Biomass logistics: Mythistory and sociotechnical imaginary in trans-Atlantic wood pellet assemblage

Abstract

The paper focuses on the role of mythistory and the sociotechnical imaginary in stabilizing the links of a particular biomass supply chain running from the forests of Georgia in the US Southeast to diffuse markets across the European Union. Trans-Atlantic wood pellet assemblage demonstrates how mythistories and sociotechnical imaginaries are deployed to opportunistically frame wood as nature, agriculture, and energy as part of governance strategies to coordinate and operationalize the “multiple, spontaneous spatial strategies” that the biomass industry requires. I use assemblage theory to explore how Georgia’s mythistory and the European sociotechnical imaginary form the abstract machine that conditions relationships for the functionality and maintenance of the wood pellet supply chain. I then chart the concrete assemblage of the trans-Atlantic biomass supply chain, which requires the collaboration of a broad network of state and non-state actors. The case helps to ground the current global energy transition period in material and political practices that are contingent, opportunistic, and likely also transitional, even though the sector involves deep capital and political investment throughout the supply chain.

Keywords

Biomass energy transition supply chain logistics energy transportation

Logistics is the management of goods across space and time. Originally a military tactic for rapid arms deployment, today logistics leads corporate strategy for the international integration of the production and distribution of goods (Cowen, 2010: 9, 2014; DeLanda, 1991; LeCavalier, 2016). Logistics manages a product’s life cycle—a supply chain—through raw material extraction, assembly/refinement, distribution, consumption, and disposal (Klaus and Muller, 2012; Lambert et al., 1998). The supply chain metaphor conjures naturalized, rational, sequential links which, through the power of technology can now distribute traditional factory-floor assembly line functions across the world (DeLanda, 1991: 106; Gregson et al., 2017). But the sites of production and consumption along the supply chain are comprised of a “complex interplay of technology, culture, commerce, distribution, [and] their respective and constitutive politics”, forming territories that “converge and part dynamically” (Lyster, 2006: 221). Thus, the supply chain metaphor fails to fully represent the political, material, environmental, and social complexities of global production and distribution.

Supply chain representational failure provides the opportunity for deeper, more nuanced studies of heterogenous global logistics practices through careful empirical investigation (Cowen, 2014: 2; LeCavalier, 2016: 33; Simpson, 2019). Tracking these mercurial, shifting geographies through precise ethnographies of how the circulation of goods actually occurs in practice—“logistics-in-action”(Gregson et al., 2017)—helps to identify the political complexities of supply chain assemblage and maintenance to better render what appears invisible visible; what Janet Stewart refers to as the revelatory “sociology of globalization” (2012: 368).

One such global assemblage is the biomass renewable energy supply chain. Biomass energy is part of a larger international strategy for climate change mitigation through carbon reduction and the transition toward a more sustainable energy system (Guðmundsdottir et al., 2018: 579; Jenkins et al., 2018). Examples of biomass include cordwood, waste paper, wood chips, wood pellets, and numerous other agricultural products and by-products that are considered to be renewable energy sources (Pellet Fuel Institute, 2019). A group of international state and non-state actors created the biomass industry by developing producers and consumer markets in a complex network of governance structures and jurisdictions at local, regional, national, and international scales (Aguilar et al., 2016; Payne and Barker, 2018). In contrast to a classic “producer-driven” extractive resources such as oil, which is “relatively predictable given the large number of consumers” (Bridge, 2008: 394; Storper and Salais, 1997), the biomass industry is a policy-induced sector; a political construct. These actors now leverage biomass carbon-neutral/low-carbon sustainability claims through diverse, opportunistic policies across these various supply chain scales to meet energy transition goals (Geels, 2014; Haughton and Almendinger, 2015; Johnson, 2009).

But as a politically constructed industry to mitigate climate change, the biomass logistics system faces risks, stresses, and competing interests. The industry must establish, standardize, and certify biomass production in the midst of the broader technology change of the global energy transition (Avila, 2018; Dunlap, 2018; Guðmundsdottir et al., 2018: 582). Urgent climate conditions require immediate action, but unfortunately these actions are subject to the same bumpy, imperfect cycles of technology change that have historically slowed such changes in other industries (Bijker et al., 1987; Hughes, 1987; 1993; Larkin, 2013: 330). As often as not, they are cases of “survival of the surviving” technologies more than the “survival of the fittest” (Edwards, 2003: 209). Technologist Thomas P Hughes describes technology change as “messy and complex … full of contradictions” (2004: 1). So renewable energy transition systems are assembled with inherent technological risk. Further, biomass products require a great deal of energy to process and transport through global supply chains, which presents significant risk for the industry’s core no-carbon/low-carbon claims. If international governing bodies were to determine that biomass products no longer bear out these claims it could potentially put an end to the entire industry (Aguilar et al., 2016; Johnson, 2009).

In addition to these contingencies, renewable energy logistics must also successfully coordinate the multiple territorial and hybrid governance jurisdictions that form its global supply chain. Biomass assemblage crosses territories, multiple cultural contexts, and “distinctive temporalities” (Wajcman and Dodd, 2017; Simpson, 2019). Biomass technology is both “new” and “old”, in that it uses new technology to denature and repackage the raw material of wood, which has a long environmental history in many parts of the world (Crosby, 1986; Davis and Robbins, 2018). This provides a certain adaptability for the biomass sector, such that it can be “grafted on” to the established industries and technologies of previous energy systems across its international supply chain. In Anna Tsing work on diversity and supply chains, she identifies these various contexts and temporalities as “niche-segregating performances”, which form part of the adaptive structure of global capital, rather than mere inconvenient obstacles to it (Guðmundsdottir et al., 2018: 581; Tsing, 2009: 150).

