Lucedale is a small city tucked into the southeast corner of George County, Mississippi. Its estimated population is barely 3,000 residents and more often than not is passed by on the way to somewhere else.

But a proposal to build a wood pellet plant there is turning this quiet southern town into a battleground for out-of-state environmental activists, including celebrity Leonardo DiCaprio who recently asked his Twitter followers to weigh in on the issue.

Enviva, the world’s largest wood pellet manufacturer, is looking to build a plant in an industrial area designated by county officials for economic development. The Maryland-based renewable energy company is also seeking to build a new deep-water terminal in the Port of Pascagoula that it says will add – between the two facilities – more than 450 jobs during construction, 120 permanent jobs, and an estimated 300 indirect permanent jobs in the timber and transportation industries.

The plant would primarily be focused on exporting wood pellets to Europe and Japan, where they are used to replace coal as a power source. According to academic research, greenhouse gas intensity of pellet-based electricity is 74 percent to 85 percent lower than that of coal-based electricity.

Source: Insidesources