Provincial woodlot owners and Nova Scotia’s largest environmental group will be lining up against Nova Scotia Power Inc.’s proposed $200-million power plant fuelled by burning wood waste in Cape Breton.
The groups are concerned about Nova Scotia Power using forest biomass at a new power plant at NewPage Port Hawkesbury Corp.’s mill in Cape Breton to meet tough new pollution regulations.
"No one is really presenting any evidence that it is sustainable. . . . There is no science to suggest it is a sustainable practice," said Wade Prest, a small woodlot owner and director of the Nova Scotia Woodlot Owners and Operators Association, on Tuesday.
Under the proposed project announced Monday, Nova Scotia Power will be the key investor in the energy project and papermaker NewPage Port Hawkesbury will be responsible for the operation and supplying the biomass to the mill for the next 40 years.
Prest, of Moose River, has been supplying NewPage’s mill for the past 25 years. He said the economics of the biomass energy project require the lowest-cost supply of forest products and will marginalize small woodlot owners.
"The one thing that really concerns us is this whole biomass-to-energy concept requires that the biomass fuel be very, very, very low cost in order to make it economically viable. . . . The only way to keep those costs down are to use very capital-intensive operations with expensive machinery," he said.
"The need for this biomass fuel to be low cost is what makes it impossible to conduct forestry operations in a manner that is ecologically sustainable.
"Many woodlot owners can be convinced that the opportunity to sell dead, dying or deformed wood is a chance to get their woodlot cleaned up and in shape. All this defective wood serves a very important ecological role, and it’s absolutely critical that enough of that be left behind after harvest to maintain the ecological integrity of the forest."
Jamie Simpson, a forester with the Ecology Action Centre in Halifax, opposes the proposed biomass project, and said burning wood will add more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
"In the short term, it’s actually worse than burning coal. It’s actually 17 per cent more carbon going into the atmosphere per unit of energy produced than you get if you are burning coal," said Simpson. "I still think we have more sensible ways to produce our renewable energy."
Simpson opposes the project and recommends using farm-based biomass in the near term.
"If we are concerned about carbon, it would make a lot more sense to focus on marginal farmland using short rotation crops such as grasses or willows or alders. It would be a beneficial thing both in terms of producing energy and carbon storage," Simpson said Tuesday.
The new plant will require 650,000 tonnes of biomass a year. Half of the biomass will be harvested and about half of that will come from Crown land as outlined in a new 25-year deal the Dexter government and NewPage signed to allow the harvest of 170,000 tonnes annually.
Only "stem wood" will be used in the project’s biomass energy generation. Tree stumps, tops and branches will not be removed from the forest floor, as they are necessary in restoring nutrients to the soil so new trees can grow, says NewPage.
"Clearly it is sustainable," said Bill Stewart, NewPage director of woodlands and strategic initiatives, on Monday.
Nova Scotia Power is targeting an in-service date of 2012 and must get regulatory approval from the Utility and Review Board, which rejected a similar bid last summer.
Last July, the board said it lacked the authority to approve in advance Nova Scotia’s plan to buy electricity from NewPage, under the previous proposal.
This time, Nova Scotia Power is submitting the proposal as a capital expenditure, not a power purchase agreement. The utility requires board approval on any capital expenditures exceeding $25,000.
1 comment:
Did everyone hear the CBC story about Summerside's wind farm. Lots of production, lots of power lots of financial return, no subsidies.
John McManus
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