In a statement this week the company said that it plans to focus resources on iron mining, its core business.

The facility, located at the Telkite Technology Park near Sawyer International Airport in Marquette, Mich., was constructed to produce high-energy, low-emission biofuel cubes from sustainably collected wood and agricultural feed stocks. Since initial production the plant has not performed to design capacity, nor at a production level that justifies continued operation.

The company, which delivered its first load of biofuel cubes to the Marquette Board of Light and Power this summer, said it will try to find new positions for the 30 people who work at the biomass plant.

No public funds were used in the construction or operation of the plant, the company said.

Other biomass projects are awash in public dollars.

On the eastern side of the Upper Peninsula in Kinross the Mascoma corporation and logging company J.M. Longyear plan to produce 40 million gallons of ethanol annually at the Frontier biofuel refinery project.

That project is expected to receive more than $100 million in public funds as a renewable energy demonstration project.

Wolverine’s power generating plans and the regulatory environment in which they play out have shifted drastically since the company first proposed building a coal-fired power plant in a limestone quarry along the shore of Lake Huron in 2007.

In 2009 Gov. Jennifer Granholm issued an executive order requiring that coal plants demonstrate that they are the best way to meet the state’s power needs. Last year, after the Public Service Commission found that the plant was not needed, the DEQ denied the project a permit. Wolverine sued in Missaukee County court and in January the court ordered DEQ to reconsider the permit. Now the state has issued a draft permit and is in the process of taking public input before finalizing the air permit for the plant.

Federal rules for coal plant permitting have also changed since Wolverine first applied for a permit. Since January the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has required that major new stationary sources of pollution demonstrate how they will use “Best Available Control Technology” to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

Wolverine’s project is the first test of how Michigan will interpret EPA’s new requirements.

Coal plants are the leading emitters of greenhouse gases and there aren’t many ways around that.

“EPA acknowledges in their guidance documents that the standard right now is going to be energy efficiency,“ Dept. of Environmental Quality Permit Engineer Rob Lemroeux said. “Most [carbon control] technologies are in demonstration mode and not cost effective.”

The DEQ’s draft permit for the plant has it burning 70 percent petroleum coke (the carbon-rich leftovers of the oil refining process), 25 percent Powder River Basin coal, and 5 percent local green wood. The plant is expected to release 6,050,090 tons of greenhouse gases each year.

Lemroeux said that the draft permit allows Wolverine to meet its greenhouse gas requirements with efficiencies such as using variable speed motors on equipment inside the plant and by burning 5 percent biomass, 255,000 tons of green wood sourced from within a 75 mile radius of the plant.

Michigan Technical University study of biomass availability in the area commissioned by Wolverine found that the company could get 20 percent of its fuel stock by using all of the biomass available within a 75 mile radius, he said.

Michigan’s 2008 renewable portfolio standards require power companies to use get 10 percent of their energy from renewable source by 2015 and biomass, including wood, is considered a renewable energy source.

The permit requires the company to come up with a biomass procurement plan, Lemrouex said, but it’s not clear whether the plan will involve specifications as to the moisture content of the biomass. Moisture affects burn efficiency.

Anne Woiwode, director of the Michigan Chapter of the Sierra Club, said that her group is planning to formally object to Wolverine’s biomass plan and argue that the permit should not be approved.

“The amount of wood is massive and one of the things that they have not accounted for is that there are already multiple other facilities that will be using wood in the Northern Lower peninsula and Eastern Upper peninsula.”

The Mascoma biomass facility in Kinross, a wood to ethanol project that has been heavily subsidized by the state, plans to use the wood from a 150 mile radius of its plant, and this area includes Rogers City. Woiwode said.

Woiwode also challenged the idea that biomass is a renewable, carbon neutral fuel.

Last year, in a study commissioned by the state of Massachusetts, the Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences found that wood burning releases more carbon dioxide than coal and that it can take generations for forests to reabsorb carbon from the atmosphere.

“This is a whole new area for all of us,” Lemroeux said about the greenhouse gas considerations. “Any comments are valuable.”

The DEQ will take comments on this aspect of the project at a public hearing on May 19th at 7 p.m. in the Rogers City High School Gymnasium, 1033 West Huron Avenue, Rogers City.

Comments will also be accepted via the DEQ website until 5pm May 19.

An ethanol production plant in South Dakota (iStockphoto)

Before the American Clean Energy and Security Act could reach the House floor for a vote on June 26, Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) took to the podium and launched an improvised filibuster in protest of last-minute additions to the bill by the Democratic leadership. For over an hour, he read passages from the more than 300 pages of amendments, lambasting provision after provision on behalf of his frustrated Republican colleagues who balk at the expansion of energy regulation.

Now, as the Senate takes up debate on the legislation, the objections to some of these late changes are coming from a very different camp: environmental advocacy groups.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

One of the most important amendments to the cap-and-trade bill, which seeks to lower the country’s greenhouse gas emissions and promote alternative energy sources, represents a compromise between the bill’s architects and House Agriculture Committee Chairman Collin Peterson (D-Minn.), who threatened to block passage if concessions were not made to agricultural interests. The amendment significantly reduces the criteria that biofuels, such as ethanol and wood pellets, would have to meet in order to be considered “renewable” — a victory for farmers who grow these materials.

But a study by the National Resources Defense Council shows that these changes could reduce the emissions-cutting effects of the legislation by as much as a third, thereby undermining the bill’s central aim.

