Arkansas Public Media

Arkansas Public Media Pellet Mill Industry Report Airs on NPR

Arkansas Public Media | By Jacqueline Froelich,

Jacqueline Froelich

Published January 5, 2018 at 9:49 AM CST

An aerial view of an industrial wood pellet processing facility operated by Enviva in rural Sampson County, North Carolina, taken by Dogwood Alliance in February of 2017.

In 2017, Arkansas Public Media began to investigate the proliferation of industrial chip mills across the Deep South, including a newly opened mill in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. The mills are grinding timber stands into millions of tons of wood pellets for export to fuel retrofitted coal fire plants in the European Union and United Kingdom, where biomass is classified and subsidized as clean renewable fuel. The pellet industry, which is self-regulated, claims to use sustainable logging practices and that wood pellets are a carbon neutral fuel. Opponents claim chip mills are destroying native southern forests and pellets burn dirtier than coal.

We prepared a national report on the controversy which recently aired on NPR's "All Things Considered," which you can listen to here.

Loggers harvest trees in Sampson County, North Carolina, last winter, for hauling to an Enviva wood chip mill.

Arkansas Public Media

Jacqueline Froelich

Jacqueline Froelich is an investigative journalist and has been a news producer for KUAF National Public Radio since 1998. She covers politics, the environment, energy, business, education, history, race and culture. Her radio segments have been nationally syndicated. She is also a station-based national correspondent for NPR in Washington DC., and recipient of eight national and state broadcast awards.

See stories by Jacqueline Froelich

Jacqueline Froelich

Jacqueline Froelich is an award-winning senior news reporter for KUAF-91.3 FM in Fayetteville where she is a long-time station-based correspondent for NPR in Washington D.C. She covers energy, business, education, politics, the environment, and culture. Her work is broadcast locally onKUAF’sdaily news magazine, “Ozarks At Large,” and statewide on Arkansas’s three public radio affiliates. She's raised a quarter of a million dollars in foundation grants for special investigative news series. With funding from the Arkansas Humanities Council, she produced an award winning two-hour public radio documentary, Arkansas Ozarks African Americans, the first comprehensive black history of the Arkansas Ozarks.She’s also written scholarly articles and reviews for “Arkansas Historical Quarterly,” and feature stories for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and Arkansas Times.