Wood Pellet Mills Are Prone to Catching Fire. Why Build Them in California?

This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Wood pellets, by design, are highly flammable. The small pieces of compressed woody leftovers, like sawdust, are used in everything from home heating to grilling. But their flammable nature has made for dangerous work conditions: Since 2010, at least 52 fires have broken out at the facilities that make wood pellets across the US, according to a database of incidents compiled by the Southern Environmental Law Center.

Of the 15 largest wood pellet facilities, at least eight have had fires or explosions since 2014, according to the Environmental Integrity Project, a nonprofit founded by a former director of the US Environmental Protection Agency.

At the same time, the world’s largest biomass company, Drax, is cutting down trees across North America with a promise to sell them as a replacement for fossil fuels. But even its track record is checkered with accidents.

In South Shields, UK, wood pellets destined for a Drax plant spontaneously combusted while in storage at the Port of Tyne, starting a fire that took 40 firefighters 12 hours to extinguish. In Port Allen, Louisiana, a Drax wood-pellet facility burst into flames in November 2021.

Now, despite finding itself in the midst of a lawsuit over accidental fire damages, Drax is pressing on with a new business proposal; it involves not just cutting down trees to make wood pellets, but, the company argues, also to help stop wildfires.

In October 2023, after purchasing two parcels of land in California to build two pellet mills, one in Tuolumne County and another in Lassen County, Drax’s partner organization, Golden State Natural Resources, or GSNR, “a nonprofit public benefit corporation,” met with residents of Tuolumne County to address concerns about its vision for how the process of manufacturing wood pellets can mitigate wildfire risk.

GSNR has since touted its close work with community members. However, according to Megan Fiske, who instructs rural workers at a local community college, residents living close to the proposed pellet mill sites were not always aware of the plans. “People who were a hundred feet away from the [proposed] pellet plant had no idea about it,” said Fiske.

Both of the proposed mills are in forested areas that have been threatened by wildfires. When asked about the risks that manufacturing wood pellets poses, Patrick Blacklock, executive director of GSNR, told Grist, “We sought to learn from those incidents. The design features can go a long way to mitigating the risk of fire.”

If county representatives approve the plan, loggers will be allowed to take “dead or dying trees” and “woody biomass” from within a 100-mile radius of the pellet mills within the two counties, which overlap with the Stanislaus National Forest and the Yosemite National Park.

Fiske said she’s seen instances, unrelated to Drax, where loggers weren’t trained properly and ended up taking more wood than should have been allowed under a wildfire resilience scheme. “There’s a difference between what the loggers are told and what happens on the ground,” said Fiske. You have “inexperienced or young people who are underpaid, maybe English isn’t their first language, so there are a lot of barriers.”

Residents of Lassen and Tuolumne counties are fighting against Drax’s plans to build the pellet mills, telling Grist that making wood pellets in forested areas and thinning the forests at the same time would only compound the risk of fires in their communities. “They are downplaying the scale of this over and over again,” said Renee Orth, a Tuolumne County resident pushing back against development plans.

In January 2024, Drax formalized its partnership with GSNR with a memorandum of understanding. Several months later, the company announced that it was creating a new subsidiary, called Elimini, to take over the work in California and focus on “carbon removal” in the United States. But before Elimini and GSNR can build their mills, they are hoping to secure a viable plan for transporting the wood pellets. GSNR intends to build a facility in Stockton, about 100 miles west of the pellet mills, to transport the wood pellets overseas. That plan has been met with strong opposition.

Little Manila Rising—a community-led group of mostly south Stockton residents—has decided to take a stand against Drax, which needs approval from the city before it can begin building its transport facility.

“Right now, our community has the opportunity to determine if we even want an industry at our port that has a proven recent track record of fires, explosions, and fugitive wood dust emissions,” said Gloria Alonso Cruz, environmental justice coordinator with Little Manila Rising.

Cruz believes that GSNR is “counting on a marginalized community’s voice to go unheard.” “We are not going to let that happen.”

A Drax spokesperson told Grist that “no decision has been made on any potential end market or on any future arrangement with GSNR,” but GSNR said that it has not signed any other MOU with another company. The draft environmental impact report states that Europe and Asia are the intended end markets for the wood pellets.

