- Plug pulled on timber sector proposal to site and construct the largest industrial forest product facilities built in California in decades to manufacture wood pellets for export to foreign markets.
- Community opposition and international reprobation likely chills investor interest in industrial wood pellet project that would have cost upwards of $500 million.
- Proponents spin of the decision to abandon their biomass megaproject as a casual ‘nothing to be seen here’ reconfiguration of their proposal continues to demonstrate their disrespect for Stockton community stakeholders that spoke out against the project and insisted on greater scrutiny of the impacts of wood pellet storage and export by cargo ship to global markets.
In late June 2025 the board of directors of the California based Golden State Natural Resources (GSNR) gathered in the county supervisors chambers in the far northern Modoc County seat of Alturas. On the GSNR board meeting agenda was an item discussing the future of the wood pellet export mega project that had been central to their mission over at least the last many years.
It was during the summer of 2022 that Biofuelwatch first identified the GSNR proposal to build two new wood pellet manufacturing facilities in rural California to make one million tons a year of wood pellets for export to global energy markets through ports in the San Francisco Bay Area. These new industrial facilities, one in Lassen County making 700,000 tons of wood pellets a year and the other in Tuolumne County making 300,000 tons of wood pellets a year, were to be the largest forest product manufacturing plants sited and constructed in California in decades.
In comparison for scale, at the height of pulp production on Humboldt Bay, prior to the pulp industry offshoring to the global south, the annual production was around 500,000 tons of pulp a year.
Though the comparison between pulp and wood pellets might be ‘apples and oranges,’ there can be no question that sourcing feedstock for making one million tons of wood pellets a year would have been a dramatic expansion of forest harvest activities for industrial wood product manufacturing in the state. The significance and scale of this proposed establishment of the global wood pellet sector in California was also reflected in the conservatively estimated $500+ million dollar investment required for the construction of the two new wood pellet plants as well as a storage and export facility in Stockton, where the wood pellets would be shipped out to global markets.
The discriminatory treatment of Stockton by GSNR as a project facility location was only accentuated by the manner in which the GSNR board of directors was convening their critical June 2025 board meeting in remote Modoc County, without any means of virtual or phone attendance, or of even viewing a broadcast of the meeting. In other words, GSNR was once again making decisions that would impact Stockton, but without traveling to Modoc County residents of Stockton would be hard pressed to know exactly what would have been decided.
Considering the quasi-public nature of GSNR the decision to not broadcast the meeting on a platform such as zoom was purposeful, and out of the ordinary in 2025, even for a remote rural California county.
Observing these dynamics in the run up to the meeting Biofuelwatch assessed that attendance at the Alturas meeting was an imperative to know factually what GSNR was deciding. We therefore made the trip with partners to be at the meeting in Modoc County in the north east corner of the state to hear first hand what GSNR was going to do about hinted ‘changes’ coming to their project. It did not take long to find out.
The historic Modoc County Courthouse in Alturas where Golden State Natural Resources made the decision to abandon their wood pellet export scheme.
In an extremely short and efficient meeting that featured a presentation from GSNR staff about their analysis that the wood pellet proposal was no longer their preferred option, the board of directors rapidly and without any deliberation made and seconded a motion, voted on the motion, and confirmed the decision to shelve their aggressively publicized vision to bring the global wood pellet sector to California.
Critical to the decision was the complete abandonment of the wood pellet storage and export terminal in Stockton. For a community already confronting a multitude of environmental injustices the decision by GSNR to abandon their wood pellet export scheme was rightly perceived as a clear victory for Stockton neighbors.
The halting of a massive wood pellet export project that was directly associated with the UK climate villain Drax (GSNR and Drax officially signed a memorandum of understanding in early 2024 to collaborate in project development) was immediately embraced by forest defenders and community protectors around the world as an important turn of events that hints at the growing momentum to stop the expansion of the wood pellet industry and hold players like Drax accountable for their legacy of environmental and social harms.
In celebration of the derailing of the GSNR wood pellet export scheme it is worth taking a moment to highlight a handful of the most important moments of this amazing campaign.
