Burning Wood May Do More Harm Than Good

treehugger.com:

Of all the sources of renewable energy, one type invariably dredges up more debate than any other--biomass. Granted, the term biomass does cover a lot of topics and a lot of different controversies--from food versus fuel to the unintended consequences of anaerobic digestion. But perhaps the most enduring of all the biomass conundrums is this one--to burn wood or not to burn wood. Now Rob Hopkins, founder of the Transition Movement, is igniting the debate once more. And he's rethinking the installation of a stove at his house.

Read the whole story: treehugger.com

Comments

[Shirleyb28]

08:49 PM on 10/01/2010

Why burn wood? It is a known fact that wood smoke carries particulates that can harm humans. Neighbors aren't likely to appreciate the foul stench entering their homes with no way to keep the smoke out no matter how they try.
It's a filthy stinking habit that does not belong in residential areas.
Having been a victim of wood smoke, I can tell you it is a nightmare. Anyone who can inflict this kind of thing on a neighbor does not belong in densely packed areas.
Burners who do this are the ones that are helping to bring in bylaws and bans, so think before lighting that fire. You just might be the person that ends all burning in your area!

[Genders]

05:19 PM on 10/09/2010

Why Burn wood? Because otherwise we dump our organic waste and increase global warming. Burning has gotten 1000's of time cleaner. Many states now have strict regulations on the quality of new wood burning stoves. Even better would be to use pyrolysis, bio char, which burns cleaner than natural gas, Bio Oil fuels and creates carbon negative fertilizer. Right now we dump 90% of our organic wastes. In those dumps they create massive amounts of methane witch is 20 times worse greenhouse gas than CO2. The whole dumping process uses lots of energy and land. That's why we should responsibly "burn"/pyrolyze our organic wastes. By using all of our organic waste for energy and fuels and carbon negative fertilizer, we can backup solar and wind, and eventually completely eliminate, coal, and nuclear power. A modern large waste burning plant emits less pollution than a barbecue. Waste Bio Char plants are most efficient when they are distribute amongst the population, to reduce transportation costs. How bio char may or may not be a good idea. many suburban yards produce enough organic waste to warm their homes in the winter. Bio Char gas could probably be used in fuel cells to generate electricity and heat at 90% energy efficiency or so.

[FormerReaganite]

10:25 PM on 09/30/2010

Burning wood is a very bad idea indeed. It is better to burn natural gas, which is about 1,000 times cleaner-burning than wood fuel, and leave trees standing, in order to soak up the CO2 generated. That is what makes sense, not burning down a forest, making people sick with the toxic pollution, and then "hoping the trees will grow back" - in 30 years!

[Dr Juan]

10:02 PM on 09/29/2010

Mass has a power plant that is fired with wood. All the tree work done by the electric companies is chipped up on the spot and hauled to the power plant where is is burned efficiently as dry chips. Runs year round.

Burning logs in a fireplace drags in so much extra cold air into the house and runs so much of the heat up the chimney that most of the wood and its energy goes to waste. However, burning in an air-tight wood stove like the Hearthstone in the article is very efficient. If you have a well insulated home, this is a great way to use wood that otherwise would rot on the ground. With about three to five acres of woods, there is plenty of fallen wood to heat a reasonable sized house. Works in Mass. And it is even better if the wood stove is in the basement.

[Josh Schlossberg]

01:16 PM on 09/30/2010

It's important to make a distinction between small scale home heating with wood and supersized industrial biomass incinerators for electricity.

A tree is always best left in the forest, but the real threat to forests is burning them for electricity, aka forest biomass incineration, not individual wood stoves.

Learn more at: www.stopspewingcarbon.com

[Dr Juan]

08:52 PM on 09/30/2010

Mass doesn't harvest forests - they get chips from all the trimming around electrical lines and fallen trees that block roads. Municipalities that have crews that have to collect fallen wood all contribute. But the way I understand it, nothing is cut down specifically to harvest energy.

[gbrooks]

10:26 AM on 09/29/2010

Arghhh...I compost, I use as little electricity as possible, I buy local produce or grow my own, I buy used as much as possible, I minimize plastic, I'll probably only have one kid, I keep the thermostat down to 55 F in the winter and I don't use AC, I walk when it's feasible. Solar panels and windmills are not reasonable up here.

I have a fireplace, I am going to use it, it's the only warm room in the house in winter, and I use it to cook on as well. I burn as clean as possible, and you will NOT take that away from me.

Enough already, buzz off.

[Josh Schlossberg]

01:17 PM on 09/30/2010

If you want firewood prices to stay low, you should be opposing large scale biomass incineration for electricity, which will spike the price of firewood for home heating.

[TakeSake]

01:31 AM on 09/29/2010

The key to burning wood is to burn it as hot as possible to combust the soot as much as possible. It is difficult to do this with cord-wood. In that case, the beginning of the fire is relatively cool, until the wood burns off enough to get the coals going. Then the key is to parcel in a little at a time.

Once the fire is burning nice and hot, if kept up to that level the room can get to be too hot. Thus the fire is left to dwindle down, and another round of restarting it may be necessary.

This process can be cleaned up a lot by using something like wood pellets, but that doesn't make sense financially if it's relatively easy to collect up 5 or 6 cords per year.

[TYRANNASAURUS]

06:37 PM on 09/28/2010

SORRY TO TELL YOU THAT BURNING ANYTHING IS BAD FOR THE PLANET AND EVERYTHING ON IT.

[gbrooks]

10:18 AM on 09/29/2010

Caps lock makes you an authority, for sure.

[TYRANNASAURUS]

10:53 AM on 09/29/2010

DIDN'T KNOW YOU WERE THAT SMART gbrooks............. SO YOU DID MAKE IT OUT OF THE FIRST GRADE............ CONGRATULATIONS.

[thundermummy]

02:38 PM on 09/28/2010

Reading the article it suggests we burn natural gas more efficiently and let the forest act as a buffer. However, after visiting my folks in PA at ground zero of the natural gas fracking industry, I must disagree.

[ecopassionate]

08:24 AM on 09/28/2010

The population has to stop growring...I don't care what you burn...the planet has reached an uncomfortably crowded point. Nothing we do doesn't have an impact at this point. Population has to become a international discussion...but then we tried that with carbon.

[jwoww]

03:49 PM on 09/28/2010

how true we must sterilize progressive and liberal democrats now

[IMOPINIONH8D]

10:24 PM on 09/28/2010

We arent the ones raising 8 or 10 kids.

[gbrooks]

10:19 AM on 09/29/2010

You go first.

[Josh Schlossberg]

10:57 PM on 09/27/2010

Burning forests for electricity, aka forest biomass incineration, emits more global warming gases than coal over the very timeframe climate scientists tell us we must drastically cut back our carbon emissions.

If you support climate legislation that would mandate CO2 emissions cuts, then you oppose forest biomass incineration.

Learn more at: www.stopspewingcarbon.com

[AndyB62]

07:06 PM on 09/29/2010

The carbon in wood came from the atmosphere. The carbon in coal has been sequestered from the atmosphere for millions of years. Therefore burning coal has a net increase of carbon into the atmosphere and the buning of wood has a net neutral effect on atmospheric carbon accumulation. Are you in "clean coal" PR?

[Josh Schlossberg]

01:12 PM on 09/30/2010

Neither coal nor biomass are part of the way forward for our clean energy future.

We've got to move beyond combustion for our energy needs. Clean energy does not come out of a smokestack. We've burned our way into this climate change mess, we're not going to burn our way out.

The answer is efficiency, conservation, zero-waste & zero-emission renewable energy like solar and wind, and--most importantly--transitioning our lifestyles to a way of life our planet can sustain.

[Genders]

10:48 PM on 09/27/2010

Dead wrong, leaving wood to rot, creates massive methane, 20times as bad as CO2. Wast4e Bio mass Bio Oil is the only hope we have. It uses the existing infrastructure, is carbon neutral or negative, and is far cleaner than fossils. You add solar, wind, and we have th only sustainable energy system there is.

[AndyB62]

07:08 PM on 09/29/2010

True. To "sequester" carbon in wood one must clearcut a forest and sink the logs to the bottom of a lake or ocean so it doesn't decompose. Then regenerate the forest and repeat the process. So far I haven't found anyone willing to do this.

[Genders]

11:47 PM on 09/29/2010

Waste bio mass bio fuels does just that: but even better, we can grow our products, use them, recycles them, then dump" them. Instead of actually throwing it the dumps like we do now, we convert it into bio oil, energy, charcoal and recovered heavy metals.