For the biomass supply chain, these niche-segregating performances include mythistories and sociotechnical imaginaries that frame the production, distribution, and consumption along the chain, variously as nature, agriculture, and energy. William McNeill coined the term “mythistories” to broaden and balance historiographical categories of Truth, truths, and myth by conjoining them (1986: 8), recognizing the blurred and progressive dynamism of each term’s definition over time. Biomass mythistories are drawn broadly from environmental histories and their cultural and political subjectivities (Basalla, 1982; Freidberg, 2004; Latour, 2004; McNeil, 1986; Stewart, 1998). The term is also useful in that it conjures George Basalla’s work on energy myths, in which he explores how, in spite of technology’s rational pretensions, whenever a new source of energy is discovered it is assumed to be “without faults, infinitely abundant, and to have the potential to affect utopian changes in society” (1982:27). The biomass myth also relies on “sociotechnical imaginaries”, which gather the socio-cultural and eco-technical framings of sustainable renewable energy to then project on to a desired future.

Biomass governing bodies create, recreate, and transform these mythistories and sociotechnical imaginaries to craft rhetoric and policies according to the particular political climates along the supply chain (Eaton et al., 2014; Jasanoff and Kim, 2009; Jessop, 2012). Mythistories and sociotechnical imaginaries serve as conduits to help channel biomass products through particular international routes. They are pasts and futures that provide discursive stability to condition the trans-Atlantic biomass supply chain social relationships and functionality.

This paper focuses on the role of mythistory and the sociotechnical imaginary in smoothing the links of a particular biomass supply chain—wood pellets—running from the forests of Georgia in the US Southeast to diffuse markets across the European Union. The state of Georgia is a key producer of wood feedstock for the global biomass industry. There, the biomass industry is overlaid on Georgia’s historic pulp and paper industries. Georgia’s long history as a world provider of cheap natural resources established its extraction-based political economy, which continues to frame its forestry and tree plantation industries. In Europe, biomass fuels a hybrid energy mix with coal in incinerators to produce electricity within broader sustainable energy transition policies. Wood pellets are a category of biomass product, and despite the growing wood pellet market demand and the deep investments made on the supplier side, there is only scant research on the spatialization of the wood pellet supply chain (Dafnomilis et al., 2018; Kittler et al., 2019).

I begin with a critical examination of the biomass as a policy-induced sector that helps countries meet carbon-reduction energy transitional goals. I then look at the particular risks and contingencies of the wood pellet supply chain, including its material instability and the multiple state and non-state actor collaborations required for its successful global processing. I follow with a section on assemblage theory as part of broader global energy analysis. Assemblage theory is a relational frame that identifies an order of unstable, disconnected sequence of actors and events through their external relationships (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980; DeLanda, 2006; Nail, 2017). I use assemblage theory to conceptualize the diverse sites, territorial flux, and multiple vulnerabilities and contingencies of the biomass logistics governance and supply chain. All assemblages are political, and by incorporating this frame for the biomass supply chain analysis I identify precisely that political complexity required for its global functionality, often missing in the naturalized supply chain metaphor.

I use assemblage theory to explore how Georgia’s mythistory and the European sociotechnical imaginary form the “abstract machine”, the conditioning relationships for the functionality and maintenance of wood pellet assemblage. I then chart the concrete assemblage of a trans-Atlantic biomass supply chain that processes rural Georgia pine trees through a pellet plant on the shores of the Okefenokee Swamp, to the Port of Savannah, across the Atlantic Ocean to the Port of Tyne in Northern England and the Amsterdam–Rotterdam–Antwerp (ARA) port zone. Trans-Atlantic biomass assemblage is instructive both as a rich case study to illustrate global renewable energy logistics, but also for its broader significance within critical discussions of global renewable energy transition, extractive logistics, and the roles of state and non-state actors in the hybrid forms of governance across the chain (Payne and Barker, 2018: 471). The case helps to ground the current global energy transition period in material and political practices that are contingent, opportunistic, and likely also transitional, even though the sector involves deep capital and political investment throughout the supply chain. By focusing on the functions of mythistory and the sociotechnical imaginary in biomass assemblage we gain a better understanding of how they are deployed to co-join an otherwise diffuse set of localities and “distinct temporalities” into a functional supply chain.

Let us see how European domesticity is heated and electrified by Georgia trees that travel through a coordinated labyrinth of multi-scalar technology, governance, mythistories, and sociotechnical imaginaries.

Biomass. Wood pellets

On 4 November 2016, 55 parties signed national commitments in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Paris Agreement to reduce global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and limit temperature rise to less than 1.5°C by 2100 (2018). Renewable energy development has been identified as a key strategy for climate change mitigation, and the centerpiece of many countries' policies to achieve the Paris Agreement’s agreed-upon mitigation targets by leaving 80% of current coal reserves, 50% of oil reserves, and 33% of natural gas reserves untapped (Guðmundsdottir et al., 2018: 580; McGlade and Ekins, 2015).

