Wood Pellet Mills Are Prone to Catching Fire. Why Build Them in California?

This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Wood pellets, by design, are highly flammable. The small pieces of compressed woody leftovers, like sawdust, are used in everything from home heating to grilling. But their flammable nature has made for dangerous work conditions: Since 2010, at least 52 fires have broken out at the facilities that make wood pellets across the US, according to a database of incidents compiled by the Southern Environmental Law Center.

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

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

In South Shields, UK, wood pellets destined for a Drax plant spontaneously combusted while in storage 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 burst into flames in November 2021.

Now, despite finding itself in the midst of a lawsuit over accidental fire damages, Drax is pressing on with a new business proposal; it involves not just cutting down trees to make wood pellets, but, the company argues, also to help stop wildfires.

In October 2023, after purchasing two parcels of land in California to build two pellet mills, one in Tuolumne County and another in Lassen County, Drax’s partner organization, Golden State Natural Resources, or GSNR, “a nonprofit public benefit corporation,” met with residents of Tuolumne County to address concerns about its vision for how the process of manufacturing wood pellets can mitigate wildfire risk.

GSNR has since touted its close work with community members. However, according to Megan Fiske, who instructs rural workers at a local community college, residents living close to the proposed pellet mill sites were not 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 of the proposed mills are in forested areas that have been threatened by wildfires. When asked about the risks that manufacturing wood pellets poses, Patrick Blacklock, executive director of GSNR, told Grist, “We sought to learn from those incidents. The design features can go a long way to mitigating the risk of fire.”

If county representatives 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, which overlap with the Stanislaus National Forest and the Yosemite National Park.

Fiske said she’s seen instances, unrelated to Drax, where loggers weren’t trained properly and ended up taking more wood than should have been allowed under a wildfire resilience scheme. “There’s a difference between what the loggers are told and what happens on the ground,” said Fiske. You have “inexperienced or young people who are underpaid, maybe English isn’t their first language, so there are a lot of barriers.”