The Baby, The Bathwater, and The Burning Wood: Why We Need a Rethink on Dutch Biomass

In 2024, Vattenfall finally pulled the plug on the Netherlands’ largest proposed biomass plant in Diemen. For years, activists had fought the project tooth and nail. They argued that shipping wood pellets from forests across the ocean just to burn them in Amsterdam was ecological madness.

They won. The plant was scrapped.

But in the smoke of that victory, a dangerous confusion has settled over the Netherlands. The public mood -already sombre on the topic- turned even more violently against all biomass. Because a massive, pellet-importing industrial plant was deemed a bad idea, the local municipality burning clippings from roadside overgrowth to heat a swimming pool is now seen as an environmental crime. We have thrown the baby out with the bathwater.

As investors in European infrastructure, we like to deal with realities, not slogans. And the reality is that while most fuel import models (like Diemen) have flaws, local circular model often have the potential to be smart infrastructure plays.

Here is why in our view the Dutch approach to biomass needs a second, smarter look.

 

1. The Tale of Two Woods: Pellets vs. Chips

The Diemen project was wrong in our view because it relied on imported pellets. This model is much more vulnerable to global price shocks and understandably raises eyebrows about carbon footprints when wood is shipped halfway around the world.

That is not the model we are talking about.

The “smart” biomass model relies on local, low-grade waste. The Netherlands is a garden; it generates tons of “landscape waste”—prunings from parks, roadside maintenance, and forestry thinning. We need to draw a line between

• The “Diemen” Model (Bad): Industrial pellets, imported globally, processed heavily.
• The “Circular” Model (Good): Local wood chips, gathered within a set radius, with minimal processing.

When we use local chips, we aren’t incentivizing deforestation in the Carolinas. We are preventing Dutch waste from being trucked to a landfill.

2. Efficiency: The Physics Don’t Lie

Even if the fuel is local, how you burn it matters. Again draw a line between:

• Biomass for Power (Electricity), which is thermodynamically tragic. You burn wood to spin a turbine, wasting 60-70% of the energy as heat loss.
• Biomass for Heat, which makes good engineering sense. You burn wood to heat water for a local grid. Efficiencies hit 90%+.

The tragedy of the current debate is that perfectly efficient, local heat projects are being blocked because they are lumped in the narrative with inefficient power plants or massive import schemes.

3. The Science of Rotting: It’s Going into the Air Anyway

Here is the plain biological fact: plants grow and need pruning, leaves and branches fall, and trees ultimately die and need removing.

When landscape waste is left to rot in wet fields, it decomposes. That releases CO2 back into the atmosphere. Worse, if it rots anaerobically (in compacted piles), it releases methane—a greenhouse gas that is 25x more potent than CO2.

By burning this waste in high-tech, filtered boilers, yes we are bringing forward the release of that CO2 which is just inevitable, but at least we are capturing the energy content of the biomass to displace fossil gas, which would not happen if we just let the biomass decay. We are doing what nature would do, but we’re getting warm showers out of it and scrubbing the particulates from the smoke, and releasing no methane.

It is hard to argue that leaving that biomass to rot in the fields, and burn imported gas instead makes better sense, both environmentally and economically.

4. Stability in a Volatile World

The energy crisis taught us that reliance on international commodities is a security risk.

Post-COVID, district heating businesses in Sweden—which rely heavily on imported biofuels—saw their margins decimated as European pellet prices spiked. They were exposed to the whims of the global market and were specifically hit by the impact of the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

In contrast, Dutch low-grade biomass is a hyper-local market. The price of roadside maintenance wood in Overijssel is not dictated by the price of gas in Texas or pellets in the Baltics. It offers a degree of price stability that is currently gold dust in the European energy market. It is cheap, it is here, and it is ours.

5. The Bridge We Need Now

Is biomass the forever solution? Probably not. In an ideal world, 2050 will be powered entirely by geothermal, hydrogen, and wind.

But we don’t live in 2050. We live in the 2020s, and the Dutch heat grid is currently addicted to natural gas. We cannot install heat pumps in every terrace house in Amsterdam by next Tuesday—the grid congestion alone makes it impossible.

Local biomass is a reliable, sensible transition fuel. It allows us to decarbonize heat now, using existing waste streams, while the electric grid catches up.

The Bottom Line

We need to stop treating “biomass” as a dirty word and get the solid facts out there. “Biomass” can mean many things, from some unfortunate practices to others that are perfectly logical and necessary allies against climate change.

The Diemen protesters were right to question the industrial import model. But we must be careful not to let that victory kill the local, efficient, and circular economy of heating our homes with the waste from our gardens and roadsides.

Please get in touch at
info@asper-im.com