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arolina-Pacific LLC shipped 5,000 tons of wood briquettes to Scandinavia at the beginning of March, marking the first of the company’s regular shipments out of its location at the Port of Georgetown, S.C. The briquettes are contracted to specific power plants there, adding Carolina-Pacific to the increasing number of U.S.-based manufacturers sending their woody biomass products overseas. U.S. companies are attracted to the European market because of higher demand and better incentives for renewable energy. In addition, wood pellet, chip and briquette producers in the Southeast U.S. have the advantage of a large supply of wood to satisfy that European demand, and the product can be transported by ship instead of more costly truck or rail. Cottondale, Fla., is the home of Green Circle Bio Energy Inc.’s 560,000-ton pellet plant, currently the largest in the world; Phoenix Renewable Energy is developing a pellet plant in Camden, Ark., with a capacity of 250,000 tons; and Point Bio Energy LLC is developing a 496,000-ton pellet plant at the Port of Baton Rouge, La. The products from these plants, and many more, are headed for Europe’s well-established renewable energy market.
Patchwork Quilt The European Union has a policy that requires its member countries to generate 20 percent of their energy consumption from
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renewables by 2020. In addition, numerous individual nations have their own goals. “They’re just about 10 years ahead of us in terms of a commitment to renewable energy,” says John Kern, chairman and CEO of Carolina-Pacific. “What we’ve got here is a patchwork quilt of portfolio mandates for each state.” Specifically in the Southeast where “coal is king,” he adds, few states have goals that draw renewable developers. “There’s a lot of indecision,” he says. “There’s a lot of inaction domestically here in the states because nobody knows what the future holds.” Kern says he would sell his wood briquettes in the U.S. if a federal renewable portfolio standard (RPS) was passed, but even then, it would be years before the standards would take effect, and development takes time. An RPS usually leads to the implementation of incentives to spur development and ensure those goals are met. “The thing is, there are some incentives in the EU so that there can be higher and better production coming from renewable energy,” says Ronalds Gonzalez, a PhD student at North Carolina State University and co-author of “Wood Pellets: An Expanding Market Opportunity” (see page 68). “Here in the U.S., we don’t have as much incentive to use wood pellets.” Gonzalez adds that more tax incentives in the U.S. would drive the domestic market. Europe adopted the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 and in 2003 started with a disincentive to burn fossil fuels: the carbon tax, Kern explains. The continent aspires to drive down pollution to 1990