Coalition emerges in late 2022 to oppose wood pellet export scheme as environmental review begins
GSNR first began their environmental review process for their project in late 2022, and the coalition response was immediate and robust. More than 30 local, national and international organizations came together in a matter of weeks in the shadow of the holidays to provide detailed written comment [22 12 19 CBD, PFPI, Biofuelwatch et al scoping comments on GSNR wood pellet project final] on the initial ‘scoping’ stage of the environmental review, and to develop communications strategies to raise public awareness of the emerging wood pellet threat. The agility of organizations like the Natural Resources Defense Council, Partnership for Policy Integrity, the Center for Biological Diversity, and many others to provide technical and legal expertise on short notice set a tone for a campaign that would be relentless in banging the drum about the dangers of letting the global wood pellet sector get a foot hold in California.
Richmond expresses concern and port terminal operator says ‘no thanks’ to wood pellet export
One of the glaring mistakes of GSNR in the environmental review process was their failure to adequately engage communities that would be impacted by their project. This discriminatory trend was prevalent though out the never finished environmental review process, and it came back to haunt GSNR almost immediately in Richmond, a Bay Area city with a vibrant and experienced environmental justice activist community. In early 2023 the Richmond City Council took it upon themselves to learn more about the project when they realized that Richmond was the preferred wood pellet export location, but that GSNR had already done scoping of the project without any effort whatsoever to engage the Richmond community. As community concerns began to gather steam the private port terminal operator that had been entertaining the wood pellet export proposal informed GSNR that actually, no, they were not interested in working with GSNR or exporting wood pellets, effectively shutting the door to GSNR on exporting wood pellets through Richmond. The rejection by stakeholders in Richmond of their project was without question a shock to the GSNR system.
Stockton mobilizes to expose discriminatory dynamics with poor GSNR engagement in community
Having lost access to the deep water port of Richmond for export of their wood pellets GSNR turned with a laser focus to the Port of Stockton for wood pellet storage and export. In June 2023, due to their failure to do adequate outreach in port communities during their previous round of scoping, GSNR opened another round of scoping under the California Environmental Quality Act in which they specified Stockton as the host to their export operations. By this time the coalition opposing the GSNR project had grown to more than 100 organizations [JointScopingCommentsonGSNRWoodPelletProject63023], with an increasing level of organizing and attention to the issue from authentic Stockton-based environmental justice organizations like Little Manila Rising. GSNR however still chose to not actually hold any public meetings in Stockton during their June 2023 scoping process, instead relying on a zoom webinar for taking virtual comment on the project. Coalition organizations from around Stockton, across the state and country, and indeed from around the world made opposition to the project felt. This powerful turn out to the zoom scoping meeting fed the power of Stockton locals who, though they were already stretched thin responding to multitudes of environmental threats in their city and at the port, understood intuitively that hosting a wood pellet storage and export terminal was going to grossly exacerbate an already intolerable pollution burden. Stockton organizing grew by leaps and bounds from this point forward.
CARB sends letter telling GSNR that they need to improve their outreach in Stockton
GSNR did through the course of 2024 make some symbolic gestures towards community engagement in Stockton, but their efforts remained inadequate. In October 2024 GSNR finally released the draft environmental review documentation for the project, publishing more than 1300 pages of material related to the likely impacts of the proposal. However, GSNR held a public meeting in Stockton less than two weeks after the release of the voluminous draft review documentation, and only days prior to the early November 2024 presidential elections. The cynical effort of GSNR to finally hold a public meeting in Stockton exactly in the days when residents would be fully and totally absorbed in preparing for a historic election was not missed by state authorities. In November 2024 the environmental justice branch of the California Air Resources Board would send a letter to GSNR expressing concern about the inadequate public engagement in Stockton [CARB_Correspondence to Golden State Finance Authority CF Signed], and the imperative of their holding more public meetings in order that the community know about the project and share their concerns. GSNR brazenly denied the request by CARB to hold more in person public meetings in Stockton, acceding instead to extend the deadline for the receipt of written public comment on the draft environmental impact report. Coalition members did take advantage of that extension and provided reams of documentation [Final GSNR DEIR Comment Letter] identifying short comings in the GSNR draft environmental documentation to correctly articulate the environmental impacts that would arise from their wood pellet export project. The public comment period on the draft environmental review closed in late January 2025.
