The Truth Behind 'Burned'

A recent 'film' by anti-biomass campaigners has been promoted widely online.

To give the anti-biomass lobbyists credit, they’ve produced a very slick film.

If you watch it through, by the end credits you’ll be convinced that all those who support bioenergy – thousands of policymakers, scientists, foresters, energy experts and investors throughout the world – are deeply mistaken. Or, worse, they don’t care.

The film presents an industry freely cutting swathes across ancient, sensitive woodlands, “destroying forests, biodiversity and making climate change worse.” And being paid “disproportionately large amounts” to do so.

But is ‘Burned’ balanced? Have you been shown the real picture and the arguments on both sides? And if not, is it believable?

The truth is that this film is not just unbalanced – it’s completely biased and dangerously wrong. It paints a deeply inaccurate picture, basing its narrative on flawed assumptions about how forestry operates and how US forests over recent years and decades have performed.

This film falls into the normal pattern of anti-biomass campaigners who, in the words of forestry experts Forisk, repeatedly commit three fundamental errors:

1. Failure to provide context;
2. Improperly assigning causal relationships;
3. Errors of fact.

There are many issues here, but we’ve picked out the key ones that keep coming up again and again from the same people.

To begin with, we’d suggest watching the below film by Tony Juniper, the renowned environmental champion and now Chairman of the English environmental agency, Natural England. Tony goes into those same forests and explores how the sector works. It’ll help provide some balance.

"We identify the sites in which the industry is harvesting its feedstocks for pellets and then from there we go down to the ground and we groundtruth.” – Dogwood Alliance campaigner

This one stood out for us because it sounds so convincing, yet it’s deeply misleading. It’s also representative of the entire ‘Burned’ film’s approach – they never give a wider view.

By pretending that you get a more ‘real’ truth on the ground, the Dogwood Alliance is ignoring a wider reality. 

Here’s why:

The film suggests that every time it shows a tree being cut down, it’s happening for the pellet industry. That just isn’t the reality.

The reality goes like this:

1. Most timber wood is used for construction, because it fetches higher prices. This is what drives forestry, not pellet markets (as Forisk points out);
2. Smaller wood, but still good quality, can be used for joinery;
3. Lower-grade wood, but still often ‘whole trees’ harvested in the thinning process, is used for panel boards, pulp, paper and pellets.

Wood that goes to pellet mills is often ‘whole trees’. Some, if it’s too large and not diseased, misshapen or knotted, will be rejected and sent on for timber use (for an example of this approach, see Enviva’s sourcing policy). The rest is used for pellets because it is of very low-value.

This system allows the market to cascade wood through a hierarchy that gets best use of the wood.

If you turn up at a logging site and secretly take photos, even if you then follow trucks to a pellet mill, you are not 'revealing the real deal'.  

Just as was done in this movie, critics misconstrue the wood that is delivered to pellet plants as being high-value wood based on visual inspection of photographs or woodpiles without having seen the forest intact.  That’s not ‘groundtruth’ – you’re simply not getting the whole picture.

This philosophy is repeated throughout the film – lots of anecdotes, lots of theories, plenty of misdirection and misrepresentation, but very little real-world data.

Burning biomass to produce electricity emits 40-60% more CO2 per Megawatt hour than burning coal.” – Screen quote, ‘Burned’ film

“Quote/unquote: ‘carbon-free’ source of energy” – Mary Booth

Firstly, we don’t claim that bioenergy is carbon neutral and neither do the rules and regulations governing our industry. The regulations are designed to ensure massive cuts in carbon emissions compared to fossil fuels, but they don’t assume or pretend there are no emissions.

Secondly, whilst biomass releases about 3-5% more CO2 than coal per energy unit, it is certainly not 40-60% more. Such a figure reflects a worst-case efficiency level which just doesn’t reflect standard biomass power generation.

There is a fundamental difference between releasing biospheric carbon and geologic carbon. Mary Booth criticizes this point, claiming that there’s no difference because the radiative forcing of CO2 is the same, wherever it originated. That’s true, but it misses a key element.

There’s a key difference that Booth chooses to ignore is this:. If you use fossil fuels, you release carbon into the atmosphere that has been locked away for tens of thousands, or millions of years.

If you release biospheric carbon (i.e. from organic materials), you’re releasing carbon that is part of an ongoing cycle. It’s like tapping into the biosphere’s inhaling and exhaling. And because forests are experiencing net growth, supported by bioenergy revenues, it’s actually helping to create a net sink. That’s why bioenergy stack emissions are considered to be matched by forest growth, thereby cancelling each other out. That doesn’t mean that the supply chain is ignored – that’s factored into the emissions reported by the sector.

So, fossil fuels release carbon from deep in the earth’s crust back into the atmosphere. Bioenergy takes part in an ongoing biosphere-atmosphere cycle.

That’s an important difference.

This was investigated by the UK’s Department for Energy and Climate Change and then refined by its successor. They found that the normal operation of the biomass power sector delivers considerable carbon savings, compared to a number of alternative supply chain scenarios, including just leaving the forest untouched.

But we want to go one further. We don’t just want much lower emissions than fossil fuels. We want to create ‘net negative’ emissions – where we actually remove carbon from the atmosphere.

Bioenergy with Carbon Capture, Utilization and Storage, aka BECCS, is one set of technologies that could make this happen. It would work like this:

1. Forests grow, absorbing carbon;
2. Some trees are harvested, with most wood going to timber (locking away carbon) and off-cuts/thinnings used for pellets. Revenues go back into forests;
3. The pellets are used to produce power and heat, displacing fossil fuels;
4. The emissions from power generation are captured rather than being released into the atmosphere;
5. Carbon is either stored underground or used in a variety of industrial products;
6. Forests continue to grow…

By absorbing carbon in trees and from stack emissions, we could capture more carbon from the atmosphere than is released – effectively sucking it out of the atmosphere. It’s a technology widely seen as essential to beating climate change (here’s a report on biomass, including a key role for BECCUS, from the UK’s Committee on Climate Change). It’s especially true essential if we don’t meet our current emissions targets (as the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said).

This is described as fantasy by the anti-biomass lobby, but there’s already a world-leading BECCUS pilot project capturing carbon at Drax in the UK. It’s not commercial scale yet, but the UK government is developing policies quickly to make this happen. The Energy Technologies Institute supports BECCUS, as do the Royal Society and Royal Academy of Engineering. Having a thriving bioenergy sector is one central step towards that.