By Peter Sachs / The Bulletin
WASHINGTON - Picking up where it left off a year ago, a U.S. House
committee on Thursday discussed whether biomass energy
production is viable, despite a government investigation that
showed an industry challenged by high production costs.
The committee, chaired by U.S. Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., got the first look at a report from the Government Accountability Office on the state of the fledgling industry. The GAO, the nonpartisan research arm of Congress, said that biomass remains relatively expensive even though a host of grant and tax credit programs are being used as incentives.
One such grant this week awarded nearly a $250,000 each to three woody biomass energy projects in Oregon, including one northwest of Madras and one in Crescent, south of Bend.
Warm Springs GeoVision, the recently formed power generation division of Warm Springs Forest Products Industries, received nearly $241,000 from the Agriculture Department grant, and projects in Crescent and Cave Junction, southwest of Medford, got more than $243,000 each.
Even with such grants, Robin Nazzaro, a GAO director, told the committee that the biggest challenge is reducing the costs of biomass energy production. It costs too much to move materials, like small-diameter trees and other logging remnants, more than 40 miles from the forest to the plant. And power plants need guaranteed sources of dry material that they can burn.
"The lack of a local logging and milling infrastructure to collect and process forest materials may limit the availability of woody biomass," Nazzaro said in a written statement. He added that more government funding directed at building biomass power plants could help.
Despite the obstacles, which industry members have echoed, Walden was optimistic about the potential of biomass energy.
"It seems to me that expanding the use of woody biomass in this country is an issue whose time has come," he said.
R. Wade Mosby, a vice president of Portland-based Collins Pine Co., told the committee that biomass projects already are producing significant amounts of electricity and add needed jobs to rural economies.
When informed of the local grant awards Thursday, Walden said he was pleased to see the money coming to the industry.
"That's the whole concept, get the grants out there," he said.
This is the second year the U.S. Department of Agriculture has awarded the grants, which require recipients to match 20 percent of the federal funding with money from other sources or forfeit the grant. A spokesman at the U.S. Forest Service said the agency hopes to keep disbursing the grants in future years, but noted that there is no permanent funding source for them.