To ask His Majesty's Government, further to the response by Lord Callanan on 3 July (HL Deb col 983) that most of the pellets used for biomass are “by-product from normal sustainable commercial forests”, what evidence they have to support the claim; and whether that evidence been corroborated and verified by independent experts.
Answered on
19 July 2023
Recent evidence on the feedstocks used in the production of wood pellets is available from a number of sources, for example, from the Sustainable Biomass Program’s 2021 Annual Review, a 2022 Fibre Study by independent experts for the Wood Pellet Association of Canada, and a 2022 review by the US Forest Service on wood pellet production in the US (the primary source of biomass for energy use).