The operative word is "they" instead of "we" because 81 percent of Americans think that other energy producing options should be explored first before biomass energy production is explored, according to a recent survey. But our public servants apparently think they know better than the public they are serving. Industry lobbyists have been hard at work selling the idea that biomass energy is clean, green, and renewable. It was chilling to listen to the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources hearings on the Federal Clean Energy Standard (May 17, 2012), in which biomass energy was advocated while the vast potential of increasing energy efficiency to reduce our demand was barely mentioned.
Wood-burning electrical power plants, or "biomass plants," as explained below, are not clean, green, or renewable. If the U.S. national park system is "America's Best Idea," as Ken Burns says, then biomass plants are America's worst idea. Biomass plants devour many things of great value -- trees, wildlife habitat, soil fertility, water, petroleum, and money, and produce a multitude of damaging byproducts -- greenhouse gases, other air pollutants, water pollution, ash, adverse health impacts, and economic damage. It would be a challenge to design a more damaging activity if one tried. However, recognition of the devastating effects has been slow to take hold, because the term "biomass plant" sounds "green" and due to our obsessive-compulsive desire for more energy that does not involve fossil fuels, at any cost.
Biomass plants can burn trees, contaminated wood (such as "construction and demolition wood" that can include painted or pressure-treated wood), tires, or just about anything that can burn. Many biomass plants burn whole trees, which biomass plant developers often refer to euphemistically as "forest debris" or "waste wood." A 2011 report estimates that there are approximately 250 biomass plants operating in the U.S., with approximately 230 more proposed. The proposed plants are typically larger and range from 25 to more than 100 megawatts in capacity.
Of all the available combustion-based electricity generation technologies, biomass plants are the least efficient, converting to electricity only 20 to 25 percent of the energy in the wood. Some of the remaining energy is used to vaporize the water in the wood, and the rest is often discharged to the atmosphere using humongous quantities of river water for cooling. A typical 50 megawatt plant requires 800,000 gallons per day of fresh water, vaporizing 85 percent and returning 15 percent to the river heated and contaminated.
Because of their supreme inefficiency, gargantuan quantities of fuel are required. If all the trees in the U.S. were burned for biomass energy, it would meet our national energy needs for only one year. A typical 50 megawatt biomass plant burns 1.2 tons of wood each minute. The impacts on forests, and the wildlife that depend on them, are devastating. In addition, when trees are mined from the forest, soil nutrients are removed rather than recycled. Nutrient depletion thus renders the process of biomass production for energy unsustainable.
Despite industry-funded fuel supply studies to the contrary, the supply of nearby trees is quickly exhausted. A common strategy is for biomass plants to then switch to burning contaminated wood for fuel. This is how more money can be made, because rather than having to purchase a resource (green wood chips), now biomass plant owners are paid to take a waste (contaminated wood). Once the expensive incinerators are built, regulatory agencies find it hard to say no to requests for fuel switching.
Also due to their inefficiency, for each unit of electricity generated, biomass plants emit more carbon dioxide than any other energy source, for example, about 1.5 times that of coal for each unit of electricity generated. This reality is often countered by arguments based on a conceptual error made early on that took on a life of its own and has been difficult to eradicate, much like how the belief that the sun revolved around the earth was tenaciously held and only released with great difficulty. This is the notion that burning wood is "carbon neutral," that the carbon emitted during combustion is reabsorbed by growing trees. What was not considered is the mismatch in rates -- while it takes a minute to burn a tree in a biomass plant, it takes decades to grow a tree back. Oops!
The science is only beginning to convince the energy establishment to correct this major gaffe. In the meantime, while it is (rightly) regarded as bad for the climate to burn tropical rainforests, somehow it is still regarded as not only acceptable but even worthy of economic incentives to burn temperate forests in an incinerator, after additionally burning fossil fuels to cut the trees, chip them into small pieces, and transport them to the incinerator. As if that weren't enough of a climate impact, often petroleum is sprayed on the green wood chips to get them to ignite.