The 1997 UNFCCC Kyoto Protocol determined that to meet climate objectives, biomass energy would be categorized as carbon-neutral, and thus was eligible for alternative energy credits and incentives (2008). This sparked scientific debate, which continues today, as to whether biomass fuel processing is, in fact, carbon neutral, or heavily carbon positive, depending on how much of the overall biomass supply chain cycle one chooses to quantify and over what length of time (Canham, 2013; Johnson, 2009). As with other renewable energies, biomass is less “energy dense” and more “spatially expansive” (Smil, 2010) than fossil fuels, so the possibility of land use and other socio-environmental conflicts can potentially counter-balance their net carbon reduction gains (Guðmundsdottir et al., 2018: 582, Huber, 2015). Nevertheless, both the European Union and United Kingdom authorities have repeatedly backed the carbon-neutral assessment and categorization for biomass energy, and EU member countries are committed to it in their strategic goals for energy transition toward a future without fossil fuel dependence (Brack et al., 2018; European Commission on Energy, 2019; European Climate Foundation, 2019; Johnson, 2009; Volpi, 2019).

Figure 1.

Wood pellets (Drax Group plc, 2019).

Wood pellets begin as saw dust and need only retain their form through their logistics journey, which ends when they burn either in European community utilities incinerators or domestic heaters. To make the pellets, a raw material is developed from multiple sources of wood and wood byproducts, which is dried and extruded using special dies. After, the material is exposed to high pressure (45,000 PSI) and temperatures (110–130°C), and the wood’s lignin softens and coheres to form the pellets (Jones and Harper, 2009). Wood pellets are low in moisture content: 4–8% water content, compared with 26% water of raw biomass (Jones and Harper, 2009). They are also low in ash content (1–3%, due to very low bark content), which produces a higher BTU energy value. One ton of wood pellets, which generally cost between $200 and $250, can generate the equivalent of 120 gallons of heating oil, 16,000 ft³ of natural gas, or 4775 kWh of electricity (USDA Forest Product Laboratory, 2004).

Figure 2.

Wood pellet supply chain diagram (Shaelyn Vering, University of Georgia).

Their uniform size—designated in the International Organization for Standardization ISO 7225-2—allows for standardized storage, processing, and transportation, which helps save costs (Thrän et al., 2019). Wood pellets are transported as bulk material, but they run a range of safety risks from pellet decomposition in transit, risks of dust production and explosion, self-heating and ignition, and respiratory issues. Thus, their unstable materiality—the very potential energy that they transport—is yet another contingency in biomass supply chain assemblage (Craven et al., 2015; Dafnomilis et al., 2018).

Figure 3.

Wood broker hauls lumber to Waycross Wood Pellet Plant (photo by James A Enos, University of Georgia).

In their analysis of the wood acquisition practices of US wood pellet plants, Kittler et al. show that because most US forests are privately owned, wood is sourced primarily from private industrial and nonindustrial forests that are mostly family-owned (2019: 7). They describe the type 1 pellet mills as those producing over 300,000 metric tons of pellets per year. For sourcing, these mills generally contract with wood dealers, or brokers for tree-length pulpwood, similar to wood stock supply chains for paper and pulp and wood panel industries (Kittler et al., 2019: 12), which accounts for approximately 80% of the feedstock. Hence, in Georgia, logistics must manage a multitude of private, non-state actors just to get lumber to wood pellets plants.

In sum, biomass has been designated as a carbon-neutral renewable energy source through international agreements to help countries meet carbon-reduction energy transitional goals. Wood pellets are an energy efficient category of biomass, which is materially unstable and generates logistics risks in transit. In the U.S. and in Georgia, wood pellet feedstock comes mostly from privately-owned forests, and the process to bring lumber to wood pellet plants and then to market involves a broad range of state and non-state actors. This produces supply chain risks for those European public sector commitments to alternative energy sources. In the following section I explain how assemblage theory can help to conceptualize biomass logistics and its broad range of actors and contingencies.

Assemblage theory

Wood pellets production began on the US West Coast in response to the 1973 international oil crisis. Wood-burning stoves had a resurgence in the state of Oregon, but increased air pollution led to regulations in the 1980s (Lisle, 2013). In response, wood pellet stoves were developed for cleaner emissions, and the market slowly traveled eastward. BioShell, a Canadian unit of Shell Petroleum, built three wood pellet plants in Northern Ontario and Quebec in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and in the 1990s pellet production also moved south into the US, in states such as Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Virginia (Lisle, 2013). The history demonstrates how some of the same players and international relationships of global renewable energy follow those established in the fossil fuel industry.

Contemporary discussion of energy, renewable energy, and energy transition often reproduce the familiar “role of energy in fueling the very stuff of social theory – modernity, democracy, capitalism” (Guðmundsdottir et al., 2018; Huber, 2015: 335), “maintaining and reproducing rather than challenging socioeconomic and political relations” (Bridge, 2014; Huber, 2018) of energy production. In this way, renewable energies are inserted into a global politics of fossil fuel energy without much disruption. This echoes Carola Hein’s work on the palimpsestic, historically layered qualities of what she calls the “global petroleumscape”, and the identification of historical patterns and path dependencies that “locked-in” specific colonial relationships and became corporate oil relationships over time (Hein, 2018: 888).

Gavin Bridge’s global production networks research of the extractive oil industry (2008) is also instructive in its comprehensive analysis of inter-firm relationships and integration, and state-firm policy across jurisdictions to understand broader themes of power and politics throughout the extractive/distributive spectrum. Drawing on Bridge’s work, energy studies researchers have used assemblage theory to address this full range of actors, exchanges, and “techno-zones” within the extractive sector, and the inherent complexity and contingency of these political, territorial, and material orderings; or, “oil assemblages” (Barry, 2006; Hein, 2018; Stewart, 2012; Watts, 2009). If the global renewable energy network is layered atop of established global energy production networks, the political analysis of the oil sector with assemblage theory can also be productively applied to the renewable energy sector.

