Ngodwana Biomass Energy Project: Can wood sourced from industrial timber plantations ever be sustainable?

Increasingly around the world pulp and paper mills are installing over-sized, dedicated biomass boilers alongside more traditional cogeneration units to take advantage of strong support and incentives for producing electricity from burning wood. These developments are essentially stand-alone power stations that require more biomass than the waste produced by the pulp mills they are built next to, meaning that additional wood must be brought into the mill to be burned. Sappi’s Ngodwana Mill and biomass plant in Mpumalanga Province, South Africa, due to begin operating in 2022, and is a good example of this trend.