The long-awaited draft environmental impact report (DEIR) from Golden State Finance Authority (GSFA) was finally released for public comment on October 22nd. The document is over 1300 pages long and after several days of delays, the appendices for the DEIR were also released. The appendices alone added several thousand more pages of information that the public is now tasked with reviewing to write substantive comments. The DEIR describes how the nonprofit Golden State Natural Resources (GSNR) will use trees to produce wood pellets which will be shipped to Asia to be burned for electricity. There is a tenuous and poorly understood relationship between GSFA and GSNR as well as the rural County representatives of California (RCRC), but the lead agency for the DEIR is GSFA. If this seems confusing, we believe that is the intent. Coupled with these cloudy relationships, and the failing nonprofit GSNR, we are greatly concerned about the involvement of Drax, a multinational energy scoundrel (scoundrels hide the truth and Drax is being renamed to “Elimini” to conceal their trail of environmental violations around the planet) that is the largest biomass energy producer in England and operates wood pellet facilities in the southeast United States and British Columbia.

We are working diligently with a large coalition of conservation groups to analyze this massive document. The document for the project describes a massive facility, which will see as many as 120 logging truck trips daily to the Lassen County village of Nu Bieber as logging ramps up in nearby national forests. The sprawling facility is spread out over the Fall River valley floor and will cover the area of multiple football fields. The facility will take whole logs, strip the bark off them, and chip the logs, using the bark and other fine fuels to dry the log chips in a large kiln. The dried chips are then compressed into wood pellets, which will then be loaded onto train cars to be hauled to the port of Stockton. In Stockton, the rail cars would be unloaded into large silos where they will be stockpiled until they can be loaded onto barges. The barges would then be loaded and set sail for Asia, where the wood pellets would be burned to generate electricity. Rita Vaugn Frost of the Natural Resources Defense Council, a member of the coalition opposing this project, describes the project “what we’re seeing is an environmental injustice unfolding” to an “already incredibly over-burdened community.”

This DEIR must cover the entire process from the trucking to the shipping of the final product. What we know from the examples that exist in the southeast United States pine plantations of Georgia and North Carolina, like pictured above, is that these pellet plants are extremely (environmentally) dirty and the communities that live nearby are burdened with toxic dust and fumes which have caused serious health complications. We also know that the port facilities pose high explosion risks and create massive dust problems for nearby communities.

GSNR has delayed the release of this document for at least six months and now seems focused on reducing the public ability to engage with the leadership of the board. Only three public meetings are scheduled the first of which was one week after the release of the multi-thousand-page document. There is one meeting scheduled in the port town of Stockton.

Comments are currently due December 23rd, so the public is tasked with reading thousands of pages of dense material during the days between Halloween, a presidential election, the Thanksgiving holiday to finish and submit comments 2 days before Christmas. Our coalition has requested an extension to allow 90 days for public comments and this request is currently under consideration by the GSFA board.

It is not enough to simply state that this is a bad project. This project represents one of the riskiest and most consequential projects that we have reviewed in many years. We have seen how Drax behaves in other states and countries, and we cannot overstate the importance in fighting the placement of these types of facilities anywhere on the West Coast of the United States. Following the footsteps of a commissioned report that exposed that California greatly underestimates the greenhouse gas emissions from the logging industry, this project has the potential to create runaway greenhouse gas emissions, which we will never be able to mitigate. This project comes with a narrative that wherever trees are harvested, new trees will be planted, and those trees will sequester the CO2 emissions generated by biomass power generation. The problem with this narrative is that it will take 40 to 60 years before any trees will begin to sequester appreciable amounts of CO2 and leading up to that time, biomass energy generation will contribute four times more CO2 than coal power plants. So in the short term, there is a science fiction plan to mitigate for massive increase in CO2 emissions caused at every step of the process that these plants require- a CO2 sequestration system that is unproven to function that scale and would re-inject CO2 into used oil wells beneath the disadvantage communities. In the long term, we will have contributed a massive amount of CO2 and heat to the atmosphere, intensifying climate change, and potentially affecting the ability of any replanted forests to survive to maturity in a hotter and dryer climate. None of it makes sense unless your goal is to ramp up logging under the guise of “forest health” or “resiliency” and allow a multinational corporation to profit off the destruction of our state’s natural resources while contributing to the demise of our planet in the name of “green energy”.

More resources:

Coalition’s press release preliminary reaction to the DEIR.
An article in The Intercept where Nick Joslin was interviewed.
EcoNews report interviewing Nick Joslin and Rita Vaughn Frost.