Deleuze and Guattari originally used assemblage theory for their conceptualization of war logistics and state frameworks (1980), but it has since been incorporated across many types of assemblages—linguistic, sociological, biological, or geological, etc.— as a frame for political analysis. Thomas Nail's work on assemblage theory helps to identify its structural consistency across application, comprised of three typologies: the “abstract machine”, or set of conditioning relations; the “concrete assemblage” as not abstract, but rather the part of assemblage that appear within the relations of distribution; and, finally, the “personae,” or agents, the “mobile operators that connect the concrete elements together according to their abstract relations” (2017: 26--27). Nail goes on to describe the four major types of assemblages: territorial, state, capitalist, and nomadic. Deleuze and Guattari believed that the analysis of their simultaneous co-functioning helped to identify the political nature of any assemblage (2017: 28). Nail concludes, “If we want to know what an assemblage is, we need to know how it works” (2017: 37), because “it is not just the so-called “application” of the assemblage that is practical or political, but the very construction of the assemblage—the way it is arranged or laid out.” (2017: 28) In this way, assemblage theory helps to construct “political substance” out of the “myriad agents, relations, and precarious assemblages”, including the mythistories and soctiotechnical imaginaries along the supply chain, that comprise the global biomass network of producers and consumers (Toscano, 2007: 21; Ong and Collier, 2005).

In the following sections, I use assemblage theory to explore how mythistories and sociotechnical imaginaries perform as abstract machines to frame, operationalize, and stabilize both supply and demand in a trans-Atlantic wood pellet logistics. I then chart the relationships, agreements, and connective infrastructure that comprise the supply chain’s concrete assemblage and its personae.

Abstract machine: Georgia Agrarian Mythistory

Much of the Southeast US pine forests serve as international bioenergy feedstock for the European Union in the form of wood pellets and wood chips. European delegations to the US Southeast in search of feedstocks are so overwhelmed with supply that they are often incredulous of growth potential (Barry J Parrish, 2019, personal communication).¹ Frank Peeples, Sr., founder of the Peeples Industries maritime logistics company in Savannah, GA, famously claimed that Southern Georgia, “is the Saudi Arabia of pine trees” (Regina Morgan, 2019, personal communication).² The quote is useful. In only a few words, it celebrates Georgia’s pine lumber as a traditional, iconic, abundant, seemingly inexhaustible state resource, AND as the rightful, sustainable global energy source to be heir to the black gold of the Arabian Peninsula. The quote frames the proposal of alternative energy in the same language as that of oil, and ties a traditional Georgia resource from the past to the global energy transition of the future. The short phrase fuses Georgia environmental mythistory to an international energy transition sociotechnical imaginary.

Georgia is an important player in the international biomass industry. With a strong historic positioning in the lumber industry, the state is the nation's leader in commercially forested land with 24.2 million acres, of which is 92% privately owned (Georgia Forestry Commission, 2019). Of the 159 counties in the state, 131 are more than 50% forested, and Georgia is the United States’ greatest exporter of wood fuel products (chips and pellets) (Georgia Forestry Commission, 2019). Georgia wood pellet exports are valued at $136 million, and they make up 26% of the total US pellet exports (Forest2Market, 2019). The total 2017 economic benefit impact of the Georgia forestry industry is $35.9 billion, which generated a reported $970 million in state tax revenue. Clearly, the state is deeply invested in the forestry industry and its future (Forest2Market, 2019).

Waycross, Georgia is home to the world’s largest wood pellet processing plant. Waycross, Georgia is home to the world's largest wood pellet processing plant. Waycross is the county seat of Ware County, which has a population of 35,680. 23% of the Ware populations live below the poverty level, and the median income is $39,887, which is approximately $16,000 below the Georgia median income of $56,100. Ware County's paper industry supports with 110 jobs, while the biomass industry (Georgia Biomass LLC) only supports 85 jobs. The wood pellet sector is highly mechanized, and the largest plant built in Ware County is still only the fraction of the cost of what a paper mill costs and employs fewer works. But as global paper demand declines, the wood pellet industry provides a palliative, which requires less capital for production and processing, but can take advantage of the established timber plantations of the region.

Figure 4.

Southeast Georgia regional map. Dotted rail lines connect the Waycross wood pellet plant with the Brunswick and Savannah ports (Shaelyn Vering, University of Georgia).

When asked about the carbon-neutral categorization of the biomass industry, one Georgia Biomass employee responded in recognition that because Georgia forests are privately owned, if not forested for lumber, the land would quickly be converted to farm blueberries or to develop into real estate (Barry J Parrish, 2019, personal communication). Forests support people’s livelihoods, and of the possible land use choices for Georgia’s extensive rural land, forests support a more complex habitat than any other commercialized choice (Barry J Parrish, 2019, personal communication; Schelhas et al., 2018). Thus, in Georgia, the industry’s carbon-neutral/low-carbon claim is relative: given the range of possible private land-use choices, forests are the most sustainable. The claim also leverages the importance of agriculture in general, and lumber in particular, throughout the state’s history.