“The ACES bill is supposed to require a 17 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2020,” David Hawkins, director of climate programs at the NRDC, stated in his written testimony to the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on Tuesday. “Because of the biomass loophole in the House-passed bill, the real reduction achieved could be far less — as little as 11 percent.”

In an ideal world, biofuels would produce no net emissions, since when plants grow, they take carbon out of the environment, and when they are burned, they release that carbon back into the air. However, there can be indirect contributions to greenhouse gas emissions — for example, if the land on which crops for biofuels are planted would otherwise have been used for carbon-reducing trees, or for food that is then instead planted on a freshly cleared rainforest in South America.

The version of the bill passed by the Energy and Commerce Committee tried to enforce biofuel carbon-neutrality by factoring in these indirect effects on emissions and restricting the conditions under which biofuels would be considered renewable. The Peterson amendment stripped the bill of several of these provisions and prevented the Environmental Protection Agency from accounting for indirect land use issues outside the United States for the next five years. According to Peterson and his backers, indirect land use is difficult to calculate, and the EPA will need some time to properly assess its impact.

The legislation establishes a national cap on greenhouse gas emissions and requires polluters to purchase allowances for each ton of carbon dioxide they emit. However, Hawkins charges that under the House bill, power plants could reduce their need to buy carbon allowances without actually cutting back on emissions.

“If a coal power plant replaces half of its coal with biomass, it has to hold carbon allowances for only half of its pollution,” he said in his statement to the Senate. “This makes sense only on the assumption that 100 percent of the carbon dioxide released when the biomass is burned was taken up from the atmosphere during its production.”

Nathanael Greene, director of renewable energy policy at the NRDC, concurred with his colleague. “In a worst-case scenario,” Greene said, “you’re going out to an old-growth forest that’s sequestered carbon over hundreds of years,” he said. “You take that, you chop that down, you burn that, and from the atmosphere perspective, it’s exactly the same as burning coal. In that case, it really doesn’t matter that you’re displacing coal. You’re adding just as much carbon to the landscape.”

The NRDC study on the effects of the lower biofuel restrictions was conducted about a month ago, but the figures were not released until Hawkins’ testimony on Tuesday before the Environment and Public Works Committee, according to Greene, who helped produce the study. Hawkins could not be reached for comment.

The 11-percent effective emissions reduction figure invoked by Hawkins represents the low end of the potential range calculated by NRDC; more likely, the number would be around 14 percent. Both figures are below the 17-percent target recommended by President Obama and prescribed by the legislation, which itself is too low for many scientists and environmental advocates.

Rolf Skar, a senior forest campaigner at Greenpeace, worries that additional support for biofuels could reduce the incentives for cleaner energy sources, such as wind and solar. “Putting them in the mix here just means that they’re going to substitute for windmills and other true sources of renewable energy,” he said, adding that the Peterson amendment “was clearly based on politics, and not science.”

On the other side of the debate, the farm lobby has cheered Peterson’s efforts. Farmers could derive substantial income from provisions that subsidize the production of biofuels.

“As a general proposition, we support what Mr. Peterson got in the House bill,” said Paul Schlegel, director of public policy at the American Farm Bureau. But he added that the Bureau opposes cap-and-trade legislation overall due to its costs for farmers and consumers of energy.

In a statement following the passage of the House bill, Peterson said, “This bill promotes homegrown, clean burning renewable fuels, which is one of the best things we can do for the economy and the environment.” Peterson’s office did not respond to a request for further comment.

Many environmentalists still hold out hope that the biofuels provision will be changed in the Senate.

Josh Dorner of the Sierra Club is optimistic that given the relatively liberal composition of the Senate Energy and Public Works Committee’s Democratic membership, the committee might be able to strengthen the biofuels language in ways the House could not. “If you look at the EPW Committee compared to the Energy and Commerce Committee in the House, it’s a much more hospitable environment,” he said.

Still, there is already evidence that the fight to maintain the farm-friendly biofuel provisions could be bipartisan. On Wednesday, Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) stated his intent to keep all of Peterson’s provisions in the Senate version of the bill, and to add “more allocations and allowances” for agriculture.

“Farm interests probably have a stronger hand in the Senate,” Dorner conceded, “given that people in nearly every state have some sort of agricultural interest.”

While the coal industry lobby in Washington seeks to rebrand its product as “clean,” and the fate of climate change legislation in Congress remains hostage to partisan maneuvering, two recent decisions by local power companies show a lower carbon future slowly taking shape.

Biomass magazine reported yesterday that the Georgia Public Service Commission has approved plans to convert Georgia Power’s 164-megawatt coal-fired power plant located near Albany, Ga., into a 96-megawatt, 100 percent wood-fired biomass plant. The result will be a carbon neutral plant with significant reductions in certain emissions pollutants such as sulfur dioxide, nitrous oxide and mercury, according to Georgia Power.

The decision trumps the company’s traditional ideological stand. Joseph Romm at Gristmill notes that Southern has long led industry opposition to national renewable energy standards which would require power companies to obtain electricity from solar, wind or other green resources.

In Wisconsin, Alliant Energy made a similar decision earlier this month. After the state Public Service Commission rejected its application to build a coal-fired plant, the company announced that it will dramatically boost its purchase of wind power. “The PSC expressed concern over carbon, and we listened,”  an Alliant spokesman told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. The company canceled another coal plant in Iowa earlier this month.

The argument that there are no practical alternatives to coal appears to be dying by a thousand cuts.

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