Over the last several months, the 350PDX Forest Defense team has joined folks from all over the region to raise concerns about the Drax corporation’s plans to build a biomass pellet export plant in Longview, WA. The plant would include a huge processing facility designed to convert almost a million tons of wood every year into pellets for export, co-firing the pellets in coal power plants.

Drax would receive “green energy” subsidies to produce electricity from their biomass plant, but we know that biomass is a false climate solution (there’s nothing “green” about it). Using wood for industrial-scale energy production actually creates two to three times more greenhouse gas emissions than using fossil fuels, and Drax’s plant would pose serious risks to the health of local forests.

Not only does this plan have dire consequences for our forests and for carbon emissions, the process of turning trees into pellets has well known adverse impacts on air quality, and Drax has a long track record of violating its air pollution permits. Drax’s Morehouse biomass plant in Mississippi emitted three times more toxic substances than permitted, and Drax had to pay the largest air quality violation fine in the state’s history.