The industrialization of Georgia forests dates back to the nineteenth century. A Southern political structure grew out of its agrarian economic structure, which sociologist Howard W Odum referred to as “agrarian statecraft”, based on low-wage labor, abundant natural resources, and extensive, efficient transportation networks of ports, rivers, rails, and roads to transport commodities (1936: 57; Boyd, 2015; Vance, 1932). From the period after the Civil War in 1866 through the end of the Second World War, Southern industrialization was based on what Gavin Wright characterized as a colonial economy:

Southerners lacked the ‘technology … industrial standards, specifications and techniques’ to create a uniquely southern program of industrialization. Instead, the money and know-how to create an economy based on manufacturing had to come from outside the region … Southern communities attracted only the most rudimentary of industries, those able to use cheap and unskilled southern laborers to process the region’s raw material. (Wright, 1986: 152, quoted in Downs, 2014: 6–7)

Local and regional Southern agrarian statecraft was supported by those northern and international companies, while “white-collar positions, corporate profits, and the processed material all left the South” (Downs, 2014: 7; Steiner, 1944). Georgia forests were a natural resource to be processed and exported as part of this colonial economy.

The industrialization of the woodlands depended on transforming timber from a mine model (one-time extraction), into a crop that could be harvested repeatedly over time (Boyd, 2015: 11). In 1866, over three-quarters of the standing timber in the South was publicly owned. That same year, the Southern Homestead Act was Reconstruction legislation enacted to break poverty cycles by selling some of this land at reduced costs. The Act was repealed in 1876, and shortly thereafter a large-scale land sale—approximately 5.7-million acres of Southern public land—was sold to private interests mainly comprised of lumber companies from the northern Lake States for prices as low as $1.25 per acre (Boyd, 2015; Gates, 1940, 1979). In what has been judged as an “enormous loss of wealth to the public and its monopolization by few interests”, the result was that by the early 1910s, four-fifths of that same Southern timberland was privately owned (Boyd, 2015: 2; US Bureau of Corporations, 1913: xvii, xxii).

From the 1870s to the 1920s, lumber from Georgia’s southeastern “wiregrass region” was floated down the Altamaha River to the Port of Darien, GA where it was milled and then shipped to the US North or to European markets (Carter et al., 2015; Ray, 2011; Way, 2018). Wood byproducts such as kraft paper, turpentine, and other naval stores, and were produced with great success: During World War II, and throughout the 1940s, the Port of Savannah was the world’s most important exporter of these products (Frederick R. Harris, Inc., 1945; Gamble, 1921; Stafford Reed, 2006). Industrial agriculture was central to large-scale manufacturing relocation to the South that characterized the subsequent Sunbelt era, often focused on Northern US and international export trade interests.

Agrarian statecraft was a governance model that provided a business-friendly environment and maintained industrial agricultural production, particularly lumber and lumber byproducts for those exogenous markets. Agrarian statecraft afforded disproportionate political power to low-population rural southern Georgia counties, and often overshadowed industrial development in Georgia’s larger urban settlements (Cobb, 1993; Odum, 1936). Georgia’s county unit system, which operated from 1917 through 1962, officially awarded more unit votes to Georgia’s small, rural counties than to the more urban population centers, and was only ended through the Georgia Supreme Court Gray v. Sanders ruling that finally established “one person/one vote” in Georgia (Buchanan, 1997; Carter, 1992). To a large degree, however, these agrarian interests remain “locked-in”, and demonstrate path dependencies that continue to play a strong role in Georgia politics (Sorensen, 2015).

Natural resource plentitude, strong transportation infrastructure networks, and low-wage labor remain key pillars of the state’s economic development strategy, and its position as the nation’s leading biomass exporter is testament to this. Agrarian statecraft and colonial economic patterns are layered, locked-in, constituent historical processes that inform and condition the relationships and policies—the abstract machine—of contemporary biomass assemblage. Georgia’s agrarian mythistory, particular in the lumber industry, continues to envelope private forestry and tree plantation industries (Hitchner et al., 2014; McNeil, 1986). Georgia was still lacking in the appropriate “technology, industrial standards, specifications and techniques” for wood pellet production, but European energy groups keen to extract the state’s lumber wealth brought their own. European energy groups went looking for lumper in Georgia because they were motivated by European energy transition policies, as I explain below.

Abstract machine: European sociotechnical imaginary

The European Union has been a world leader in carbon mitigation strategies through the promotion of energy transition goals and renewable energy diversification policies. Biomass is an important energy source for this aspirational renewable portfolio. The European Union currently imports 4% of its biomass for energy use in the utility co-firing and domestic heating sectors. However, projections accounting for potential supply gaps in energy production due to political commitments (Paris Agreement and the like), and/or the full closing of coal power plants, suggest that this percentage will likely increase dramatically (both in percentage of total biomass and in absolute amounts) by 2030 (Dafnomilis et al., 2018; Lamers et al., 2016; Parish et al., 2018). Japanese and South Korean wood pellet consumer markets are also on the rise. Japan’s Feed-In Tariff program seeks to increase renewable energy production, particularly in the wake of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in March 2011. It is now committed to have biomass comprise 20% of its renewable energy generation—approximately 15 and 20 million tons per year (MTPY)—by 2030 both for domestic residential use and for major utility companies (Forrest2Market, 2019: 11). Estimates show South Korean wood pellet demand could be over eight MTPY by 2025, and the combined Asian biomass consumer market is predicted to have the world’s largest percentage increase in demand (Dafnomilis et al., 2018; Kittler et al., 2019). These new markets, along with others, will search all parts of the globe for lumber feedstock supply to sustain this alternative energy generation (Fischer et al., 2019; Forrest2Market, 2019; Mai-Moulin et al., 2019; Proskurina, 2018).