The EU, along with Japan and South Korea, subsidize wood pellets as a renewable fuel, based on carbon accounting which assumes that the trees will grow back and replace the CO₂ that was burned after the trees were removed. But over the past few years, evidence has emerged that the burning of US-sourced wood is currently releasing annual greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to between 6 and 7 million passenger vehicles. One study suggested it can take between 44 and 104 years for new trees to reabsorb the carbon that was emitted during clear-cutting for wood pellets, and in a 2018 letter sent to members of the European Parliament, a group of 772 scientists concluded, “Overall, replacing fossil fuels with wood [for biomass] will likely result in 2-3X more carbon in the atmosphere in 2050 per gigajoule of final energy.”

To move forward, GSNR has to first wait for approval from the Port of Stockton. The port’s director Kirk DeJesus says they are waiting for the environmental impact report to be completed before signing any agreement. GSNR released the draft environmental impact report on October 22, 2024, with a 90-day review period, where comments are submitted and incorporated into an amended version, which will be sent back to Golden State Finance Authority—the nonprofit that owns GSNR—later this year for approval. After that, GSNR will also have to get local permits for Tuolumne and Lassen counties and demonstrate compliance with the California Environmental Quality Act.

In its draft environmental impact report, GSNR says it anticipates the “Biomass Only Thinning Projects will treat approximately 85,779 acres of forested land annually on average once the proposed project is fully operational.” If the project is green-lit, then approximately 2,640 square miles would be logged over a 20-year period, the equivalent of a mile-wide strip of forest stretching from Sacramento to Boston. Blacklock told Grist the organization based its wildfire project on research known as the Tamm Review, which found that thinning combined with prescribed burns can reduce wildfire severity by 62 to 72 percent.

But climate scientist Dominick DellaSala said the authors of the Tamm Review mis-cited their own work and ignored 37 papers contradicting their findings. “The forest is no longer a forest,” DellaSala added. “The fire-thinning question has been very narrowly scoped to get a preconceived outcome … None of them look at the collateral damages to ecosystems and the climate—only if fuels are reduced enough to lower intensity.”

Kim Davis, research ecologist with the USDA Forest Service and lead author of the 2014 Tamm Review study, said she stands by the findings that mechanical treatments can reduce future fire severity when combined with prescribed fires, adding that the 37 studies DellaSala cited were not included because they did not meet sufficiently strict scientific standards. “This research underwent rigorous statistical, technical, and peer review,” said Davis. “We respectfully disagree with the statement that our work improperly cited or misrepresented studies and data.”

In any case, the US Forest Service already cuts down dense areas of forest it believes are particularly at risk from wildfires and burns them in controlled areas, known as slash piles. Blacklock said that the partnership between Drax and GSNR shares this same objective. From GSNR’s perspective, and that of many local politicians, using wood which would otherwise be needlessly burned in wood-pellet facilities is a win-win.

But campaigners say that, in other markets, Drax and its subsidiaries have extended their operations beyond slash piles, cutting down healthy trees to make wood pellets. In 2022, the BBC uncovered that wood used in Drax facilities had come from clear-cut primary forests in Canada, which can take thousands of years to grow back. A year later, after residents of a town in British Columbia, Canada, asked Drax to help clear nearby slash piles, Environment Ministry employees told The Tyee that tens of thousands of trees from healthy forests were being turned into wood pellets.

Large trees of the kind chopped down in Canada act as wind buffers, according to DellaSala. When these trees are removed in logging operations, like opening the air vent on a wood stove, the increased ventilation can cause a fire to spread quickly. “If a fire occurs it can spread rapidly through the forest due to higher wind speeds and drying out of the understory by tree canopy removals,” said DellaSala. “Hence the forest is over-ventilated and more prone to fast-moving, wind-spread fires.”

The pellet mills, which have a history of setting on fire and producing piles of combustible dust, have to be built in clearings within forests so that woody fuel can be delivered. Although GSNR assured residents it follows strict fire protocols, the proximity to the forest made some residents nervous, and has compounded worries that the wildfire treatment plan will make fires more likely, not less.

Drax’s involvement has also not reassured them. The company has recently come under scrutiny from regulators. The UK energy regulator Ofgem slapped the company with a $25 million fine in August 2024 for misreporting sustainability data. Three months later, Land and Climate Review reported that Drax has broken US environmental rules more than 11,000 times according to public records. The breaches have spurred action from communities across the Golden State, with 185 organizations asking California to reject the wood-pellet proposal.

Orth, one of the Tuolumne County residents Grist spoke with, captured the argument against Drax and GSNR very succinctly: “It’s greenwashing through and through,” she said.