Upper Valley Clean Air Committee Interview Part I: Explaining Biomass Combustion
Toward the end of 19F, I spoke with John Tuthill, Meg Sheehan, and Lucia Martin of the Upper Valley Clean Air Committee, a collection of concerned neighbors and Upper Valley residents working to educate the community about biomass. Excerpts from the interview will be posted in three parts, and were compiled and transcribed by Ari Chadda ’22 for Dartblog.
John Tuthill: The Upper Valley Clean Air Committee came together following a series of forums by the college about the biomass project. So, a group of people started meeting and doing quite a lot of research on the issue of biomass. Air quality, public health impacts, finances and also alternatives. And that’s ongoing at this point. I could just speak personally. My interest actually goes back a number of years. I live about 50 miles from Hanover. I live in an area where a lot of wood is harvested for the biomass industry.. We have heavy cutting in our region in Sullivan County, south of here. And I’ve been involved with biomass in the State as it’s has become a political issue in New Hampshire and in the region. Also, at the federal level. And this gets to the finances and the subsidy programs that have been put in place both by Congress and by the state legislature.
So, I was concerned, having attended all of the forums, including the first one in the spring when about a dozen people came. I was concerned initially that the college seemed to be reading from the biomass industry’s playbook and that their financial considerations, it seemed to me, were largely based on the subsidy packages they could get. This appeared to be combustion technology fairly quickly and easily plugged into their system; practically off the shelf. I mean, this is a technology that’s been around for 30 or 40 years now. And we do know that in New Hampshire regulation is relatively light, and that the standards are not always protective of health or air quality. That is largely my concern. I will say that although I have been encouraged to see a pause for more planning, I think it’s still very important to be focused on where the college is going with this. I think that there has been some progress and some indication that Dartmouth is genuinely looking at alternatives.
Meg Sheehan: My name is Meg Sheehan. I am an environmental lawyer. I have been practicing environmental law for over 30 years. I have been involved in the biomass issue for about twelve years, off and on. I started my involvement when there were five proposals for a wood burning biomass facilities in western Massachusetts that led to a statewide campaign to change our regulations in Massachusetts, which did happen. And now we have the strictest biomass harvesting and air pollution regulations in the world. I would like to see Dartmouth agree to comply with those regulations, and if they had proposed something back initially in the spring that even acknowledged that those regulations existed. I would have thought perhaps maybe they had done their homework. But as John says, this is all about the money. This is greenwashing. It’s just window dressing. There is really no deep dive into what sustainability really means. It’s just a way for the college to look good. And I’m not buying it and I don’t see that the public is either. If Dartmouth is really serious about sustainability, they would be doing a lot more around the campus. I look around and I see copper roofs everywhere on these new buildings.
Where are the solar panels? They have allegedly been studying biomass for 10 years. But what have they done in the meantime? I don’t think they even have a comprehensive recycling or composting program here. This is just all about the money. The folks they’ve decided to partner with on this project are Goldman Sachs and the likes of Blackstone, who’s one of the potential financiers, Blackstone has a horrible reputation in the environmental world for promoting really bad infrastructure projects that harm the environment and supply dirty fossil fuels and other types of fuel, too, for energy consumption. So, this is by no means a clean energy project or a sustainable project. t’s really offensive that one of the most prestigious academic institutions with an endowment of six billion dollars had the audacity to pose this to the community by presenting it as this is a done deal, saying “We’re going to one of these three neighborhoods, the golf course, the low-income community or an industrial site.”
What do you think they’re going to pick and what’s going to win out in the end? There was never any initial effort to work with the community to get input on whether a toxic incinerator in the middle of a neighborhood was a good idea. The fact that they tried to hide the letter from the three scientists that was leaked to the Valley News is another indication that this is really not about green energy. It’s really about a greenwash. And I’d just like to add that the level of insult to me really is increased by the fact that the Irving Institute at Dartmouth, which is funded by Irving Oil, is promoting this. And the fact that they took a biomass trip to Denmark, spending tens of thousands of dollars to take faculty and community members as well as students and had the nerve to come back and present to the community that biomass is clean. I will quote from the presentation that I saw that stated the only emissions out of garbage incinerators in Denmark is water vapor. That is a complete and utter lie. I saw nothing in that presentation about the fact that there is a tremendous carbon loophole that promotes biomass burning. That’s like Biomass 101.
There are so many academic papers, including papers by the Chatham House in the U.K. saying that Denmark is one of the worst biomass burners in the world, importing biomass pellets made from the southern forests of the United States. And for Dartmouth’s Irving Institute to go to Denmark and come back with this sanitized and greenwashed presentation for the community on biomass and relate that to the toxic incinerator that they want to put it in is stunning.
Lucia Martin: As a resident of Hanover, I am concerned about the biomass project. I feel strongly that it will have a profoundly negative impact on our community. This project was presented as a temporary bridge to future technology, it is in fact a step backwards. It is far more polluting, a greater health risk, less regulated, and with a devastating effect on the environment. And of course, the real big lie is that it will be short-lived. As Meg mentioned, Dartmouth’s own scientists wrote a letter addressing the most critical issues of this project. The letter is available at https://uvcac.org/impact-science/
John Tuthill: I’ve been fairly involved over the years in permitting issues, particularly having to do with waste incinerators in the state. We’re down to one large waste incinerator in New Hampshire now. Permitting goes through the federal Clean Air Act. The state actually administers the federal program under their own regulations, but these have to meet Clean Air Act standards. The permissible levels of heavy metal emissions, for example, both for biomass and for waste incinerators, are extraordinarily high. I hadn’t paid much attention to the biomass issue until a couple of years ago when a state senator introduced a bill to include waste incinerators with biomass incinerators for new subsidies. And we’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars spent on subsidies in a small state like New Hampshire since the industry arrived here over three decades ago.
The Governor’s Office has estimated subsidies amounting to nearly half a billion dollars have been paid by ratepayers since the mid-80s. That’s a lot of money that could have been applied to genuine renewable energy systems. Basically a wasted public investment keeping combustors owned by private investors running. Biomass and trash incineration are simply not economical without subsidies. But I want to get back to the air emissions. One of the first things I discovered looking at EPA data from tests of smokestack emissions was that some of these burners are reportedly emitting, 80, 90, 100 pounds of lead per year. And these are electric generating facilities with a capacity of 25 Megawatts or less. That is not something you want to see happening in a neighborhood where people are going to be routinely exposed seven days a week, 24 hours a day. I don’t think that Dartmouth had really looked at the emissions question.
What Meg has just said is really kind of staggering, that biomass proponents could come back from a trip to Denmark and announce that the emissions are steam. It is true that there is pollution control on these systems, but they still are emitting significant levels of toxic chemicals and elements. And this pollution is permissible under state and federal law.