Biomass plants thus not only emit more carbon dioxide than any other energy technology, they destroy the very trees that sequester carbon dioxide. Recent research shows that the world's forests are much more important in the carbon cycle than previously thought, soaking up one-third of all fossil fuel emissions. At the same time, forest logging releases more than one quarter of all carbon dioxide emissions stemming from human activity. When developed countries burn their own forests for electricity, it shatters their credibility when they then ask developing countries to preserve their forests in order to mop up carbon dioxide emissions that are mainly caused by energy use in the developed countries.
As yet another consequence of their bottom-of-the-barrel efficiency, biomass incinerators (even after air pollution control equipment) release copious amounts of a wide array of air pollutants besides carbon dioxide, including particulates (soot), carbon monoxide, sulfur oxides, nitrogen oxides, heavy metals, volatile organic compounds, radionuclides, and dioxins. Biomass plant developers admit in their air permit applications that their projects will routinely emit air pollutants. Something they don't admit is that fuel pile fires are a common occurrence when fuel is stored uncovered outdoors, as is invariably the case due to the mammoth fuel quantities required. Fires often burn for weeks, with no emissions controls.
Because routine biomass plant air emissions increase human morbidity and mortality by causing or exacerbating asthma, heart disease, and cancer, numerous medical societies have spoken out forcefully against biomass plants. For example, the Massachusetts Medical Society, with over 23,000 physicians and medical students, adopted a resolution that states that biomass power plants "pose an unacceptable risk to the public's health by increasing air pollution."
Another dangerous byproduct that comes out the back end of a biomass plant is ash. A typical 50 megawatt biomass plant produces 1.5 tons of ash per hour. Ash from burning wood (even trees directly from the forest) contains dioxins and heavy metals such as arsenic. Another concern is radionuclides such as cesium-137 that are released from nuclear testing and accidents and are sequestered by trees and thus end up in the ash. Radionuclides and metals are released in air emissions or ash - those are the only two possibilities. Regulators turn a blind eye to radionuclides, however, and do not require testing for radionuclides. They likewise usually do not require testing for dioxin, a "known human carcinogen." Up to 80 percent of wood ash generated in northeastern U.S. is landspread on agricultural soils.
Partly owing to their inefficiency, biomass plants also require massive infusions of cash in order to be financially viable (unless they are allowed to burn contaminated wood). They receive various forms of tax-payer and rate-payer subsidies, in the form of Renewable Energy Credits, investment and production tax credits, and loan guarantees, which cost the public billions of dollars on top of the cost paid for the electricity itself. This is corporate pork on steroids, and furthermore, these subsidies divert funds that could instead be used to promote clean, renewable energy.
Proponents argue that biomass plants create jobs. However, ravaging forests destroys tourism jobs, and the biomass plant jobs created are few and costly. The investment required to create each permanent full-time job typically exceeds $3 million. Biomass plants also hurt the economy by driving down nearby property values (one reason they are invariably sited in poor communities with few resources to fight back) and driving up the price of wood needed for productive purposes.
Trees are worth far more than their energy content, cleaning the air and water, moderating the water cycle, providing earth's heat shield, housing and feeding animals, nourishing our souls, and providing other services we are only beginning to understand. It is evidence of our sense of disconnectedness from the natural world that we would allow trees to be valued merely for their energy content.
Biomass plant developers argue that biomass plants should be "part of the energy mix." Biomass plants don't belong in our modern energy portfolio any more than the muscle power of slaves or animals. They are no more appropriate than slide rules in modern computing, blood-letting in modern medicine, celestial spheres in modern astronomy, spontaneous generation in modern biology, or horses and buggies in modern transportation. We need to move from dirty combustion technologies to cleaner options such as solar, geothermal, wind, conservation, efficiency, hydropower, and fuel cells. Certainly any of these technologies must be implemented with care and intelligence. But it is past time for the combustion era to come to a close, and with increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, we need our trees now more than ever before.
