This is happening because in the EU there are financial incentives fin place by Government to use biomass. Once you slow down conversion of crop land to "biomass" land so as to protect world food resources for people, wood is whats' left.

This process has the secondary benefit of making it easier to up commercial generation capacity and still meet air and solid waste permit limits (wood is cleaner in all respects than coal.) Those benefits should accrue in the US, not Europe. Finally, fine quality coal has become quite expensive, which makes addition of wood an economic benefit for EU utilities.

Meanwhile, isn't it nice to see "Old Europe" doing the third world resource rip off on the Land of the Brave and the Free?

If we had any brains left (as a nation) we'd have the same or better incentives in place here in the US and put local people to work logging instead of using ginormous polluting chippers to send our wood to Europe, adding the shipping emissions to boot.

How many people who can no longer afford to pay for oil heat could benefit from a wood pellet stove?

Lets keep our pellets home!

And these are going to Europe by sailboat or Clippers, right? Or empty petroleum vessels...

And why are the chips not being used here in the states?

They could easily be used by Green Power, Inc.

http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:Green_Power_Inc%27s_NanoDiesel:Catalytic_Pressureless_Depolymerization_%28Oiling%29

Since when is logging green?

This type of operation puts an enormous stress on forest ecosystems.
They say it's green, but is it sustainable? Are only planted pines being used or do we intend to raze the entire southern forest?

If the trend continues, and an increasing percentage of our energy is derived from woody biomass, what then is the fate of our forests.

We do not have enough planted pines to replace coal, and a planted pine ecosystem is trite compared to the forest that it replaced.

what would Ansel Adams, Emerson, or Muir say?

We should think ahead of our generation; increase efficiency (at one point we needed zero electricity) and mitigate our wastes to fill our energy demands (algae has potential here).

tread lightly,
sje

I have a few questions regarding this post and its comments. One of them is why does this factory has to be the biggest of the world? When are the people in the US going to learn that distributed energy is the goal. Specially with such a big country as yours, it would be much better if there would be hunderds of factories like these. Shipping of these pellets to the EU by ship is probably cheaper then sending it back from florida to the rest of the US with large trucks.
Of course the same goes for the wood that has to go to florida to be made into pellets.

560,000 tons of pellets per year requires up to 1,400,000 tons of wood to be sourced from within a 50 - 80 mile radius of the plant per year to make it pencil out economically. Biomass power can be sustainable, but NOT at this scale.

Folks in the NE are in for a long and expensive winter as heating oil is expected to near all time high.

We're shipping our forest over to Europe so they can meet their Kyoto targets while our citizens wont be able to heat their homes. I wonder how much oil is consumed to ship 560,000 tons of southern pine forest across the pond?

Why would they make a green fuel in the USA then ship it to the EU via plane,boat or what ever and burn fossle fuels to get it there?
Why wouldn't they sell the product in USA and Canada and cut transportation fuel emissions and costs?
Sound like a load of bull pellets to me!