On May 10, 2025, the New York Times reported on a new policy directive by the Trump administration.  It was reported that Jeffrey B. Clark, the acting administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, wrote a memo on May 5.  In his memo, Mr. Clark doubted the scientific consensus that pollution from things like transportation and industry is heating the planet.

He argued that there were too many “uncertainties” in calculating a social cost of carbon emissions, including: “Whether and to what degree any supposed changes in the climate are actually occurring as a consequence of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.  It is no longer federal government policy to maintain a uniform estimate of the monetized impacts of greenhouse gas emissions,”

In the context of scientific facts and pragmatic strategic planning, such statements by a senior official are misguided at best.

This white paper explains why

Only BECCS from sustainably sourced biomass derived fuel can offer the simultaneous benefits of providing grid-stabilizing baseload generation while also steepening the downward slope on the off-ramp to a future in which atmospheric CO₂ concentrations have returned to levels that give us a chance for the future to be what we would like it to be.

The paper is complimented with a dashboard that illustrates the pathway from sustainable sourcing of biomass derived fuel to the permanent removal of CO₂ from the atmosphere.

The UK’s Department of Energy Security and New Zero (DESNZ) and the Drax power station have reached an agreement on the support for pellet generated power from the end of the current support policy in March 2027 until March of 2031.  This white paper discusses and explains the likely impacts of the policy changes.

Key takeaways
• There will be a significant reduction in aggregate demand for wood pellet fuel beginning in April 2027.
• Depending on the size, frequency, and duration of modulations in generation output, the wood pellet fuel supply chain may need significant intermediate buffer storage that does not currently exist.

The plan that this white paper discusses will create many tens of thousands of new jobs. The plan will stimulate billions of dollars of new investment in new US manufacturing plants. It will enhance US national energy security and cost competitive diversification of baseload generation. The cost to ratepayers is imperceptible. The cost to taxpayers is zero.

Leveraging the existing global pellet trade infrastructure to support the decarbonization of the steel industry

If the capacity factor is much below baseload (<80%) and natural gas prices are not at rock bottom, building new natural gas combined cycle generation is not the optimal solution.

This short paper and the accompanying dashboard show the consequences of a mismatch between white pellet consumption at a power station with a low capacity factor and white pellet production by pellet factories with offtake agreements for that station.  The dashboard illustrates the significant capital cost savings of avoiding the dry storage requirements of white pellets by using waterproof steam treated pellets.

This brief white paper discusses the rapid increase in current and forecast demand for electricity.  The transition away from fossil fuel generated power will be challenged by demand growth.  This paper offers a way to make baseload green power sustainably. 

This short white paper describes the decision-making model that every power boiler operator that is considering conversion from coal to pellet fuel should use.  The decision-making model is built into an interactive dashboard that allows the user to experiment with a variety of inputs and see how, under some input combinations, black pellets, not white pellets, are the optimum choice for fuel. 

On December 13, 2023, the United Nations Conference on Climate Change delivered the outcome of COP28.  This comprehensive FutureMetrics white paper discusses the goals set out in the “first global stocktake”.

This white paper analyzes the operating costs of heat pumps.  It shows that in colder climates, supplemental heat is always needed.  And in many colder locations, they are NOT the lowest cost heating option.

Where do you think lumber, furniture, flooring, paper, cardboard boxes, tissue, and toilet paper come from?  A quantitative review of the North American forest products industry with a new interactive dashboard.

As the white paper and dashboard show, the export pellet sector only uses about 3.2% of the primary harvest directly from the forest.  The rest goes to lumber, paper, etc.

The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recent report makes it clear that action is needed now.    

This new analysis by FutureMetrics’ William Strauss describes a strategy that the US can follow that yields carbon negative results AND generates baseload power.

Twenty-five years ago, the first bulk shipment of industrial wood pellets traveled from British Columbia to the Helsingborg Energi power plant in Sweden, marking the birth of today’s multibillion dollar industrial wood pellet industry. 

The person behind this accomplishment, John Swaan, tells some of the stories which led him to that first contract worth $1.67 million in 1998.

There has been much discussion recently about the offtake pricing relationships between pellet producers and pellet buyers.

Many years of near zero inflation resulted in some complacency in how offtake price adjustments were defined in the bilateral contracts between the pellet fuel producers and buyers.  It became common to define an annual fixed adjustment to the sales price of the pellets; often in the range of 1.5% to 2.5%.  With hindsight, it is obvious that this exposed producers to risk if the average cost of production increased faster than the price.

This brief white paper will set the foundation for the reader to use the dashboards that complements this analysis.

A supply shock occurs when a significant portion of a good or service is no longer available in the market and substitutes are scarce or non-existent.

This white paper describes how the loss of pellet fuel supply into western Europe and the UK as a result of sanctions on Russia has produced a supply shock that is having, and will continue to have, significant consequences.

This white paper shows how wood pellets and high efficiency gasifying pellet cookers will be beneficial to the people and ecology of Rwanda and many other countries in which people use smoky solid fuels for cooking.

FutureMetrics is honored and proud to be providing analysis and consulting services to BioMassters via the support of the Clean Cooking Alliance (an organization within the United Nations).

The Inflation Reduction Act has opened the door for what may be the most efficient and pragmatic approach to actively lowering atmospheric CO₂ concentrations.  Combining the use of fuel produced from the by-products of continuously growing managed forests with carbon capture results in the same outcome as direct air capture.  This white paper and the new accompanying dashboard show how.

There has been high-level discussion from some government policymakers in the EU about restricting the use of “roundwood” as feedstock for pellet fuel.  While the spirit of the policymaking exercise is properly grounded as a tactic to disallow deforestation and encourage the most efficient use of a renewing resource, a blanket exclusion of “roundwood” is misguided.  This white paper explains why.  This white paper also discusses the dynamics of forest growth and carbon sequestration.

This comprehensive 32-page white paper uses advanced simulation techniques to explore every part of the industrial wood pellet supply chain.  The analysis shows how high inflation could impact the sector.  The paper offers some thoughts on mitigating the negative impacts of high inflation.

This white paper discusses a biomass fuel strategy for the German power generation sector that has the potential to reduce dependence on imported natural gas, mitigate grid reliability risk, solidify baseload generation, and significantly reduce carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions.  It is complimented by a new interactive dashboard.

This white paper discusses how Japanese policy has set the foundation for the next wave of pellet fuel demand.  It uses a real-world example based on recent announcements by J-Power and Enviva.

This brief white paper is motivated by a policy announcement in India on October 8 that mandates that 5% to 10% biomass pellets must be blended with coal by October 2022 in most of its coal fueled power stations.

This white paper quantifies the demand for biomass pellets based on the Indian coal fueled power generation fleet.  It also offers an opinion on the potential for India to import wood pellets.

Even after years of explaining managed forest dynamics, the carbon debt misconception lives on. 

To this day, and sometimes by academics with PhD’s after their names, the carbon debt fallacy is perpetuated.  This white paper will explain why they get it wrong. 

This white paper’s thesis is that the likelihood of evolving policy that supports continue growth in demand for pellet fuels might be significantly increased by focused efforts on cooperation between the pellet sector and the consortiums that advocate for wind power, solar power, and energy storage.

Cooperation in strategy and communications may yield a future in which government strategies and influential reporting will have a more complete view of how to get from today to a fully decarbonized power sector.