Truth in Advertising: Middlebury College's Biomass Plant

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By RICHARD MONASTERSKY

While sustainability efforts are well intentioned, the results — particularly in the short term — do not always match the rhetoric.

The claim: In 2008 the college will open an $11-million biomass plant that will burn wood chips to help heat and cool campus buildings and produce electricity. The plant will reduce the college's consumption of fuel oil by 50 percent and "will cut the college's greenhouse gas emissions by almost 12,500 metric tons annually."

Fine print: The college estimates it will need 20,000 tons of wood chips to replace one million gallons of fuel oil each year. The plant should produce less sulfur and particulate pollution than an equivalent amount of fuel oil, says Michael W. Moser, Middlebury's assistant director of facilities services. And it will enable the college to meet its goal of cutting its greenhouse-gas emissions to 8 percent below its 1990 levels, which is one of the more ambitious carbon commitments in American higher education.

In the short term, however, the biomass plant may not offset carbon emissions that much, if at all. For the next few years, local saw mills will supply all of the wood chips, which would have most likely gone to a paper producer or to a large biomass plant run by an electric utility. If more trees are chopped down to provide additional wood chips for those users, the extra logging could raise the net greenhouse-gas emissions in the area. In the long term, Middlebury hopes to plant 1,200 acres of fast-growing willow, which could provide half of the fuel for its biomass plant, says Thomas J. Corbin, the director of business services. The college will start experimenting with the willow in the spring by planting 10 acres.

With the current high cost of oil, biomass plants have become popular, especially because utilities can qualify for renewable energy credits when operating them. But it is unclear whether biomass is truly sustainable because the wood used in such plants can take many years to grow. Lisa R. Rector, a senior policy analyst for Northeast States for Coordinated Air-Use Management, a Boston-based nonprofit group specializing in air-quality issues, says that with growing demands from biomass plants, experts are trying to answer the question: "How much wood is there out there that the Northeast can sustain for power generation?"