Once international and national governing bodies conjured the biomass global supply chain in policy, private and local agents were invited to assemble and activate the network through complex public–private, multisectoral agreements (Payne and Barker, 2018). These international commitments to energy transition draw heavily on the technical pretentions of the biomass energy myths, and the constituent sociotechnical imaginaries therein (Basalla, 1982; Eaton et al., 2014; Jasanoff and Kim, 2009). The above-mentioned international accords themselves are the most significant international public performances of renewable energy commitments, and the foundation of conditioning relationships of the global biomass assemblage abstract machine. As a recent article claims, “The EU is aiming at a 20% contribution of renewable sources in 2020 to the gross final energy consumption (GEC). Pellets and other types of woody biomass could significantly contribute to this goal” (Sikkema et al., 2011: 273).

In pursuit of climate change mitigation goals, much of the political discourse is wrapped in “the dominant promotion of renewable energy as a technofix-solution to climate change” (Guðmundsdottir et al., 2018: 580), which often draw on “sociotechnical imaginaries”. The sociotechnical imaginary literature demonstrates “the way these visions provide an attainable end goal, or collective vision of a feasible, desirable future social order, provided by technological projects” (Eaton et al., 2014: 228; Hitchner et al., 2016, 2017; Schelhas et al., 2018). Coined in the work of Science and Technologists Jasanoff and Kim (2009), sociotechnical imaginaries offer a future that state actors work toward through technical innovation, thereby not merely dreaming these futures but working proactively toward “new forms of order and life” (Eaton et al., 2014: 230). The sociotechnical imaginary is not constructed from a decontextualized future, but rather “always based on past experience in a world that is always constituted both materially and symbolically” (Eaton et al., 2014: 252). Thus, the sociotechnical imaginary is rooted in a particular framing of mythistory, as is the case in the biomass supply chain.

In their research on bioenergy futures in Northern Michigan, Eaton et al. conclude that differing community attitudes toward biofuel are based on “different interpretations of environmental history” (2014: 253). As Haughton and Almendinger note (2015: 859):

multiple imaginaries can exist at any particular moment and at a variety of scales, each competing to present itself as a ‘natural’ and meaningful scale around which policy actors can cohere to undertake strategic work supported by an appropriate institutional governance infrastructure.

Thus, new geographic amalgams may be drawn around river and estuary corridors, mountain ranges, or larger bodies of water as overlays on traditional political boundaries as the result of such contested imaginaries (Anderson, 1983; Metzger, 2013; Stead, 2011; White, 1995).

The relationship between US biomass producers and European energy markets is authenticated through various European governmental and NGO sustainability certification agencies. These evaluate forestry practices, habitat health, rare species monitoring, fair trade concerns, and more direct pellet quality issues (Sikkema et al., 2011). The coveted ENplus A1 certification, monitored and awarded by the German Pellet Institute, is the highest sustainability grade for US wood pellets set for the most demanding European commercial residential heating markets in Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, and Denmark (Craven et al., 2015; Sikkema et al., 2011). US pellet plants need to keep these certifications updated, and they receive frequent visits from European monitors to do so. But the two groups clearly need one another.

Sustainability proceduralism and its institutional performance are important for biomass supply chain construction and maintenance, but they do not threaten the essential, underlying trans-Atlantic codependence (Volpi, 2019). The very performance of certification as standardization belies the diversity of political contexts and utility exemplified across the wood pellet supply chain (Tsing 2009, 150). Certification processes are enactments of biomass sociotechnical imaginaries, and the belief that biomass effectively and efficiently mitigate, even improve climate change conditions. Nevertheless, growing scientific concern over the broader aggregate carbon neutrality of the biomass industry could threatens and/or override any specific sustainability standard that the industry currently awards. The certification and standardization processes established in Europe recall those technological “industrial standards, specifications and techniques”, mentioned above, that governed the US southern colonial economic terms for resource extraction governance.

In addition, Belgium, the Netherlands, and the UK, have all recognized that their ports will need to accommodate greater wood pellet importation for the expected increase in their co-firing energy plants in concert with coal, and the accelerated transitioning of coal plants to running exclusively on wood pellets (Dafnomilis et al., 2018; Port of Rotterdam, 2018). In the UK, power plants such as RWE’s Tilbery Power station in Essex and the Lynemouth Power Station in Northumberland are converting from coal to biomass, due to a combination of European energy goals and past environmental fines incurred from coal burning emissions. The European Union is dedicating funds to help plant conversion to pellets, and these kinds of “carrot and stick” policies will likely characterize energy transition throughout the Euro-Region in the coming years (International Energy Agency, 2018).

Figure 5.

Pellets arrive to Northern England Biomass Terminal (Drax Group plc, 2019).

Biomass as a renewable energy source provides the European Union, and a growing number of countries with a sociotechnical imaginary of a “desirable future social order”—of carbon reduction and independence from fossil fuels—through “technological projects” (Eaton et al., 2014: 228). This is basis of what recent political ecology research terms the “socioenvironmental state” for ecomodernity (Guðmundsdottir et al., 2018; Nightingale, 2018; Payne and Barker, 2018). The European Union deploys the biomass sociotechnical imaginary directly though incentive and punitive policies for energy generation practices, but also through a host of non-state actors charged with operationalizing global renewable energy practices that will allow countries to fulfill their renewable energy commitments. Below I illustrate how the abstract machine of mythistory and the sociotechnical imaginary frame biomass assemblage by reviewing the trans-Atlantic wood pellet concrete assemblage.