Robert Redford: Stop Public Handouts to Oil, Gas and Coal Companies, Now
I believe it is unethical to burn trees for electricity. Climate change is not just a hypothetical future scenario. People are being impacted now (and those impacted are predominantly people who played no part in creating the problem). A recent report by the Kofi Annan Foundation estimates that climate change today accounts for over 300,000 deaths throughout the world each year, the equivalent of an Indian Ocean Tsunami every single year. In addition, climate change today seriously impacts on the lives of 325 million people. The report predicts that by 2030, the annual death toll from climate change will reach 500,000 people a year, and climate change will seriously impact on the lives of 660 million people, making it the biggest emerging humanitarian challenge in the world, impacting on the lives of 10% of the world’s population.
Trees are solutions. Biomass plants are problems.
This article and Greenpeace are making some big mistakes in their analysis of sustainable wood to energy and fuels systems. I
Even burning wood is carbon neutral not positive like they argue.
I agree that we must separate the old dirty burning of prime wood, clear cutting, from the good stuff.
We must have strong regulation of harvesting, that's a given, anything else is wasteland.
I totally agree with Greenpeace that we should use the land for growing the prime wood for building, but how do you Greenpeace folks miss that all wood we harvest and use, eventually gets burned or dumped. Only a small amount of it gets properly converted to fuels and energy in local co generation system in our country, several European countries Sweden are really recycling everything instead of dumping or field debris removal burning.
Armory Lovin's is correct, that waste bio char and carbon burial as soil enhancement is the last chance the world has to lower CO2 levels.
We need to stop dumping anything(except nuke waste), and recycle everything, leave it better then when you arrived. In our trash is 15% or more or our total energy that we need to backup solar and wind. In that waste are the rare earths and valuable metals we need to reduce the amount of mining we do.
http://www.biodieselfuelonline.com/Biodiesel_Made_From_Wood_Chips.html
Even in Combined Heat and power plants (CHp), where biomass generated heat displaces that
derived from fossil fuel, the carbon emissions can be as much as 200% greater than when electricity
and heat are produced from natural gas. Note that these figures come from measured smokestacks emissions and that they can differ greatly with more efficient technologies. A report produced by the IpCC shows that new technological pathways could improve significantly the overall carbon footprint of bioenergy projects.
http://www.greenpeace.org/canada/Global/canada/report/2011/10/ForestBiomess_Eng.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparisons_of_life-cycle_greenhouse-gas_emissions
Biomass (various): 14 - 35 g CO2/kWhe
Natural Gas: 443 g CO2/kWhe
Coal: 960 CO2/kWhe
In fact, the benefit appears to be on the scale of several orders of magnitude, and when paired with sustainable forest practices and silviculture, the benefit is also entirely sustainable, renewable, reliable, cost-effective, and ecologically sound.
Yep......I'm don't know if you know about selective farming of several quick growers. Some trees take forever to reach a good size. Bamboo grows like a grass....guess why? I have had it before, we are talking big stalks doing feet a day. Oregon is going to do Popular (sp?) trees in a farm setting, don't think the copmpany will lose money. Then all the crop crops, grow in a season. Seed heads use as a fermentation product- sorghum or malacantheria (sp?? again). But the game changer is bionitrogen, replaces Haber Process and still spit-out a good amount of electricity and bio-fuels, just leaving as hydrogen and methane is fine too- can be piped. Hog and cow stockyards, leave the poop, poison the Chesapeake......don't leave the poop. Rio anybody? clean the garbage dump, and make a few gigawatts.
And thats not even the stuff that makes sense.
FARMED biomass is a different story altogether. If new furnace and boiler designs are employed to minimize pollution and maximize efficiency AND it doesn't take good ground away from food production then I'm all for it. Even with these restrictions a very good case can be made for biomass.
Eventually, biomass in some form or another will be needed to provide liquid transportation fuels. There is no other way to produce the MASSIVE amounts of liquid fuel that we use.
Burning wood in industrial boilers emits on average 4 times more toxic, lung irritating carbon monoxide (CO) than coal and 92 times more than oil 190. Biomass combustion emits 10 times more fine particles than natural gas, up to 4 times more than oil and twice as much as coal191. Even though sulfur emissions from biomass are lower than coal, they are still 100 times higher than natural gas191. Large biomass boilers are known to release heavy metals including lead, mercury, manganese and cadmium and other highly toxic molecules like dioxin and furane119.
http://www.greenpeace.org/canada/Global/canada/report/2011/10/ForestBiomess_Eng.pdf
http://www.greenpeace.org/canada/Global/canada/report/2011/10/ForestBiomess_Eng.pdf
- Cutting down whole trees for energy production should be discouraged, but rather waste wood should be used (consistent with sustainable forest management practices).
