The Environmental Protection Agency will begin treating energy created by burning trees as renewable, the same as wind and solar.
Biomass from burning wood to produce electricity will be considered carbon-neutral, the EPA announced Monday.
“Today’s announcement grants America’s foresters much-needed certainty and clarity with respect to the carbon neutrality of forest biomass,” Administrator Scott Pruitt said Monday after meeting with forest industry representatives during a visit to a school in Georgia. “Managed forests improve air and water quality, while creating valuable jobs and thousands of products that improve our daily lives. This is environmental stewardship in action.”
The recent spending bill passed by Congress had directed the EPA, Energy Department and Agriculture Department to “reflect the carbon-neutrality of forest bioenergy and recognize biomass as a renewable energy source.”
Georgia and other large timber states had lobbied the EPA to consider biomass carbon-neutral when the states were facing limits on carbon emissions from power plants required by the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, one of its key climate change initiatives. Pruitt has begun a process for repealing and replacing the Clean Power Plan, which was never implemented because of court challenges.
The EPA says it will consider biomass as carbon neutral when devising regulatory actions on energy production from power plants, such as a potentially revised, more modest Clean Power Plan.
“The use of biomass from managed forests can bolster domestic energy production, provide jobs to rural communities, and promote environmental stewardship by improving soil and water quality, reducing wildfire risk, and helping to ensure our forests continue to remove carbon from the atmosphere,” the EPA said in a policy document explaining the move.
Despite Pruitt’s action, EPA’s science advisers haven’t come to a consensus on whether biomass is carbon-neutral. Many scientists say that while biomass is a renewable resource, it is not carbon-neutral because burning wood for energy releases large amounts of carbon all at once, faster than what is absorbed by newly planted forests.
The EPA’s policy statement contends that U.S. forests absorb more carbon from the air than burning wood releases. In 2015, forests offset about 11.2 percent of gross U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, the agency says.
The EPA said it will continue to enforce current air pollution regulations against power generation from biomass as it normally would, not treating it as carbon-neutral.
“This statement of agency policy is not a scientific determination and does not revise or amend any scientific determinations that EPA has previously made,” the EPA document says. “Although this policy announcement does not itself alter sources’ obligations with regard to [greenhouse gases] and CO2 in any particular regulatory program, the agency is committed to addressing regulatory uncertainty about how it treats biogenic CO2 emissions in forthcoming actions under various EPA programs.”
