Why the Definition of Biomass in S. 3813 Needs to be Broader

Most private forests in the United States are smaller tracts owned by nearly 10 million separate owners.

• Of the nearly 450 million acres of private forests in the U.S., only about 20% are purposefully managed for the continued production of forest products.
• The remaining forestland is managed by owners who frequently experience one or, perhaps, two harvests in a lifetime.
• A typical wood basket for any facility will rely on potentially hundreds or even thousands of separate sources of wood coming from a broad variety of forest and ownership types.

S. 3813’s definition of qualifying biomass discourages biomass use by excluding biomass from large portions of private, managed lands.

• The language creates four separate categories of private forests that produce qualifying biomass – 1) planted forest land that was planted or was cropland at the time of enactment; 2) naturally regenerated forest land; 3) forest land planted to “restore” naturally regenerated forests; and, 4) conservation forest land.
• The categories do not mesh with practiced forestry, creating confusion and severely limiting supply:
  • “Natural regeneration” would not allow any planting of trees in areas that are not planted now.  A significant portion of private forests are reforested through a combination of planted and naturally growing trees.  These forests would not qualify as a source of renewable forest biomass.
  • “Planted to restore a naturally regenerated forest” would mean you plant a forest today and never again.  Planting is a significant up-front investment done on forests that will continue to be managed over time.  The practice suggested in this provision will rarely happen and will consequently produce little biomass.
  • “Conservation forestland,” as defined in the bill, has no legal precedent, creating a broad new overlay of new federal land use regulations on top of the existing framework of well–established federal, state and local laws, like the ESA, Clean Water Act and successful state and local policies and programs.  This new overlay will create redundancy, confusion and litigation exposure, all of which will discourage the use of biomass.
  • “Planted forest land” is similar to the definition in the Energy Independence and Security Act which set in place the Renewable Fuel Standard.  This confines the use of biomass to planted forests and prohibits the use of biomass from forests where trees are planted to create a more desirable or ecologically beneficial species mix (i.e. replacing invasive or inferior species).

• Placing biomass into separate categories of “qualifying” and “ineligible” material creates new and costly verification complexities that will discourage biomass use in an already low-margin market.  Because biomass comes from thousands of different (mostly small) landowners, even the most sophisticated private sector wood-tracking systems used today are not able to trace most wood back to its origin.

Forests are not at risk of large-scale conversion to plantations due to biomass energy markets.  The real conversion risk is to non-forest uses because forestry is no longer an economically-viable land use.

• The economics of forestry favors the production of the highest value saw logs and peeler logs first, higher value pulp logs second and lower value material, like biomass, third.  Because biomass is the lowest value product in the forest “value chain,” forest owners will not displace higher value products in the long term to supply low value biomass in the short term.
• One of the most effective means of conserving working forests is to provide market opportunities that will make forest management economically competitive with non-forest uses.  As traditional markets decline, new markets, such as biomass energy, must replace them in order to help forest owners conserve forests as forests.
• Restrictive definitions of biomass that discourage or foreclose market opportunities reduce the economic value of forest lands, reduce or eliminate the ability of forest owners to reinvest in the land, and contribute to the likelihood of forest conversion and fragmentation.
• The federal government has a number of well-established and effective tools, like the Forest Inventory and Analysis Program, which will be used to monitor the impacts of biomass utilization on landscapes over time.  A strong monitoring program using such existing tools can help track the impacts of biomass utilization on the land, identify trends in forest extent and diversity, and provide the basis for corrective action, if needed.