- Vattenfall, the Netherlands’ third-largest energy producer, has announced it is abandoning plans to build the country’s largest wood pellet burning power plant.
- Forest advocates, who launched a campaign to derail Vattenfall’s plans in 2019, declared victory. They note that burning wood pellets to make energy produces more carbon emissions per unit of energy than coal, despite industry claims that the technology is carbon neutral.
- Increasing scientific evidence shows that burning forest biomass for energy is a false climate solution that increases deforestation and biodiversity loss, while releasing significant carbon emissions at the smokestack — worsening climate change.
- In a recent pivot, EU officials now seem more willing to admit the error of past carbon neutrality claims for wood pellet burning power plants, though they now say those emissions can be eliminated by installing Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BCCS) at the facilities — an untested, unready technology, scientists say.
Dutch forest campaigners are claiming a significant victory over one of the Netherlands’ top energy providers, Vattenfall, after the company decided in late February to cancel plans to build the nation’s largest wood pellet burning plant for energy.
“This is enormous,” said Fenna Swart, leader of the Clean Air Committee, a Dutch forest advocacy group that has aggressively opposed Vattenfall’s plans since 2019 in the court of law and public opinion. “This is a great victory for our forests and biodiversity. After six years, [we] have succeeded in stopping this mega biomass power plant by the multinational Vattenfall.”
The Sweden-based company, the Netherlands’ third-largest energy producer, first sought a permit in 2018 to build the 120-megawatt power plant using only forest biomass to generate energy. The facility, to be built just outside Amsterdam, would have powered up to 24,000 homes in exchange for 395 million euros ($424.8 million) in subsidies pledged by the Dutch government.
Research has consistently shown that the burning of wood pellets produces more carbon emissions per unit of energy than coal, despite claims by the industry that forest biomass is a renewable, carbon-neutral energy source because trees can be regrown.
Swart said her group will lobby Dutch legislators to apply the subsidies earmarked for Vattenfall for forest conservation. However, the conservative national leadership in Amsterdam appears intent on promoting policies that continue to support forest biomass burning as a means of phasing out its remaining coal-fired plants.
According to Biomass Magazine, an industry trade publication, the Netherlands remains the European Union’s largest importer of wood pellets for industrial energy production. In 2023, the Dutch imported 2.3 million metric tons of pellets, nearly half from the United States. Denmark and Italy ranked second and third in wood-pellet imports.
According to the Swedish energy company, it is closing all of its coal-fired heat and energy plants across Europe and shifting to other energy sources, including wood pellets. Meanwhile, the global forest biomass industry is poised to expand dramatically on both the supply and demand sides by 2030, according to International Energy Agency estimates.
Years of litigation
When Vattenfall officials announced in late February “that this biomass plant can no longer be realized,” the decision came after years of legal wrangling that saw the company initially granted the environmental permits necessary to start planning for construction.
Lawsuits filed by the Clean Air Committee failed in two lower court rulings where the NGO argued unsuccessfully that forest biomass harms domestic and overseas forests, reduces biodiversity and increases carbon emissions — worsening the climate crisis.
It took successful appeals in 2023 and 2024 in the Dutch Council of State, the country’s highest administrative court, to overturn the lower court rulings on environmental grounds and leave Vattenfall with little recourse but to abandon plans for the large biomass plant.
Like South Korea, which in January stopped subsidizing imported wood pellets for industrial-scale energy (but not for domestically produced pellets), the Netherlands has wavered in its government commitment to burning wood for energy and heat. The country already has some 200 large and small biomass plants for producing energy and heat.
But in December 2022, the Dutch government terminated subsidies for all new biomass power plants. The decision was driven in part by exclusive Mongabay reporting that December. The Clean Air Committee also produced a petition with more than 300,000 Dutch signatures opposing biomass energy (at that time, the Vattenfall subsidy had already been pledged).
Swart told Mongabay: “We did not immediately bring the subsidy train to a standstill, namely the existing and long-term subsidies of 5-15 years are still running (estimated in the billions of euros). And the Dutch government has refused to enter into discussions with the biomass industry to encourage them to change from burning wood.”
BECCS: Biomass solution or ‘business as usual?’
The 27-nation European Union now finds itself in a bind of its own making when it comes to burning forest wood to make energy. The EU has perhaps the most ambitious carbon emissions-reduction goals in the world — promising 90% cuts by 2040 largely by phasing out all fossil fuels for energy, heat, transportation and consumer products.
But there’s an inbuilt problem with that goal: EU policy designates wood burning as a renewable energy source (which allows biomass carbon emissions at the smokestack to go uncounted toward a country’s annual emissions output). This means that some 60% of EU renewable energy is not truly zero-carbon wind, solar, hydro or nuclear. Rather, reductions are to be claimed by burning wood pellets, which produce significant carbon emissions, despite being designated carbon neutral on paper.
The EU has proposed a means for correcting this huge carbon accounting error: At the United Nations climate summit in Azerbaijan in November 2024, Wopke Hoekstra, the EU climate commissioner, who is also Dutch, pledged that the European Union would triple its renewable energy portfolio in the years ahead. And it will do so by burning more wood pellets, not fewer, but with a twist: BECCS, or Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage.
In the Netherlands, RWE, another major energy producer, plans to increase its annual burning of wood pellets from 3.5 million metric tons to 7.5 million metric tons in the coming years while claiming that it will use BECCS technology to capture the emissions.
There is, however, a problem with this strategy. According to a range of climate scientists, BECCS is an unproven technology that is nowhere near ready for the kind of near-term implementation envisioned to effectively eliminate or even reduce wood pellet smokestack carbon emissions.
“Putting our faith in BECCS — especially on a large scale — is loaded with dangers and uncertainties for both people and nature,” Shaye Wolf, climate science director for the Center for Biological Diversity, told forest campaigners. “And many experts now believe it could even accelerate climate change.”
Swart, the Dutch forest advocate, went further, calling BECCS “the new scam” when it comes to governments justifying the already observed deforestation and increased emissions associated with burning wood pellets for energy.
“The irony is that my country and the EU have called burning biomass carbon neutral, right?” Swart said. “Now the claim with BECCS is that the air will be even cleaner. But in our view, it’s just another flawed policy to allow business as usual.”
While Swart’s group celebrated the recent halting of the Netherland’s largest wood pellet burning power plant, she said forest campaigners like herself have no choice but to remain vocal and active with the public and government officials.
“The most important thing we can do is restore, protect and expand our forests,” Swart said. “With climate change, we need biodiverse forests more than anything in the world.”
Banner image: Dutch forest advocates Maarten Visschers (left) and Fenna Swart protest the burning of forest biomass for energy outside Vattenfall’s headquarters in Amsterdam in 2021. Image courtesy of the Clean Air Committee in the Netherlands.
Justin Catanoso, a regular contributor, is a professor of journalism at Wake Forest University in North Carolina.
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