Enviva’s two storage domes at the Port of Wilmington are up, but the company still has work to do before it can begin processing wood pellets from North and South Carolina forests and shipping them abroad through the Port of Wilmington.
 
“Enviva is making significant progress on the construction of our deep-water marine terminal at the Port of Wilmington and our wood pellet production plant in Sampson County,” company spokesman Kent Jenkins Jr. said in a recent email.
 
Although the “balloons” forming the outer skin of the 17-story storage domes have been inflated, the interiors of the storage domes are not yet finished, he said.
 
“We are now completing the steel-reinforced concrete primary structures of the domes, which are designed to withstand hurricane-force winds and an earthquake that registers ‘8’ on the Richter scale,” Jenkins said. “In Sampson County, work on our pellet plant is well underway.”
 
Jenkins said the company expects construction of both facilities to be complete in early 2016 and full operations to begin in the spring.
 
“At full capacity, the Sampson plant will produce about 500,000 metric tons of wood pellets per year. We will transport pellets from our Sampson plant to our Wilmington port by rail and by truck,” he said.
 
Enviva’s total investment in its port facilities and Sampson County plant is about $150 million, according to Jenkins. He added that the company’s combined plant and port operations are expected to create about 300 jobs – 100 on Enviva’s payroll and roughly 200 related jobs such as trucking and logging.
 
“The North Carolina State Ports Authority estimates that our facilities will generate about $780 million in economic activity every year,” he said.
 
Enviva officials state that the company is the world’s largest supplier of wood pellets, a fuel they say feels and burns like coal but which enables electrical utilities that convert from coal to wood pellets to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by as much as 80 percent. 
 
The company’s primary customers are electric utilities in Europe, Jenkins said.
 
“One of them is the largest power generator in England and Europe’s largest single source of greenhouse gases,” he said. “This utility is converting three of its six coal-fired units to wood pellets; converting just one unit reduces carbon emissions by 12 million tons a year – the equivalent of taking 10 percent of the cars in Great Britain off the road.”
 
Some conservationists, including the Southern Environmental Law Center and the Dogwood Alliance, have questioned Enviva’s harvesting practices in the Carolinas and the sustainability of its supply of raw materials. The company has responded that it is taking only waste wood.
 
Jenkins added that Enviva is also continuing its efforts to work with local residents, some of whom had objected to the noise of the company’s operations and to the height of its storage domes. 
 
“We ... are working closely with local residents, including the Historic Sunset Park Neighborhood Association, to ensure that as we help build the local economy we also protect the quality of life,” Jenkins said. “We have agreed to a set of ‘Good Neighbor Principles’ with the Sunset Park Neighborhood Association, and we look forward to a continuing a close relationship with this organization.”