Tag Archives: BECCS

Mongabay: Netherlands’ largest forest biomass plant canceled, forest advocates elated

In 2020, two years after the Vattenfall wood pellet energy plant was proposed, forest advocates organized a youth protest outside Vattenfall headquarters as part of the National Children’s Climate March. Image courtesy of the Clean Air Committee in the Netherlands.

As this stories describes, forest advocates were able to take significant credit in The Netherlands when one of its largest energy providers canceled plans in February 2025 to build the largest wood-pellet-only power plant just outside Amsterdam. It took six years and a circuitous route through the Dutch court system, but on a rare occasion, the environmental argument that burning forest biomass is not the climate-friendly solution it is touted to be until won out.

While the Dutch, like the South Koreans, appear to be inching away from industrial-scale forest biomass energy, neither is close to giving up entirely on wood burning, or subsidizing the burning, as they both try to meet 2030 legal deadlines to phase out all coal burning.

In fact, the elusive promises of BECCS — Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage — is now being touted as the reason to continue burning wood pellets because, it is theorized, that emissions can be easily trapped and permanently buried underground.

There is a significant flaw in that plan in that the scientific consensus illustrates that BECCS technology is years, if not decades, away from effective implementation.

“The irony is that my country (The Netherlands) and the EU have called burning biomass carbon neutral, right?” Dutch forest advocate Fenna Swart told me. “Now the claim with BECCS is that the air will be even cleaner. But in our view, it’s just another flawed policy to allow business as usual.”

A close-up image of one of the posters held aloft by demonstrators to protest plans by Vattenfall to build the Netherlands’ largest woodburning energy plant. Image courtesy of the Clean Air Committee in the Netherlands.

Mongabay @ COP22: Forest advocates say zero-carbon goals too reliant on unrealistic tech

Edward Perry of Birdlife International speaks at a panel at COP22 in Marrakesh, Morocco. Photo by Justin Catanoso

Edward Perry of Birdlife International speaks at a panel at COP22 in Marrakesh, Morocco. Photo by Justin Catanoso

This seemed an ideal story for Mongabay.  Protecting forests, fighting deforestation and striving to replant tens millions of trees as natural carbon sinks, are critical strategies in the Paris Agreement in slowing the rate of global warming. But fossil fuel representatives at COP22 aren’t quite getting it. They do not want to strand assets (oil, natural gas, coal) underground, and are promoting unproven technologies that haven’t even been developed yet as ways to do business as usual. Environmentalists aren’t buying it.