Biomass Incinerator withdraws permit application in Indiana
by Andy Mahler
The Concerned Citizens of Crawford County have just announced that Liberty Green Renewables LLC (LGR), the company proposing to build a 32 megawatt biomass incinerator in Milltown, Indiana, has withdrawn its permit application to discharge wastewater from the plant on-site, effectively signaling a successful conclusion to an eighteen month organizing effort to stop the incinerator.
This permit application withdrawal comes on the heels of two other recent developments including an ordinance passed by the Crawford County Commissioners that would require a county permit for any such facility seeking to locate in the county, including numerous comprehensive studies detailing the impacts of the proposed incinerator – a permit that is very unlikely to be issued. The other development is that a 90% stake in the company has recently been acquired by an Australia-based energy financial firm - Macquaire Group.
In addition to the Milltown incinerator proposal the company has plans for similar forest burning facilities in Scottsburg, Indiana, and Perryville, Missouri. Heartwood extends gratitude and appreciation to the Concerned Citizens of Crawford County and to 2009 Heartwood Hellbender Cara Beth Jones for an outstanding organizing effort
The Concerned Citizens of Crawford County have made it clear that their opposition to biomass incineration does not stop at the county line and that they will continue to lend support to citizens groups in Scottsburg and Perryville, Missouri, and anywhere else in the country where one of these incinerators is proposed.
LGR and others of their ilk come into these poor rural communities promising to provide green, renewable energy, and to only use clean, waste wood from sustainable operations in the process. They describe it as a win/win/win situation. Use wood that would otherwise be wasted, create jobs, generate clean, renewable energy and improve local forests at the same time.
The reality is that these facilities are being proposed to reap the substantial federal subsidies available for their construction without which they would not be feasible on their own merits. There are tens and even hundreds of millions to be made, at taxpayer expense and once the incinerator is up and running, chances are the owners will sell to local utilities or other investors and cash out.
In fact as recent studies by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the Environmental Working Group have conclusively demonstrated, industrial scale biomass facilities are neither green nor sustainable
Environment
They are harmful at every stage of the process from the sourcing of the fuels, to the transport and processing of those fuels to the incineration, to the disposal of the ash. They generate more greenhouse gases per unit of energy produced than coal-fired power plants. While the fuel proposed is usually wood, local forests cannot supply sufficient fuel at that scale on a sustainable basis over time. These facilities require huge quantities of fuel 24/7/365. Once they are up and running they are routinely granted variances on their permits to add to the mix such additional fuels as tires, municipal solid waste, treated wood products and demolition debris, all of which add to the already toxic mix of air and water pollutants associated with incineration of such huge volumes of material and the disposal of the resultant ash which concentrates so many of those pollutants.
Economy
While these facilities advertise the jobs they create and the contribution they make to the local economy, in fact, an objective benefit and cost analysis would likely point out the many jobs and opportunities that would be lost should the facility be built, especially jobs in wood products industries that would have to compete for raw materials with a facility that can use trees of any age, any grade, and any species. The local community would also sacrifice the potential to attract other kinds of businesses, as few desirable businesses want to locate near an incinerator and the associated noise, pollution and smell. Local communities and property owners would see the value of their property decline along with assessed value for local property tax revenues, damage to local roads from continuous hauling, and most important of all, health costs associated with the releasing of fine particulates into the air and other forms of pollution, with small children being most susceptible.
Equity
When armed with the truth and the reality of what is being proposed, communities throughout the East, Midwest, and South are organizing to defend themselves from this latest tax-subsidized industrial assault on the recovering forests of the hardwood region. These facilities seem always to be proposed for poor rural communities near public forests, almost always by outsiders. And if the people of Perryville, Missouri, are able to organize themselves as the citizens of Crawford County have and the citizens of Scott County are, they will also reject biomass incineration. The bad news is that LGR claims to have plans for eight such facilities with locations in several Heartwood states
One final thought, from Harper's Index, January 2006:
Number of years the United States could meet its energy needs by burning all its trees: 1