Environmentalists have doubts, but John Keppler’s faith in the energy source is rewarded by European customers willing to pay top dollar.n a crisp North Carolina morning, an eastern pine forest is being clear cut in a precisely choreographed hydraulic ballet. Pincers grab 500-pound, 30-foot tree trunks, run them through trimmers and auto-cutters and then stack the nearly uniform logs onto flatbed trucks which take them to mills to be cut into construction boards.
Keppler insists that Enviva never turns whole trees into pellets—except those knocked down by hurricanes. Instead, it buys scraps that used to get pulped into newsprint for now dead or shrunken newspapers. Enviva says it only works with landowners who replant trees—not those clearing land for development. “If it doesn’t go back to forest, we won’t buy it,’’ declares Lauren Killian, a 32-year-old sustainability forester at Enviva.
Then came their Eureka moment: instead of doing one-off projects, they could build a whole pellet business based around more than 50 million acres of pine forests stretching from Virginia through the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi.But they needed more capital. In 2010, Keppler and Meth turned to private equity shop Riverstone Holdings, which specializes in energy.
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