Booming British mill company's pollution draws scrutiny in Mississippi. Less so in Louisiana

When Mississippi environmental regulators checked the emissions of a large wood pellet mill operating a few miles from the Louisiana line, they found pollution levels two times higher than the legal limit. 

In Louisiana, two mills nearly identical to the Gloster, Miss. mill operate under the same British owner and produce the same product with the same equipment. But whether these Louisiana mills, located in Bastrop and Urania, are also tainting the air with large quantities of formaldehyde, methanol and other chemicals is a question Louisiana’s environmental regulators can’t answer.

“The Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality does not require testing for these pollutants,” said Patrick Anderson, an attorney for the Environmental Integrity Project advocacy organization. “But when Mississippi tested, they learned (the mill) was putting out 50 tons of hazardous air pollutants per year. That blows past the legal limit by almost two fold.”

The three mills are owned by Drax, an England-based energy company that operates Britain’s largest power station. The former coal plant in rural Yorkshire produces power by burning wood pellets sourced from low-grade timber harvested in Louisiana and other parts of the South.

The EIP, made up of former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency officials, is urging LDEQ to conduct the same emissions review as Mississippi. The group stresses that Drax has a history of pollution violations in Louisiana. Last year, Drax agreed to pay LDEQ $3.2 million to settle air pollution claims against its Bastrop and Urania mills. The settlement was the largest paid to LDEQ in at least a decade.

LDEQ has not responded to the EIP, but an agency spokesperson said on Thursday that a review of Drax’s emissions and possibly LDEQ’s own permitting policies are now underway. LDEQ had no timeline for the review and indicated it was too early to tell if enforcement action would be taken.

In a statement, Drax said the “safety of our people and the communities in which we operate is our priority, and we take our environmental responsibilities seriously.” The company did not answer specific questions this week about its emissions levels, but acknowledged “some discrepancies” between its emissions estimates and its actual releases.

In March, the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality determined that Drax’s Amite BioEnergy mill in Gloster, about 12 miles from the Louisiana line, had far exceeded the allowable limit of what regulators call “hazardous air pollutants,” or HAPs. This wide-ranging classification includes about 180 pollutants, including arsenic, lead and mercury, that are toxic to humans. While the mill was permitted as a “minor source” for HAPs, its actual emissions made it a “major” source, according to MDEQ.

LDEQ confirmed that it does not require Drax to test for HAPs or a similar group of chemicals LDEQ refers to as “toxic air pollutants.” The Louisiana agency does not conduct its own testing for these chemicals at Drax’s mills.

Drax indicated its own inexperience with wood pellet production caused it to underestimate emissions.

“The pellet production industry is a relatively young industry,” Drax said in a letter to MDEQ in March. “Several wood pellet facilities, not only Amite BioEnergy, LLC, initially underestimated emissions in connection with the permitting of these facilities.”

The Mississippi mill is allowed to release 24 tons of HAPs per year. MDEQ records indicate the mill was releasing HAPs at a rate of 37 tons per year since 2021, but Drax’s own emissions estimates from 2022 put that rate at about 49 tons per year, according to a letter the company sent to MDEQ.

A Drax spokesperson on Thursday said it cooperated with MDEQ and “took swift corrective action” this year.

It was the second time Drax ran afoul of MDEQ over the past two years. In 2021, MDEQ fined Drax $2.5 million for emitting hundreds of tons of volatile organic compounds, known as VOCs, per year in violation of the company’s Clean Air Act permits. VOCs are a collection of chemicals that can be harmful to breathe, especially for elderly people, children and sufferers of asthma and other lung conditions. The chemicals are released at the mills when trees are dried in kilns and then processed into pellets.

Drax’s $3.2 million payment to LDEQ a year later was also over alleged VOC emissions violations.

This pattern of violations should show that “a new round of enforcement actions against Drax is plainly warranted,” the EIP told LDEQ in May.

While LDEQ hasn’t required HAPs testing on Drax’s two Louisiana mills, Anderson contends it’s reasonable to assume the similar facilities are releasing comparable levels of air pollutants. Drax told regulators that the Mississippi mill is a “nearly identical sister” to its facility in Bastrop, a small, mostly Black community in Morehouse Parish.

“The Morehouse facility was built at the same time and is very similar to (the Mississippi mill), such that it has the exact same process design, equipment, production rates…,” a Drax executive told MDEQ in 2017.

Like Bastrop, Gloster is a majority Black community with high rates of poverty. The promise of mill jobs has come with rising concerns about the health of residents and the environment, said Janice Lyons, president of the NAACP chapter for Amite County, where Gloster is located.

“Drax claims to be a good neighbor and to care about the environment,” she said. “But they have been dumping toxics on us and making us sick since day one.”

The wood pellet industry boomed after European regulators classified wood-burning as a green energy source comparable to solar and wind power. That made Drax’s power plant eligible for renewable energy subsidies that have amounted to billions of dollars over the past decade.

Drax has sourced much of its wood from the American South, where timber is cheap. Growing demand has pushed the company to look elsewhere, including the old-growth forests of British Columbia.

The company recently announced plans to establish a U.S. headquarters in Houston and build several new facilities in the U.S. and Canada in the coming years.