My Google Alert for “Manomet Study” has been pretty quiet
lately, and no wonder since our "Massachusetts
Biomass Sustainability and Carbon Policy Study" was initially
published in 2010 (with a subsequent peer-reviewed publication
in the Journal of Sustainable Forestry in early 2013). So I was a bit surprised
to see one pop up on Friday afternoon (November 1st, 2013). This one took me to
a link for a Biomass Magazine blog
by Anna Simet featuring the comments of an engineer recycling an argument from
2010. Based on what the engineer said, it appears as though they did not
understand the carbon accounting methodology employed in the study. The
engineer was making the case that “As long as you don’t harvest the trees
faster than they regrow, you are essentially producing electricity from solar
energy. There is no net carbon emission from this model.” With training and
practical experience in forest management, this was in fact my view of the
issue before we embarked on the Manomet Study. But I've come to learn that this
is a flawed and incomplete view of forest biomass energy carbon accounting. We've
addressed this topic before in a piece
in Global Change Biology – Bioenergy and in a Renewable Energy World article,
so I won’t go into great detail here. I now see it is very easy to demonstrate
that even if the forest stocks at whatever scale you choose remain the same or
increase, following the fate of the harvested and unharvested material can lead
you to very different conclusions about the emissions the atmosphere will
receive. It is not easy, however, to overcome the conventional forestry wisdom
that “sustained yield = carbon neutral”. In the dynamic baseline approach we
used in the Manomet Study, the unharvested (and generally growing) forest
landscape is doing what it does in both the baseline and biomass energy
scenarios. While we could not (and cannot) perfectly predict the future fate of
forests in the baseline and bioenergy scenarios we used, our projections were associated
with an economic analysis of biomass supply based in part on the historical (and
fairly consistent) behavior of landowners in the region. This grounded our
modeling much closer to reality than I think many detractors realize.
I say all this as a background introduction to my main point
in responding to the Biomass Magazine blog post. I believe that the conversation
needs to move beyond the “Manomet Study” and instead focus the rapidly emerging
body of science from around the world. It is a very rich area of scientific
inquiry that has increased rapidly since 2010. The scientific community appears
to be developing common themes that move beyond the view that biogenic energy
sources are inherently carbon neutral. Among those themes is the development of
a dynamic baseline evaluation framework that incorporates the complexity of
forest management and the forest products sector.
Anna Simet’s call for a “new study on biogenic emissions” to
come out is illustrative of the gap in understanding between the scientific
community completing these studies and the biomass energy industry. We need to
close this gap. Actually, there have been many studies on biogenic emissions published
since the Manomet Study. In fact, my colleague Thomas Buchholz at the Spatial
Informatics Group and I have found nearly 60 studies that look at the question
of woody biomass emissions compared to fossil fuel equivalents. Similarly, a
group in Europe (see Lamers and
Junginger, 2013) recently completed a thorough review of several carbon
accounting studies. Both efforts have concluded that the overwhelming majority
of these studies identify a carbon payback (or carbon debt) period before
bioenergy scenarios are favorable to fossil energy scenarios from an emissions
standpoint. Most of the studies that were reviewed in these two meta-analyses
have been published since 2010. A report
from several industry groups in Europe, Canada and the US was also recently
released that acknowledges that there is a carbon debt. The overwhelming
majority of the studies coming out since 2010 fundamentally conclude the same
thing as the Manomet Study: when you use
biomass from the forest for energy, there will be an initial emission of
greenhouse gases that is greater than fossil fuels (per unit of energy
generated), but these emissions are removed from the atmosphere as the
harvested forests re-grow. Some scenarios have shorter “debt” period than
others, and there are contexts where the debt is paid off immediately. We are completing
a meta-analysis of these published studies to try to understand the many
factors that drive the length of carbon payback period. We hope to have this
work written up in the next few months to synthesize and bring greater
awareness to the current scientific thought on this topic.
Again, I firmly believe that the conversation needs to move
beyond the “Manomet Study” and instead focus on what the rapidly emerging
science is telling us about where the development of biomass energy from
forests is a low risk proposition from an atmospheric emissions perspective. I
agree with Anna Simet, it really is all about the carbon math. It’s complicated
math, but necessary to do to drive activities that best use our forests as a
climate mitigation tool.
See also: