been converted from coal to biomass-and-coal to biomass base load with natural gas peakers.
Some of our previous looks at wood-fired electricity in Europe:
Back to the Future: "UK’s Renewable Energy Targets Drive Increases in U.S. Wood Pellet Exports"
"What's Replacing Coal In Europe? Imported Wood"
If interested see also the Guardian, "Drax to double wood pellet production with biomass firm purchase".
*Don't get me started on
Nationality AmericanOccupation Criminal mastermindAffiliation IndependentStatus Deceased; shot by a poison dart and blasted into space by James Bond
