In California, a Biomass Company’s Expansion Raises Fears of More Fires

Wood Pellets, by Design, Are Highly Flammable

The small pieces of compressed wood scraps, like sawdust, are used for everything from home heating to barbecuing. But their flammable nature has made working conditions dangerous: since 2010, at least 52 fires have broken out at facilities that make wood pellets in the United States, according to a database compiled by the Southern Environmental Center.

Of the 15 largest wood pellet facilities, at least eight have experienced fires or explosions since 2014, according to the Environmental Integrity Project, a nonprofit organization founded by a former director of the Environmental Protection Agency.

At the same time, the world’s largest biomass company, Drax, is cutting down trees in North America with the promise of selling them as a replacement for fossil fuels. But even its track record is checkered with accidents.

In South Shields, United Kingdom, wood pellets destined for a Drax plant spontaneously combusted while stored at the Port of Tyne, starting a fire that took 40 firefighters 12 hours to extinguish. In Port Allen, Louisiana, a Drax wood pellet facility went up in flames in November 2021.

Now, despite being in the midst of a lawsuit over damage caused by accidental fires, Drax is pushing forward with a new business proposal: not only to cut trees to make wood pellets, but, the company argues, to help stop wildfires.

In October 2023, after buying two plots of land in California to build two pellet mills—one in Tuolumne County and the other in Lassen County—Drax’s affiliated organization, Golden State Natural Resources (GSNR), a little-known public agency group, outlined its vision for how the wood pellet manufacturing process can mitigate wildfire risk.

GSNR has highlighted its close work with community members. However, according to Megan Fiske, who trains rural workers at a local community college, residents living near the proposed pellet mill sites weren’t always aware of the plans. “People who were a hundred feet away from the [proposed] pellet plant had no idea about it,” said Fiske.

Both proposed factories are in forested areas that have been threatened by wildfires. When asked about the risks posed by manufacturing wood pellets, Patrick Blacklock, executive director of GSNR, told Grist: “We try to learn from those incidents. Design features can go a long way in mitigating fire risk.”

If county officials approve the plan, loggers will be allowed to take “dead or dying trees” and “woody biomass” from within a 100-mile radius of the pellet mills within the two counties, including areas near Stanislaus National Forest.

Fiske said she has seen cases—unrelated to Drax—where loggers were not adequately trained and ended up taking more wood than was allowed under wildfire resilience programs. “The difference between what [the loggers] are told and what happens on the ground is very different,” said Fiske. “[You have] inexperienced or poorly paid young people, maybe English isn’t their first language, so there are a lot of barriers.”

Residents of Tuolumne and Lassen counties are fighting Drax’s plans to build the pellet plants, saying that producing wood pellets in forested areas while thinning the forests at the same time only adds to the fire risk in their communities. “They’re downplaying the scale of this over and over again,” said Renee Orth, a Tuolumne County resident who has pushed back against the development plans.

How Wildfires Could Unravel California’s Climate Progress

In January 2024, Drax formalized its partnership with GSNR through a memorandum of understanding. Several months later, the company announced the creation of a new subsidiary, called Elimini, to take over work in California and focus on “carbon removal” in the United States. But before Elimini and GSNR can build their mills, they hope to secure a viable plan for transporting the wood pellets. GSNR intends to build a facility in Stockton, about 100 miles west of the pellet mills, to ship the wood pellets overseas. That plan has faced strong opposition.

Little Manila Rising, a community-led group of residents from South Stockton, has decided to take a stand against Drax, which needs permission from the city before it can begin building its transport facility.

“Right now, our community has a chance to decide whether we want an industrial operator at our port with a proven recent history of fires, explosions, and fugitive wood dust emissions,” said environmental justice advocate Gloria Alonso Cruz.

Cruz believes GSNR is “counting on the voice of a marginalized community to go unheard.” “We’re not going to let that happen.”

A Drax spokesperson said that “no final decision has been made regarding any potential end market or any future agreement with GSNR,” but GSNR said it has not signed any other memorandums of understanding with another company. The draft environmental impact report states that Europe and Asia are the intended final markets for the wood pellets.

