Wood pellet cruise on the lower Cape Fear, 2023

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A view from our cruise boat as we approached the Port of Wilmington and the massive stores of Enviva wood pellets waiting to be shipped across the ocean.

Priss Endo of our Cape Fear Group gives cruise guests an overview of the trip.

An enormous pile of wood pellets from Enviva's facilities in North Carolina, awaiting immediate shipping overseas.

The white domes provide storage space for another 45,000 metric tons of wood pellets.

Andy Wood of the Coastal Plain Conservation Group gave a fascinating talk about the threats posed by Enviva and what we and allied groups are doing to stop it. Here, he shows guests some of the trees and plants that, along with the animals in that habitat, are regularly destroyed by the wood pellet industry.

As we reached the turnaround point of our trip, we got a glimpse of unspoiled estuarine forest - the way this landscape would look if we minimized human impacts.

This June, we again took a cruise along the Lower Cape Fear River for an update on the threats posed by the wood pellet industry to forests in North Carolina and across the South. The educational trip was organized by the Southern Forests Conservation Coalition.

Wood pellets are typically made from trees cut specifically for pellet production, then burned in power plants in the United States and overseas, especially in the United Kingdom.

Enviva, the world's largest pellet producer, has multiple facilities in North Carolina and throughout the South. It regularly ships its product from the Port of Wilmington.

The industry poses environmental hazards from start to finish: destroying forest habitat, transporting raw wood, producing pellets in communities that already face industrial health threats, shipping the pellets across the ocean, and finally burning the pellets and contributing to carbon emissions.

Derrick Galloway, a 2022 summer fellow, provided more details on the issue and the cruise in this post he wrote after attending last year's cruise.