Enviva Holdings LP, the Maryland-based company that is building a wood pellet plant in Sampson County and pellet storage facilities at the Port of Wilmington, announced Thursday that it has launched a $5 million forest conservation fund.

This initiative, which Enviva said it will fund over the next 10 years until it reaches the $5 million total, is designed “to protect tens of thousands of acres of bottomland forests in northeast North Carolina and southeast Virginia,” according to the company’s news release. The fund’s goal is to act as a catalyst, attracting other conservation investments to the region, with an eye to conserving 35,000 acres of bottomland forests.

The Enviva Forest Conservation Fund, administered by the U.S. Endowment for Forestry and Communities, “will award matching-fund grants to nonprofit organizations to permanently protect ecologically sensitive areas and conserve working forests,” the release stated. The geographic area of focus is the Virginia-North Carolina coastal plan, which is home to Enviva’s three wood pellet production facilities in the region and a deep-water marine terminal  in Chesapeake, Virginia.

Establishment of the fund is a “logical next step” for Enviva as it expands its wood pellet production in forests along the coastal plain, said Kent Jenkins, the company’s vice president of communications.

“We are a very young company in a very new field,” Jenkins said. “We were founded just over a decade ago. What we do is new, and anytime something is new, [people] have questions about the impact that we’re having. We want to be very specific and straightforward.”

The new fund’s scope, however, is a drop in the bucket compared to the impact Enviva’s operations will have on sensitive forest areas in the region, said Derb Carter, who directs the North Carolina offices of the Southern Environmental Law Center. It proposes to protect “only a small fraction” of lands that would be a valuable source of wood for its operations, he added.

Having come in to the state saying it would make wood pellets from sawdust and wood waste, such as debris from already-harvested trees, Carter continued, Enviva is going beyond those sources of wood and is cutting trees, even hardwoods.

Jenkins said that Enviva’s policy is not to accept wood from sensitive areas.

The endowment will place a priority on giving grants for conservation of cypress-tupelo swamps, Atlantic white cedar stands, pocosins (wetlands with significant groundwater except during seasonal dry spells) and Carolina bays – water-filled depressions that occur along the coast, the release stated. Those focal areas were identified with the help of forestry agencies and land trusts.

“These four wetland ecosystems and forest types contain some of the most unique plant and wildlife communities found across the Atlantic coastal plain. They provide a range of important environmental benefits, including improving water quality and maintaining wildlife habitats,” the release stated.

Carter asserted that there are sensitive areas containing valuable trees that are not on Enviva’s protection list. He named oak-dominated bottom lands, black gum swamps and long-leaf pine forests, which the state is spending “tremendous amounts of public money” to restore.

Jenkins said that establishment of the fund is “just a step. We anticipate there will be others.”

Wood pellet production has two troubling aspects, according to Carter. One is the cutting of valuable trees and disturbing of sensitive environments. The second, he asserted, is that cutting, processing and shipping hardwood pellets -- as opposed to pellets made of waste wood and sawdust -- and then burning them emits four times the amount of carbon into the atmosphere than does burning coal.

“If this is really about lowering carbon and addressing climate change, they would not be harvesting hardwoods for wood pellets and burning them in Europe, instead of coal,” Carter said, explaining that the EU countries are analyzing data to determine if wood pellets are really the energy source of the future for them.

Enviva, however, is "very happy" to be part of a coastal conservation effort, according to Jenkins. "Our goal is to leave forest better than we found them," he said.

The wood pellet plant in Sampson County and the storage facilities at the Port of Wilmington should be up and running by spring, Jenkins said.