Garbage in, garbage out

What do a folk singer and a potato farmer have in common? How about a dodgy investment scheme in power generation at Gold River that might actually see tons of Los Angelinos garbage pile up in Nootka Sound

The Republic
Vancouver's Opinionated Newspaper
September 2 to 15, 2004, No 96

A strange tale involving an alleged American stock fraudster, a popular Alaskan folk singer, a huge Japanese conglomerate, a dying mill town, and desperate government officials is unfolding in the northern Vancouver Island village of Gold River, population 1,400, and falling.

Five years ago, owners of the Bowater Pulp Mill at Gold River shut the plant down, permanently laying off all 400 employees. The employees were mostly residents of the village of Gold River, then bustling and prosperous with a population of 2,400 and growing. Gold River was originally planned and built by the owners of the mill in the 1960s. The abandoned mill continues to sit on land leased to it from the Muchalat Indian band. The village now continues to die a slow death as remaining residents grasp at whatever hope comes along.

As though by saving grace, one such hope has appeared on the horizon—but it may come with a high price. BC Hydro is a state-owned electric utility company. The current British Columbia provincial government is trying to privatize the utility. To tart up its prospectus for a future initial public offering on the stock markets, BC Hydro announced that it would shut down its under-water cables that supply electricity from generating plants on the BC mainland to Vancouver Island. To make up for the electricity shortfall on the island, the utility proposed to build a natural gas pipeline connecting to the North American gas grid, and to construct a natural gas-fired electricity generating plant near the Vancouver Island city of Nanaimo.

But last year, the government regulator, the BC Utilities Commission, turned down the bid and insisted instead that BC Hydro should first seek applications from potential private generators of electricity on Vancouver Island.

One of the more intriguing proposals that have come forth from the resulting tendering process the utility launched last year involves the moth-balled Bowater Pulp Mill at Gold River. The proposal comes from an unlikely duo: a potato farmer from Idaho by the name of David O Kingston, and a folk singer from Alaska by the name of Jewel Kilcher. Kingston owns a set of companies that wholesales and distributes potatoes from Idaho, pineapples from Costa Rica, and other farm food from Peru, Florida and California, mostly by truck to huge California markets. Kilcher is better known by her stage name, Jewel, currently one of the world’s most popular singer-songwriters.

With proceeds from her successful entertainment career, Jewel funds a foundation called Clearwater Project that aims to provide potable water to third world villages. The chief corporate strategist at Clearwater is Lenedra Carroll, Jewel’s mother, herself once half of a formerly popular folk music duet in Alaska, the other member being Jewel’s father, Atz Kilcher. The two divorced when Jewel was eight years old. Her father continues to play and record music.

Carroll, on the other hand, authors self-help books and manages her daughter’s career. In a suit launched by Jewel’s original manager a few years ago, Inga Vainshtein alleged that Jewel was required to consult her mother’s supposedly channeled entity, known as “Z”, prior to making any decisions regarding Vainshtein’s business advice.

Kingston and members of his family own and operate the Kingston Companies LLC with headquarters in Idaho Falls, Idaho, and offices around the US, and also in San Jose, Costa Rica, Lima, Peru and, oddly enough for a fruit and vegetable-growing concern, Gold River, British Columbia, according to published corporate information. The company owns farms that grow and distribute potatoes, onions, broccoli, lettuce, and pineapple.

Kingston and Carroll, through the Clearwater Project, were named in the BC Legislature in Victoria by North Island MLA Rod Visser as chief investors in the new plan for the Bowater mill. Carroll, in her capacity as chief corporate strategist at Clearwater, launched a private company, in collaboration with Kingston and other investors, called Green Island Energy. Sean Ebnet, Executive Director of Jewel’s Clearwater Project foundation, has taken up part-time residence in Gold River to head up Green Island Energy. Kingston’s company began this year to list Gold River as a site of one of its far-flung global offices.