[Josh Schlossberg]

01:18 PM on 09/30/2010

The best climate buffer we have is our living forests. Logging them to convert into fuel will only exacerbate runaway climate change.

Let's support efficiency, conservation and zero waste, zero emission renewable energy like solar and wind.

[Genders]

09:05 PM on 10/02/2010

agreed on efficiency, but i am talking about waste bio mass, not virgin forests.

[jsarets]

09:42 PM on 09/27/2010

Burning wood from dead trees isn't that bad.  They would decompose anyway, so might as well harness the energy.  Mature forests usually regenerate enough soil organic matter from fallen leaves, flowers, and fruits and are not ecologically dependent on fallen trees for sustainability.

That said, wood is not easy to burn cleanly.  Wood contains lignins, tars, and resins that are prone to incomplete combustion, releasing soot and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) into the atmosphere.  

Industrial charcoal kilns are equipped to confine the solids and capture gases, burning them completely in compressed air to produce process heat and surplus electricity.

Natural lump or extruded charcoal (with no fillers or binders) is more suitable for clean burning in relatively simple home heating or cooking stoves.  But in the developing world, where gas and electricity are scarce, the demand for charcoal has been causing massive deforestation.

So even if charcoal from dead wood is an ecologically sensible fuel in the limited quantities in which it can be produced, the demand for charcoal that would result from its use as a predominant heating and cooking fuel could not be sustainable from timber resources.

However, modern technologies such as hydrous pyrolysis can produce high yields of gas and charcoal from any cellulosic biomass, including paper, textiles, and agricultural wastes.  

In this way, the economy gets at least one use of each unit of biomass as higher-value foods or materials before being "downcycled" into lower-value fuels or fertilizers.  It also permits the use of fast-growing grasses (e.g. hemp) rather than long-lived trees.

[AndyB62]

07:11 PM on 09/29/2010

The decomposition of dead trees results in the release of carbon through respiration by the decomposers. This is why forests have a net carbon balance of zero.

[econ1]

06:15 PM on 09/27/2010

Burning wood is far less damaging to the planet than having three children.

[AJH]

04:18 PM on 09/27/2010

Burning wood on any large scale would be a bad industrial policy. That is going out and harvesting resources with the intention of burning them.

On the other hand taking biomass that has been harvested for other uses or as a result of pestilence drought etc... and entered the waste stream through a biomass facility shouldn't be considered so.

How you end up sequestering the CO2 eventually and controlling the criteria pollutants (plenty of existing technology that will improve) can be long term issues.

There is an anoumt of biomass that will die and enter the waste stream recognizing the world is no longer a massive swamp with anaerobic conditions that prevent decomposition enabling long term sequestration that eventually became coal and gas etc...Harnessing that waste makes sense. Harvesting resources to create waste does not.

[Josh Schlossberg]

01:19 PM on 09/30/2010

A forest requires dead wood to nourish its soils. Even if you pretend that biomass incinerators run on "waste wood," once these facilities are built, they will burn anything they can get their hands on, including whole trees (which they are already doing).

www.stopspewingcarbon.com

[MCJanes]

02:15 PM on 09/27/2010

Oh for God's sake. I suppose they'll be telling us not to fart soon.

[OkieMon]

05:17 PM on 09/27/2010

have you tried beano ??

[rjmtx]

06:14 PM on 09/27/2010

Try to stop me...

[thundermummy]

02:39 PM on 09/28/2010

Let me get my cork.

[Master-T]

02:06 PM on 09/27/2010

I'm a progressive. This sort of stuff just causes problems with advancing our agenda in a realitic fashion. In short, it makes us look like idiots. Seriously. We have to stay focused on what's causing damage on a large scale especially given the rise of China, India, and South America. The world cannot sustain all those people living according to the gluttonous standards Americans have set. Burning wood is NOT the problem!!

Seriously - this sort of stuff has to stop. You want to be a scientist, fine. Do your studies, write your thesis, and let it go. Trying to gain traction with this just sets us back.

[Josh Schlossberg]

01:21 PM on 09/30/2010

Burning wood is certainly a part of the problem, it pumps out more CO2 than coal--coal!--over the very timeframe that climate scientists insist we must drastically cut back our carbon emissions.

If you support legislation mandating CO2 emission cuts, then you oppose biomass incineration for electricity.

The science is out there: www.stopspewingcarbon.com