Burning off the fog

When it comes to green energy, there’s never anything so simple as black and white.

There is, however, a lot of gray.

Like fog. Thick stuff, too, the sort of pea-souper that keeps the fleet in port until the sun burns through.

The latest example of a renewable energy source coming under fire, so to speak, involves biomass.

That’s another word for what we used to call logging slash.

The traditional way to get rid of slash was to stack it in piles and then burn it.

Trouble is, slash fires produce smoke that contains carbon dioxide, soot and other pollutants.

But then some bright people realized that there’s another byproduct of slash burning, only this one is beneficial and valuable: electricity.

An Oregon company is building a plant now that’s designed to burn slash — or biomass if you prefer — and generate enough electricity to power 13,000 homes.

But even this endeavor, which seems to us the epitome of elegant engineering, has attracted opposition.

It turns out that the planned Oregon biomass plants, although it will be “cleaner” than the traditional practice of burning slash out in the forest, will produce more of certain pollutants, including carbon dioxide, than would a coal-fired power plant of similar capacity.

In Massachusetts, state officials no longer deem as “green power” electricity produced from burning biomass.

Voters in that state will decide whether to ban biomass plants.

Although we don’t much care what happens in Massachusetts, we are worried that anti-biomass sentiment will infect Oregon.

And this is a singularly bad time for such a dispute.

The construction of biomass plants is likely to be a vital part of the campaign to restore millions of acres of sickly forest, both public and private, in Central and Eastern Oregon

There is nearly universal consensus that our forests are being in effect suffocated by a surfeit of small trees, mainly firs.

Cutting some of those trees is a key component of the legislation that Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden introduced a few months ago.

That’s the bill touted as the armistice in Oregon’s eastside timber war — the bill that brought timber industry officials and preservationists to the same lectern.

And these strange bedfellows all agree that the effort to rejuvenate eastside forests will result in a glut of biomass.

But we need to decide what to do with the slash, which will be measured in the hundreds of thousands of tons.

Would you rather burn that biomass where it lies, producing considerable pollution but not a single kilowatt of electricity?

Or burn it in a plant that generates less of the bad stuff but quite a lot of the power we need?

This seems to us an easy choice.

Oregon officials agree. The state Department of Energy might soon offer landowners a tax credit of $10 per ton for slash that’s sold to a biomass power plant.

Without that subsidy, many private landowners couldn’t afford to restore their ailing forests.

We hope the state follows through with the tax subsidy despite the complaints about biomass pollution.

After all, if we continue to neglect our forests they will, inevitably, succumb to wildfires.

And some of those pollute more in a day than a year’s worth of slash burning.