It's Like Some Biomassive Delusion...
(How Billionaires are Burning Up Our Future and Our Forests for Profit)
When I began investigating details surrounding the proposed Concord Blue biomass power plant in the small town of Eagar, Arizona in 2014, information regarding both the company involved, and the process itself, were extremely difficult to locate. Since then, my opinion of the sustainable energy movement has been biomassively altered.
Following the failure of a hyped potash mine to materialize in Apache County, a proposed CO2 mining venture had local politicians tripping over themselves to roll out the red carpet for Halliburton- who walked away. In order to avoid another public slobber fest, it seemed a reasonable idea to look deeper into the newest pie in the sky scheme being lauded as the latest technological breakthrough in “sustainable energy!”
Something just didn’t smell right about it from the start, while unbeknownst to me, neighbors of the only functional Concord Blue plant (located in Pune, India) were already registering complaints about the stench. Luckily I found “Lost in the Woods” by Claudine LoMonaco on the High Country News web-site. Inside her dense and disturbing coverage of the 4FRI federal forest fiasco, the hard-hitting German journalist followed an Arizona trail that led her to uncover Concord Blue pay dirt.
After seeing a proud online claim by Concord Blue that a biomass plant was currently under construction in Herten, Germany, she drove over to speak with that town’s economic development department. Thanks to a candid employee, she learned that no work had been completed on the previously abandoned building since 2011.
After months of research, LoMonaco could not locate a single Concord Blue biomass plant that was online and full-scale, except for that trash burning power plant in India.
In 2015, the U.S. Department of Agriculture supplied Concord Blue Eagar, LLC with a $5 million loan. After that, the Town of Eagar leased them a 12 acre parcel of public land for next to nothing, while receiving a grant of $50,000 from the USDA. The biomass power plant, and the industrial park which was to be financed with that $50K in seed money, have failed to materialize- with not even a peep from the local press.
I haven’t spent much time reflecting on this boondoggle during the interim, but after viewing Jeff Gibbs 2019 documentary “Planet of the Humans,” I’m inclined to think $5+ million might actually turn out be a very good investment… if it guarantees that the Concord Blue Eagar, LLC biomass power plant never comes online. Here’s why:
The leading culprit in greenhouse gas emissions is carbon dioxide. Any argument based upon a premise that killing trees and burning them for power is “sustainable,” ignores the fact such a process releases carbon dioxide, while effectively eliminating the production of oxygen and sequestration of carbon that would have been accomplished by that same tree during its natural lifespan. This graph shows how commodification of forests as an alternative fuel source threatens their conservation.
Sure, you can grow another tree, but nowhere near as fast as is required when they are burned to create megawatts of electric power. Twenty four cords of wood per hour is an unsustainable amount of raw timber to feed any power generation system, and especially if solar assisted hydrolysis, combined with a closed-loop hydrogen boiler would provide the same constant flow of electricity, while producing zero emissions.
The horrors of deforestation are stark and haunting, whether the clear cut is intended to fuel a biomass generation plant in Michigan, open up the Amazon for a sugar cane plantation, or to prepare land for palm oil farming in the mountains of Malaysia. As we slide down a slippery slope, damp with the newest coat of corporate greenwash, we must decide whether or not we’re willing to take a road that clearly leads to Dystopia.