Concrete assemblage and personae: Hybrid governance in a trans-Atlantic supply chain

The global politics of energy transition generates complex, hybrid governance forms of state and non-state actors that continually re-border and shift “modes of environmental authority” at supra-, national, and sub-national nestled hierarchies (Balachandran et al., 2018; Brenner, 2004; Haughton and Almendinger, 2015; Jessop et al., 2008; Nightingale, 2018; Swyngedouw, 2010). Within this multi-scalar state environmental regulatory field, non-state actors are granted the opportunity and the burden of technological innovation, investment, market pressures, and politically complex multijurisdictional regulation and stimulus to operationalize and achieve climate goals set by public bodies. Payne and Barker point out that while “state-level actors have advanced a plethora of regulatory and policy-based mechanisms geared towards meeting ambitious reduction targets”, a range of non-state actor are often called on to achieve environmental goals in an economically feasible manner. (Bailey and Wilson, 2009; Geels, 2014; Nightingale, 2018; Payne and Barker, 2018: 471). To illustrate the complexity of multi-scaler governance, I explore a particular wood pellet concrete assemblage, beginning with a trip European energy, utility, and management companies took to Georgia in search of loblolly and slash pine.

Sweden was a leader of developing biomass markets in the 1990s, and the first long-distance wood pellet transport travelled from Canada to Sweden in 1998 (Obernberger and Thek, 2010; Sikkema et al., 2011). There were market shortages reported in 2008, and in response, the Southeastern US, with its abundant Southern Pine, emerged as an important supplier for European markets. The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster precipitated the German decision to phase out nuclear energy, and similar to Japan, this was yet another boon for biomass markets in Europe. It was at this time that the RWE Group, a German utility company, and the Swedish BMC Management Consultant group took a trip to Georgia to explore sites for a Southeastern wood pellet plant to supply European energy markets.

RWE is a leading energy group in Europe, which, at that time, had just reorganized its corporate structure after prolonged difficulties in the international energy market. After shutting down older power plant facilities, the group launched new renewable expansion priorities with a new subgroup called RWE Innogy (RWE Group, 2019). In the same year, the German group also entered the Dutch energy market after taking over Essent BV (RWE Group, 2019). BMC were tasked with site selection and plant facility development management. Their priority logistical concern was how to handle wood pellets in unit train transfers for the best freight rates. This meant they went first to talk with the CSX Transportation freight rail company (Regina Morgan, 2019, personal communication). Audra Brown, CSX head of Industrial Development Management, suggested the switch rail town of Waycross in Ware County in Southeast Georgia as an ideal location. CSX had extensive rail transfer infrastructure in Waycross, which serves the strategic North-South commercial trade corridors connecting Midwestern markets with the Ports of Brunswick, GA and Jacksonville, FLA, and East-West corridors connecting the Port of Savannah, GA with interior Southern and Gulf markets. BMC agreed, and Ms. Brown put them in contact with the Okefenokee Area Development Authority (OADA), for which Waycross is the central, historic rail terminal (Hurst, 1982, 1985; Jones, 2017). As discussions progressed with the OADA, the Georgia Department of Economic Development helped to put together an incentive package and grants for the European groups to develop a pellet manufacturing site in Waycross. Georgia Power, the state’s utility group, also contributed to the package through its Economic and Community Development departments, as it does with most state industrial economic development projects, to assure RWE of energy supply requirements for the new plant (Barry J Parrish, 2019, personal communication). Abundance of trees and water, rail infrastructure, and government cooperation at all levels were all mentioned as reasons for the deal’s success (Barry J Parrish, 2019, personal communication; Thrift, 2011).

In 2010, Georgia Biomass LLC formed as a wholly owned subsidiary of RWE Innogy, and RWE spent $200 million in capital investment to build a wood pellet plant in Waycross. In April 2011, Georgia Biomass opened the world’s largest, most modern wood pellet plant, capable of producing 750,000 tons/year, and requiring approximately 1.5 million metric tons of fresh wood each year to meet production goals (Gibson, 2010; Hitchner et al., 2016; Thrift, 2011). The plant uses equipment shipped from Seattle’s TSI group for its furnaces, dryers, and emissions pollution control (Gibson, 2010). Waycross plant modifications were required after the Georgia consortium failed to inform Georgia Biomass LLC of the wetlands on the proposed site. Economic development was the primary consideration, and the site wetlands were identified only after the agreement had been reached. In response, the pellet plant simply built a more extensive pellet feed system that bridged over the wetland (Barry J Parrish, 2019, personal communication). In 2013, Georgia Biomass signed contracts with various European companies, including the UK Drax Group plc., RWE Supply, and the energy trading house Trading GmbH that exceeded 660,000 metric tons per year (Statkraft, 2015).

Once finished and cooled, the pellets from the Waycross Plant are loaded on to special pellet container rail cars, and CSX rail transports them to the Golden Isles Terminal Wharf on the Savannah River, where the Peeples Industry, Inc. privately operates the specialized East Coast Terminal for wood pellet and wood chip logistics. Handyman vessel ships are loaded every two weeks, carrying between 31,000 to 33,000 metric tons that travel either to the northern UK Port of Tyne, or the Amsterdam -Rotterdam -Antwerp (ARA) port zone in the North Sea basin (Regina Morgan, 2019, personal communication). From their North Sea ports, the pellets either travel by rail (with similar transport technology as used to get from pellet plant to port) or trucks to power plants for utility energy generation. The pellets may otherwise be bagged and sent by truck or rail to interior European domestic heating markets, with Italy being the top consumer of these markets (Barry J Parrish, 2019, personal communication).

