Abstract
Wood pellet exports from the Southeastern United States (SE US) to Europe have been increasing in response to European Union member state policies to displace coal with renewable biomass for electricity generation. An understanding of the interactions among SE US forest markets, forest management, and forest ecosystem services is required to quantify the effects of pellet production compared to what would be expected under a reference case or ‘counterfactual scenario’ without pellet production. Inconsistent methods to define and justify the counterfactual scenario result in conflicting estimates and large uncertainties about the impacts of pellet production on SE US forests. Guidelines to support more consistent and transparent counterfactual scenarios are proposed. The guidelines include identifying major influences on current SE US forest conditions, developing potential futures that clearly document underlying assumptions and associated uncertainties, identifying the most likely alternative feedstock fates, and estimating the effects of no pellet demand on future forest conditions. The guidelines can help modelers to more accurately reflect the past and current forest dynamics and to consider the implications for SE US forest landscapes of future scenarios with and without pellet production. WIREs Energy Environ 2017, 6:e259. doi: 10.1002/wene.259. For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | e259 |
| Journal | Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Energy and Environment |
| Volume | 6 |
| Issue number | 6 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Nov 1 2017 |
Funding
This research was supported by the US Department of Energy (DOE) under the Bioenergy Technologies Office. Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is managed by the UT-Battelle, LLC, for DOE under contract DE-AC05-00OR22725. We thank Matt Langholtz of ORNL and two anonymous WIREs reviewers for their helpful comments on the original version of this manuscript. This manuscript has been co-authored by UT-Battelle, LLC under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the US Department of Energy. The United States Government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the United States Government retains a non-exclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, world-wide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for United States Government purposes. The Department of Energy will provide public access to these results of federally sponsored research in accordance with the DOE Public Access Plan (http://energy.gov/downloads/doe-public-access-plan).