A recent article in our local paper (taken from the Capital Press) talked about Microsoft buying carbon credits to offset its carbon emissions from a small company in Oregon named Freres Engineered Wood. The credits come from investing in marketing a biochar byproduct produced from the cogeneration plant that Freres operates next to its timber processing facility that generates steam for that facility and electricity for the grid. The byproducts include biochar and ash. The biochar was being sold to local farmers, but now is now being hauled to a landfill 45 miles away, according to the article.
The deal was sanctioned by the certification organization Puro.earth, which runs this trading scheme that companies use to buy and sell credits on the open market, with another company brokering the deal. Sound legit and cool, no?
Actually, not. Oh, it's legit, but cool, not really. Freres was already producing the biochar, so no emissions are being saved. Trees are not being planted, no land is being converted to forest, nothing new is happening at all. In fact, the biochar is just a product of an operation already going on that produces an enormous amount of CO2 emissions by burning trees!
I'm a huge critic of the biomass energy industry, which is always seeking more feedstock (read trees) for their plants, which only makes industrial logging more likely. They frame it as being "green" by "using" more of the tree than otherwise would be done, hence making them less "wasteful". It would be more "green" for Freres to fold it up altogether, or at least to sell the mulch from their operations directly to farmers and gardeners, instead of burning it for energy. They could run their plant on renewable energy, or close up shop entirely, if they were really serious about being "green".
It's disheartening to see the surge in the use of engineered wood for construction these days. I really wish we put more thought into the materials we use in our built environment. But we certainly shouldn't let this sort of operation be propped up by one of the richest corporations in the world, with the full blessing of the environmental establishment. Shame on us all!