There is an ongoing debate regarding the use of biomass to fill energy needs and the impact it has on the environment.

Nova Scotia Power has been under fire for years for burning biomass at Port Hawkesbury Paper.

In a recent article from the Halifax Examiner, it states that "Citizens concerned about climate change have for years opposed the government classifying biomass as "renewable energy" because clearcutting, which releases carbon from the ground, remains the dominant form of harvesting on Crown and private land. That's despite ongoing work to begin implementing 2018 recommendations from Professor Bill Lahey to move toward a more ecological approach.

In May 2020, after it became obvious renewable hydroelectricity from Muskrat Falls was going to be delayed yet again, the McNeil government passed an Order-in-Council extending until December 2022 the deadline to generate 40% of electricity from renewable sources.

To help with the shortfall, Nova Scotia Power was told to "maximize" its use of biomass at both the facility it owns in Port Hawkesbury and another one in Brooklyn owned by its parent company, Emera."

National Geographic reported in a recent article that "wood pellets are being shipped from the United States to Europe to be burned in power plants that generate electricity."

National Geographic went on to state that: "Early this year, 500 scientists sent a letter to world leaders warning that logging forests for bioenergy would undermine the fight against climate change. A 2018 study led by one of the signatories of the letter, John Sterman of MIT, supports that view; it says cutting down trees to burn them would be worse for climate over the next few decades.

"It's the opposite of what we should be doing, says Andy Wood, director of the North Carolina-based Coastal Plain Conservation Group. We're hoping it will be addressed at Glasgow.

The United Kingdom, which is hosting the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland through November 12, is the world's largest consumers of wood pellets. The Drax Power Station in Yorkshire, once the largest coal plant in the U.K., now runs mostly on wood pellets--including, in 2019, some five million tons imported from the U.S. Drax itself has become a major player in the international wood pellet market...

The Sterman study estimated that the carbon "payback time" for wood-burning ranged from 44 to 104 years, depending on the type of forest. In the meantime, it said, power plants that burn wood are adding CO2 to the atmosphere, just as if they were burning coal.

And in the meantime, ice continues to melt, seas continue to rise, people continue to be displaced by extreme weather--the scientific consensus, repeated again and again at COP26, is that the world can't wait to dramatically reduce its emissions.

What's more, there are at least two reasons why cutting down trees today to burn in power plants could add even more carbon to the atmosphere than burning coal. First, the trees immediately stop doing what living trees do--they stop removing carbon from the atmosphere. Nothing like that happens when you mine coal.

Second, wood burns less efficiently than coal or gas. Per kilowatt-hour (kWH) of electricity generated, it emits one and a half times the carbon dioxide of coal and three times that of natural gas."

In a recent article from Canadian Biomass titled A carbon negative future? How switching from coal to wood pellets can remove CO2, it outlines an approach and new perspective for how to subtract CO2 from the atmosphere and produce baseload power.

You can read the full article from Canadian Biomass by clicking here.