Humboldt County expresses concerns about the project and withdraws from GSNR board of directors
Previous to the close of the public comment period on the draft environmental review documentation the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors responded to community concerns about the project and the role of Humboldt County in attempting to bring Drax to California to establish an export oriented wood pellet sector in the state. The board of directors of GSNR is composed of elected rural county supervisors, and had included since January 2023 the participation of a Humboldt County supervisor on the board. Humboldt residents and environmental organizations were particularly concerned about the role that their county had in the governance of a project that threatened an entirely new wave of high intensity industrial intervention in the state’s forests, and that was thrusting already environmentally stressed Stockton deeper into the pollution hot seat. The Humboldt County Board of Supervisors took two dramatic steps that clearly had a major impact on the future of GSNR and the perception of investors of the viability of the project: first, the Humboldt board of supervisors submitted a letter critical of the wood pellet export project as public comment on the draft environmental review [HumCoBoS_Letter to GSNR_Jan14-2025], and then Humboldt supervisors reined in their colleague and had the county supervisor from Humboldt County withdraw from the GSNR board of directors, totally shattering the perceived consensus of rural California counties as being in support of the wood pellet export scheme.
Biofuelwatch exposes GSNR magical thinking about liquid biofuels
Our organization engaged singularly on the way in which GSNR claimed that their future use of the high deforestation risk liquid biofuel product knows as ‘renewable diesel’ was going to magically solve the greenhouse gas emissions challenges from the extensive use of diesel in the future operations of the project. Biofuelwatch submitted a letter as public comment that was specific to challenging the assumptions central to the GSNR claims about ‘renewable diesel’ as a climate solution in the context of the absence of quantifiable data about their anticipated heavy machinery and trucking emissions in their draft environmental review [BiofuelwatchComment_GSNRDEIR]. This is but one example of how coalition efforts poked so many holes in the GSNR draft environmental review that the future of the project was put into serious jeopardy.
Tuolumne activists raise the alarm and GSNR feels the heat
By winter of 2025 Tuolumne County residents had begun to organize in a serious way to express concerns about the numerous impacts that the establishment of a 300,000 tons a year wood pellet plant would have on their community. Locals anticipated the planned March 2025 GSNR board of directors meeting that was to be held in Tuolumne County as a chance to show up in numbers and express concern about the wood pellet export plan. The community organizing itself to oppose the project apparently terrified GSNR, and GSNR retreated from their agreement to hold their March 2025 board meeting in Tuolumne County, and instead decided to just host the meeting in Sacramento. Despite not having the opportunity to present their comments in person, activated Tuolumne residents did participate en masse making public comment by zoom during the March GSNR board meeting in Sacramento, further dispelling the narrative that rural Californians were unanimously in support of the wood pellet megaproject vision of GSNR.
A campaign success to be elevated and celebrated
These are just a few of the remarkable campaign developments that culminated with GSNR deciding to abandon their wood pellet export scheme at their June 2025 meeting in Modoc County, marking a notable victory against an industry that has over the last decade exploited the false narratives around biomass as renewable energy to expand their sector and production with impunity. Even as coalition participants take stock of how to monitor and respond to GSNR aspirations to reinvent their biomass project, whether it be to pursue bioenergy unicorns like making aviation fuel from woody biomass, or false climate solutions like Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Sequestration (BECCS), we will not be shy about heralding the significance of this victory in California over the global wood pellet sector. A tremendous thank you is offered to everyone and anyone that has leaned into stopping the GSNR wood pellet disaster from becoming reality. We are due to celebrate this win as there is still lots of work ahead of us. Looking ahead Biofuelwatch will remain active with partners to watch dog biomass energy developments in California, to contribute to existing efforts to keep Drax from developing a wood pellet plant on the Columbia river in Longview, Washington, and to continue to organize collectively to dispel biomass delusions and debunk bioenergy illusions.