Inside this issue

From the Editors

Who Even Knows Whats Coming?

Since this magazine’s inception, we have fought to keep our collective eye on the ball, as the saying goes. We focus on wood-to-energy production. For a long time that almost exclusively meant wood pellets, whether it be smaller domestic home-heating operations dotting the Northeast or the behemoth industrial wood pellet operations of the U.S. South cranking out tons measured in the hundreds of thousands. We’ve also profiled utilities like Virginia’s Dominion Power that converted old coal-fired power plants to burn biomass for the power grid.

And while the industry has grown and changed (especially over the last year) those biomass power production markets have remained, well, not exactly steady, but in existence. One thing that has collectively garnered our attention at WB is sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) production and how the primary producers—that is loggers and farmers—are going to handle the ever changing landscape. One such way is the move by machinery manufacturer John Deere (known globally for the production of agricultural, construction, forestry, and turf equipment) to join Growth Energy, the U.S.’s largest biofuel trade association. Deere joins a membership of operators and supporters of biomanufacturing facilities at the heart of America’s bioeconomy, according to the association, with its members focused on delivering a new generation of clean fuel options.

In a press release Growth Energy CEO Emily Skor says the addition of John Deere to the group “underscores the strong connection between biofuels and the farm economy.” While corn ethanol-based fuels have been in use for decades, and don’t exactly include woody biomass as a liquid fuel option (yet) it will be interesting to see where the science might go in the next decade. Especially with projects like those from Strategic Biofuels that set out to do exactly that—make a biomass-based fuel. Though a biomass-based fuel powering a John Deere tractor on the average farm in Indiana might be far off, SAF continues to dominate chatter with aviation titan Airbus signing a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to collaborate on the realization of SAF using bioethanol derived from Japanese wood with Japan Airlines (JAL), Nippon Paper Industries, Sumitomo Corp., and Green Earth Institute (GEI).

JAL aims to promote domestically produced SAF and has set a goal of replacing 10% of all onboard fuel with SAF by 2030. Airbus will support the work to obtain the carbon offsetting and reduction scheme for international aviation (CORSIA)—a global market- based measure designed to offset international aviation CO2 emissions in order to stabilize the levels of such emissions—to certify the use of woody biomass for this project to help meet the industry target to achieve net- zero carbon emissions by 2050.

While this seems the most promising among announced SAF projects, the ever present question remains, “but will it go?”

As with everything woody biomass, the industry will just have to wait and see. WB magazine was started in the middle of the Great Recession, when the fledgling woody biomass energy industry was finding itself for the first time with wood pellets. SAF (and other renewable diesel fuel products) might just be the industry’s great second act.

From Left: Jessica Johnson, Managing Editor; Dan Shell, Senior Editor; Rich Donnell, Editor-in-Chief; David Abbott, Senior Associate Editor