Golden State Natural Resources (GSNR) Wood Pellet Project
The Golden State Natural Resources wood pellet project proposes to build two of the country's largest wood pellet mills in Tuolumne and Lassen Counties—equal in size to the Enviva pellet mills that are devastating the southeast U.S.—transport the pellets by rail across California, store the fire-and-explosion-prone pellets in silos at the ports of Richmond and/or Stockton, and then ship them overseas to Asia or Europe to be burned in converted coal-fired power plants, threatening public health and safety, the climate, environmental justice, and our forests.
Public health: Wood pellet production facilities emit toxic air pollution including particulate matter, NOx, SOx, heavy metals (lead, mercury), and hazardous air pollutants (benzene, formaldehyde, dioxins). Exposure to these pollutants is linked to an increased risk of premature death and serious illnesses including cancer, respiratory diseases, and heart disease. The estimated 285 daily truck trips through small rural communities to deliver wood to the mills will create noise and diesel pollution impacts.
Public safety: Wood chip piles are prone to spontaneous combustion, threatening workers and nearby communities with fires and explosions. Fires and explosions have erupted in pellet plants in at least five states. In 2017 a wood pellet storage silo in Port Arthur, Texas, caught fire, with flames burning for more than 100 days, and sent many local residents to the hospital.
Climate: Wood pellets are a highly carbon-intensive, polluting, expensive, and inefficient energy source. Burning wood to generate electricity produces more carbon emissions at the smokestack than coal per unit of electricity produced. Greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution would be emitted at every step of the project—from cutting forests, trucking cut trees long distances, chipping wood and producing pellets, transporting pellets by rail hundreds of miles to ports, and shipping pellets to be burned overseas. The project would incentivize a massive ramp-up of logging of California’s forests, releasing their stored carbon, at a time when it is critical to increase forest protection and stored carbon.
Environmental justice: The two proposed deep-water port sites, Stockton and Richmond, are located in low-income communities of color (majority Hispanic) with some of the highest pollution burdens in the state, according to CalEnviroScreen. The Tuolumne pellet mill site has a higher-than-average pollution burden and a high poverty rate.
Forest ecosystems: The project would remove trees of any type and size within a 100-mile radius of each pellet facility to manufacture one million metric tons of pellets every year, damaging habitat for sensitive and endangered species and harming forest ecosystems.