The EU, along with Japan and South Korea, subsidizes wood pellets as a renewable fuel, based on carbon accounting that assumes trees will regrow and replace the CO2 burned after the trees were removed. But in recent years, evidence has emerged that burning wood sourced from the U.S. is currently releasing annual greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to between 6 and 7 million passenger vehicles. One study suggested it may take between 44 and 104 years for new trees to reabsorb the carbon released from burning wood pellets, and in a 2018 letter to members of the European Parliament, a group of 772 scientists concluded that “[using biomass] is likely to result in 2–3x more carbon in the atmosphere by 2050 per gigajoule of final energy.”

To move forward, GSNR must first await approval from the Port of Stockton. Port director Kirk DeJesus said they are waiting for the environmental impact report to be completed before signing any agreements. The draft report was released on October 22, 2024, with a 90-day review period during which public comments will be submitted and incorporated into a revised version, which will be submitted to the Golden State Authority. GSNR will also need to obtain local permits for Tuolumne and Lassen counties and demonstrate compliance with the California Environmental Quality Act.

Climate activists blocked the entrance to Drax’s annual general meeting in May 2025 in London.
Lab Ky Mo / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images

In its draft environmental impact report, GSNR says it anticipates that “biomass thinning projects will treat approximately 85,779 acres of forestland annually on average, once the proposed project is fully operational.” If the project goes ahead, approximately 2,640 square miles would be logged over a 20-year period—equivalent to a one-mile-wide strip of forest stretching from Sacramento to Boston. Blacklock told Grist that the organization based its wildfire mitigation projections on research known as the Tamm Review, which found that thinning combined with prescribed burns can reduce wildfire severity by 62 to 72 percent.

But climate scientist Dominick DellaSala said the authors of the Tamm Review misinterpreted their own work and ignored 37 articles that contradicted their conclusions. “The forest is no longer a forest,” DellaSala added. “The fire question has been narrowly framed to reach a preconceived outcome… none of it looks at collateral damage to ecosystems and the climate, only whether fuels are reduced enough to lessen fire intensity.”

Kim Davis, research ecologist with the USDA Forest Service and lead author of the 2014 Tamm Review, said she stands by the findings that mechanical treatments can reduce fire severity when combined with prescribed burns, adding that thinning has become “settled science.” “This research went through rigorous statistical, technical, and peer review,” Davis said. “We respectfully disagree with the claim that our work misquoted or overlooked studies and data.”

In any case, the U.S. Forest Service is already thinning dense forest areas it deems at risk and conducting controlled burns, known as slash pile burns. Blacklock said the Drax-GSNR partnership shares the same goal. From GSNR’s perspective—and that of many local politicians—using woody debris that would otherwise be burned at forest sites is a win-win.

But activists say that in other markets, Drax and its subsidiaries have expanded operations beyond slash piles, cutting down healthy trees to make wood pellets. In 2022, the BBC discovered that wood used at Drax facilities came from clear-cut primary forests in Canada, which can take thousands of years to regrow. A year later, after residents of a town in British Columbia asked Drax to help clear nearby slash piles, employees from the Ministry of Environment told The Tyee that tens of thousands of trees were being turned into pellets.

Large old-growth trees cut down in Canada act as wind buffers, according to DellaSala. When these trees are removed during logging operations—like opening the air vent in a wood stove—the increased ventilation can cause fire to spread quickly. “If a fire starts, it can spread rapidly through the forest due to higher wind speeds and the drying of the understory caused by the removal of the tree canopy,” DellaSala said. “So, the forest becomes over-ventilated and more prone to fast-moving, wind-driven fires.”

Pellet factories, which have a track record of fires and producing piles of combustible dust, must be built in clearings within forests so woody fuel can be managed. Although GSNR has assured residents it follows strict fire protocols, proximity to the forest has made some residents nervous and heightened concerns that the wildfire treatment plan might actually make fires more likely—not less.

Drax’s involvement has not reassured them either. The company has recently come under regulatory scrutiny. The UK energy regulator Ofgem fined the company $25 million in August 2024 for misreporting sustainability data. Three months later, Land and Climate Review reported that Drax had violated U.S. environmental regulations over 11,000 times, according to public records. The violations have spurred action from communities across the Golden State, with 185 organizations urging California to reject the wood pellet proposal.

Orth, one of the Tuolumne County residents interviewed by Grist, summed up the argument against Drax and GSNR succinctly: “It’s greenwashing from start to finish,”