Status: 04/18/2023 07:24
More and more European coal-fired power plants are switching to wood pellets – at the expense of nature. For example, Estonia, Europe’s largest pellet supplier, is being deforested at a rapid pace. Environmental activists are alarmed.
By Thomas Kruchem, BR
Visit to Lääne-Virumaa, a sparsely populated county in northeastern Estonia. Liina Steinberg is standing on a cul-de-sac that opens up 90 hectares of state forest. She grew up in this forest, says the head of the forest protection organization Save Estonia’s Forests.
Clear cut for renewable energy
A stone’s throw away, a yellow harvester snaps birch trees like straws. Instead of dense forest, there are clear-cut areas in the landscape. Estonia – smaller than Lower Saxony and still half forested – is being cut down at a rapid pace: the small country is Europe’s largest pellet exporter. A large part of the Estonian wood migrates to European coal-fired power plants, which switch to pellets – highly subsidized, supposedly renewable energy. A mistake, as is becoming increasingly clear: not in Germany, but in the EU as a whole, more is now being cut down than is growing back.
Drainage channels, one and a half meters deep, run along the cul-de-sac in Lääne-Virumaa County in Estonia. They allow the forest floor to dry out to allow easier access for harvesters. In the wall of a canal, the 50 centimeter thick layer of peat in the ground is clearly visible.
Drainage ditches are designed to make the forest more accessible to harvesters.
Image: Thomas Kruchem
Efficient, inexpensive, destructive
Forest conservationist Steinberg, with tears in her eyes, points to huge clear-cut areas as far as the eye can see: birches, pines, ash trees, oaks – all gone. Clear-cutting is the long-established method of forest management in Estonia, she explains. Efficient, inexpensive, destructive: The ground is torn up and then releases large amounts of CO2. Mammals, amphibians, insects and countless plants are losing their habitat. And the machines, which weigh up to 15 tons, compact the forest floor.
Steinberg points to the half-meter-deep track of a harvester: “It drove here about three years ago and left this ditch – for the next decades or even centuries. And it’s very difficult to plant something new here.”
Countless tree trunks are shredded
Ten to twelve million cubic meters of timber are felled in Estonia every year – twice as much as in Soviet times. More than half is fuelwood in the first place – wood that Estonia’s rural population needs for heating and wood for the pellet industry.
Outside the village of Osula in the southeast of the country is the brand new pellet factory of Graanul, the largest pellet manufacturer in Europe. Truck after truck full of logs pass through entry gate controls. Thousands of logs are stacked on the factory premises, the plant runs around the clock – like the sawmill of another company next door. Graanul produces around 2.5 million tons of pellets per year – in eleven factories spread across the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
Ukraine war increases demand
The most important buyers are power plants in Denmark, the Netherlands and Great Britain, explains company spokesman Mihkel Jugaste. “The global pellet market was already growing very quickly before the Ukraine war. But the war triggered an additional growth spurt in Europe. People are now increasingly relying on safe energy sources that are available within their own borders.”
Graanul, now owned by a US investment fund, produces pellets from 55 percent sawmill waste and 45 percent low-grade logs, Jugaste says. A lot of Estonian logs must be of inferior quality – this thought comes to mind when you look at the countless 40 or 50 centimeter thick logs on the premises of the pellet factory.
Estonia’s forests: net emitters instead of carbon sinks
As a representative of the small Social Democratic Party, Estonia’s Minister of the Environment, Madis Kallas, is pretty powerless against the clear-cutting in his country. Kallas is considered a man of integrity who speaks frankly. He sharply criticizes the fact that clear-cutting is still allowed in Estonia’s national parks and “Natura 2000” protected areas. “Our environmental protection laws are weak. And the wood industry is not to blame for that. No, the 101 members of our Parliament are responsible for allowing logging during the breeding season, for example. The industry only uses this legal situation to achieve maximum profits.”
In fact, Estonia’s forests, which should be carbon sinks, have been net emitters of carbon since 2018. This is one of the reasons why the Minister for the Environment has exercised his right to reduce the felling volume in the state forest for one year – by at least ten percent.
EU sanctions for clear-cutting in protected areas
“Hopefully other politicians will wake up soon,” says environmentalist Steinberg. “Hopefully they will at least ban the logging of Natura 2000 sites without an environmental impact assessment.” Because of such deforestation, the EU Commission has initiated infringement proceedings against Estonia. A process that can take many years.
Estonia’s forests don’t have this time, says the environmental activist and is now suing the Estonian courts with her organization “Save Estonia’s Forests”. “We want all deforestation in ‘Natura 2000’–Prohibit areas without environmental impact assessments.”