Enviva Nears Collapse: "Renewable" Wood Biomass Company Was Built On Lies, Per 2022 Whistleblower Complaint
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“The problems have been there for years. There are lots of issues, but they stem from fundamental challenges Enviva faces in wood costs and keeping its manufacturing plants operating at full capacity,” a former Enviva maintenance manager told Mongabay. “It’s all coming home to roost in a kind of cumulative way.” In exclusive interviews with Mongabay, the former Enviva employee detailed critical problems he witnessed and grappled with as a top operations manager at two of Enviva’s 10 Southeast U.S. plants between mid-2020 and mid-2022. His insights help explain why Enviva is now in dire financial straits.
In a Dec. 5, 2022, Mongabay story that reverberated globally, this Enviva whistleblower was the first insider from the multibillion-dollar international wood pellet industry to ever go public. At the time, he accused Enviva of falsifying its green claims and not being truthful about where and how it sourced forest wood for the tons of pellets it makes every day in the U.S. for export. “The company says that we use mostly waste like branches, treetops and debris to make pellets,” the whistleblower told Mongabay a year ago. “What a joke. We use 100% whole trees in our pellets. We hardly use any waste. Pellet density is critical. You get that from whole trees, not junk.”
But junk wood is cheap, while whole trees are not, and therein lies a part of Enviva’s operational problems. The former employee — who declined to be named to protect his professional and family’s privacy — said last week that this wood-sourcing deception is one reason Enviva has been losing money. “Enviva built a business model saying it uses mostly scrap and waste from lumber mills and cut sites to make its pellets,” he said. “If that were true, its feedstock would basically be free. But it has to buy trees, a lot of trees, and it’s competing for them with other companies that want that wood. Loggers sell to the highest bidder, right, and that drives up the price. It’s something Enviva can’t control.”
In its 2023 third quarter filing on Nov. 9 with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Enviva wrote that among the myriad reasons impacting its financial viability is “the amount of low-cost wood fiber that we are able to procure and process.” “So that’s your first problem,” the former employee said. “Your feedstock is costing way more than you’re letting on, and that’s before you start dealing with the costs of making pellets.”
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https://news.mongabay.com/2023/11/enviva-the-worlds-largest-biomass-energy-company-is-near-collapse/
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