The trans-Atlantic wood pellet concrete assemblage includes hybrid governance collaboration among actors including the RWE Group and BMC Management from the European renewable energy sector, CSX Transportation, Georgia’s state Department of Economic Development and the local Okefenokee Area Development Authority, along with Georgia’s own private utility company, Georgia Power, who contribute to the coordinated, negotiated wood pellet assemblage. Georgia’s abundance of trees and water, rail infrastructure, government cooperation, and the established network of a pulp and paper industry all contributed to the deal’s success. These are essentially carry-overs from the agrarian governance and colonial economic patterns established in the late nineteenth century; elements of the state’s mythistory. The example of the renewable energy pellet plant built (preliminarily) atop a wetland is a reminder of precisely how the technological imperative of the sociotechnical imaginary and the mythistory mandate can acquire greater political power than the more mundane necessity of actual land use and construction regulatory stewardship and enforcement. Put otherwise, it is an example of wood processing perceived and prioritized as renewable energy over concerns for the broader ecology for the wood that produces it. But these are precisely the stabilizing, operational roles that mythistory and the sociotechnical imaginary play to help move wood pellet assemblage forward through “distinct temporalities” and diverse niche performances at localities along the supply chain.

Conclusion

The trans-Atlantic wood pellet assemblage helps to illustrate broader points about the politics and materiality of energy transition, renewable energy logistics, and the role of mythistories and sociotechnical imaginaries in those processes. The biomass industry is driven by the policy decision, in Europe and an increasing number of countries, to incentivize renewable energy use as a transitional phase toward fossil fuel independence. International accords have ratified biomass as a no-carbon/low-carbon alternative to fossil fuel, stimulating participating governments to invests, directly and indirectly, in its consumption, technological development, and market expansion. Policy incentives can come in the form of subsidies and/or fines, but they are politically and economically powerful enough to send international energy and utility companies to rural areas around the globe in search of wood feedstock.

Biomass is part of a broader, layered palimpsestic history of energy use, wherein contemporary and previous energy sources are interrelated to other current and future fuels sources (Hein, 2018). We see this both in the global patterns of corporate and colonial relationship established during oil development and market expansion, and how this sets a precedent for actors and relationships in the renewable energy sector. The palimpsest is manifest in the transitional co-firing of coal and wood pellets in European utility incinerators. We also see it in the inter-relationship of nonfossil fuel markets, such as how the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster further incentivized other nonfossil fuel markets in order for countries to meet their climate mitigation commitments. Again, recalling Basalla’s work on energy myths, we see that just as energy sources are layered, their mythical technical promise can also be transferred across energy sources.

The geography literature on global commodity chain analysis describe the “multiple, simultaneous spatial strategies” (Zalik, 2015: 2452–2453) that capital incorporates to construct, balance, and maintain production, distribution, and consumption across supply chains (Hughes and Reimer, 2004; Simpson, 2019: 124; Smith, 1984; Storper and Walker, 1989; Werner, 2020). Trans-Atlantic biomass assemblage demonstrates how mythistories and sociotechnical imaginaries are deployed to opportunistically frame wood as nature, agriculture, and energy as part of governance strategies to coordinate and operationalize the “multiple, spontaneous spatial strategies” that the biomass industry requires. This places renewable biomass energy, a topic generally confined to technical discussions of energy transition, into considerations its logistics and global value chains. Doing this helps to understand renewable energy as a global capital flow with a network of exchanges and hydrocarbon production beyond those generated by wood pellet production alone (Bridge, 2008: 409).

The objective is not to critique the overarching aspiration for global energy transition toward fossil-fuel independence. Rather, it is to show how biomass assemblage is part of the “messy, complex”, at time contradictory process of technology change in energy transition, subject to both old and new operational challenges. The Georgia lumber agro-industry and its mythistory are able to adapt to new export opportunities in biomass energy when paper and pulp demand recedes. The mythistories and sociotechnical imaginaries are resilient; pliant in that their pasts and futures can be bent opportunistically to fit political and economic opportunities of the present. In this way, biomass is simply the current global energy source which mythistories and sociotechnical imaginaries are helping to operationalize. In this way, the case helps to make visible those discursive practices in energy transition necessary to structure and activate assigned renewable energy assemblage.

Highlights

The article traces the construction of a trans-Atlantic biomass supply chain that pulls biomass energy from a Georgia swamp region to power European domesticity.

Drawing on the recent work of energy production and assemblage theory, the article explores the industrial ecology that comprises the material, infrastructure, ecological, social, and political histories, futures and imaginaries of biomass origins and destinations.

Urgent climate conditions require immediate action, but unfortunately these actions are subject to the same bumpy, imperfect cycles of technology change that have historically slowed change in industries over time.

The biomass supply chain is quirky, materially unstable, and contingent upon any number of local political jurisdictions, evaluation metrics, temporalities, and imaginaries.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Joshua Barkan, John Schelhas, Doug Pardue, Nik Heynen, James Enos, Karen Lee Abt, Barry J. Parrish, and Regina Morgan Labis for their helpful conversation and feedback as I was preparing this article. Thanks also to Carola Hein, Max Welch Guerra, and Karl Friedhelm Fischer for their shared insights at our 2019 AESOP roundtable. Thanks to Shaelyn Vering for her assistance with map generation. Finally, thanks to Leila Harris for her thoughtful reading throughout the editorial process that contributed to the improvement of this article.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Stephen J Ramos

Notes

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