Green Island Energy has a proposal before BC Hydro and various BC government regulators to transform the abandoned Bowater mill into an electricity generating station that would produce and sell electricity to BC Hydro. The Green Island Energy proposal is to take advantage of existing transmission lines that connect the mill to the electrical grid at nearby Campbell River, lines formerly used to supply the mill with electricity. Existing boilers at the mill can be used, the proposal states, to burn waste wood particles from nearby mills in sufficient volume to create, with steam turbines, 49 megawatts of electricity—roughly the equivalent of what is used by 24,000 homes in one year. Ultimately, Green Island Energy proposes to generate 250 megawatts at the former Bowater plant.

According to companies that already burn waste wood to produce electricity, each megawatt produced requires about 20,000 tons of wood waste products. The initial phase at Green Island Energy would require one million tons of wood waste per year. The ultimate plan would require five million tons per year.

Of course, there isn’t nearly that much wood waste produced at mills throughout British Columbia, not anymore, anyway, since many, like Bowater, have shut down. The Green Island Energy proposal, however, does not specify that wood waste only would be burned at the old mill site in Gold River in future phases. Instead, the proposal is to burn “biomass.”

According the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory , biomass has this official definition, for the purposes of US regulators: "Biomass: Organic matter available on a renewable basis. Biomass includes forest and mill residues, agricultural crops and wastes, wood and wood wastes, animal wastes, livestock operation residues, aquatic plants, fast-growing trees and plants, and municipal and industrial wastes." With the right boilers, any of this material can be burned to produce steam for electricity.

Only one kind of biomass listed above is in great enough abundance and cheap enough to source for anyone to consider basing a 250 megawatt electricity generating plant on it: municipal and industrial solid waste. In fact, producers of municipal waste up and down the west coast of North America are anxious to pay anyone willing to take their biomass—human household waste, mostly—away because landfills are full, new ones are impossible to get permits for, and dumping waste in the ocean is no longer acceptable. City of Vancouver residents generate about 300,000 tons of household garbage and waste a year. The west coast of North America generates about 50 million tons—all of it with not much room left to stash it.

Biomass-burning electricity plants constructed recently in Pennsylvania and other eastern seaboard states at first proposed to burn “clean” wood chips, but nearby residents soon learned that the term “biomass” has a wider definition than they thought when municipal and state governments granted companies permits to burn it. They now see municipal waste from afar brought to their impoverished towns, where it is burned at their former “clean wood chip” fired electricity plants.

David O Kingston, one of the principles behind the Green Island Energy proposal, is currently in the courts in Idaho facing lawsuits stemming from fraud in an alleged stock market swindle with a company he headed up called Collabware. Collabware promised investors it had special access to certain Lougheed Martin Company inventions, but all came to naught and the company wound up operations soon after new capital stopped flowing in.

The company Green Island Energy proposes to sub-contract out the actual operation of the plant at Gold River is North American Energy Services, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Itochu Corp., a sprawling Japanese conglomerate with revenues from global operations totaling over $120 billion last year.

Other business ventures by Jewel and her mother have included a yet-to-be made film called Wave, co-produced by the two about a mother re-uniting 25 years later with her son in a remote west coast Canadian town. Jewel is to be cast as the son’s love interest. It is writer David Rothmiller’s first writing credit. Production has been stalled for two years.

Gold River is not Lenedra Carroll’s first foray into electricity entrepreneurship. Two years ago she led a consortium interested in taking over the mothballed Anyox hydroelectric dam and generating plant at Alice Arm, BC, located nearby Prince Rupert. The status of this project is unknown; the purchasing agreement with BC Hydro was expected a year ago, but has not yet materialized.

Earlier this year, the mayor of Gold River, the local MLA, and Gordon Campbell, premier of the province, were introduced to the principles of Green Island Energy, and also treated to a song or two by Jewel in person. Sources close to The Republic say Green Island Energy recently received government approval to begin shipping municipal waste to the Bowater mill site, but this could not be confirmed by press time.

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Jewel meets with Premier to discuss plans for a new power generation facility

from the Premier's media gallery (link)