- Wood allocations and environmental impact assessments need to properly managed and regulated.
- Public hearings should always be a part of responsible environmental policy and the development of scientifically informed and ecologically sustainable forest management plans.
- Ecosystem-specific standards need to be incorporated in each environmental impact statement.
- Forest biomass is effective when harvested on a limited and sustainable basis, and needs to be coupled with other low-carbon technologies to achieve ambitious carbon reduction goals and a resource mix that is fully sustainable and renewable (specifically mentioning wind, solar, and geothermal energy).
These are prudent and responsible guidelines, and I thank you for including them.
waste bio mass should be converted into fuel not burned directly.
On that we agree, right?
• Burning natural forest biomass – whether for electricity, heat or biofuels – is not
carbon-neutral as governments and companies claim. Burning trees contributes to
climate change for decades, as shown by the most up-to-date science, until replacement
trees fully grow back.
• Compared to current coal-fired electricity plants in North America, current woody
biomass power plants can emit at the smokestack up to 150% more climate disrupting
CO2, 400%more lung irritating carbon monoxide, and 200% more asthma causing
particulate matter to produce the same amount of energy. The CO2 emitted will harm
climate for decades before being captured by regrowing trees.
• The latest science shows that burning biofuels derived from standing trees in southern
Ontario’s forests will emit more CO2 emissions than using gasoline for well over a century.
• Burning boreal biomass contributes to climate change through a long carbon payback
time due to the slow regrowth of forests and the fragility of existing carbon stocks.
http://www.greenpeace.org/canada/Global/canada/report/2011/10/ForestBiomess_Eng.pdf
The two of us are having an extensive discussion of this issue beginning here:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/social/Silken17/burning-trees-to-make-ele_b_1601275_161918739.html
For those who may be interested, I recommend you start reading that long and detailed discussion starting with the above link.
Easy ...
The natural cycle of the northern forest is a fire dependent (disturbance based) ecosystem that regularly burns with many small and frequent fires. In a naturally occurring forest fire, every tree is burned down, and most of the carbon is released into the environment. Ash is deposited in the soil.
We currently suppress natural fires (for a variety of reasons), and have intervened in this process. As a consequence, many of our northern forests resemble farms rather than natural ecosystems, and have lost much of their original diversity and disturbance based natural character.
Good forest management and silviculture can restore this natural ecosystem and adaptive species diversity, and at the same time provide some usable wood products and a bit of sustainable and cost effective energy that displaces more polluting fossil fuels, and reduces long term environmentally damaging impacts from rising carbon emissions.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.biombioe.2011.08.005
Biomass plants have an important role to play here (one where waste wood doesn't go to waste, but instead is utilized to displace other more highly polluting energy sources). If we wish to reintroduce fire to the forest, we could definitely do so. Or we could also make the northern forest one big farm (and give up on stand and species diversity all together … and say good-by to many of our threatened native species). But we certainly can't do nothing (and expect everything to remain the same).
No, it's waste, it get's burned in open piles, just to get rid of it.
We have massive amounts of wastes we pay to have dumped. construction materials, wood. paper.
Sure, likes get rid of the dirty burning waste system, but the clean pyrolsis and FT systems are great, very efficient, and just what we need to back up solar and wind.
Unlike fossils fuels including natural gas, waste bio mass does not contain the large amounts of heavy ,metals. The ash is fertilizer, not poison.
There may be a lot of waste but there is not nearly enough of it to backup solar and wind....not even close....not even 10%.
Biomass ash contains many toxic alkali and alkaline earth oxides. It also contains heavy metals that have been sequestered by the plants. It cannot be used as fertilizer without processing. Burning biomass releases particulates nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide and many organic carcinogens into the atmosphere. It is just as dirty as coal if not more so!
Pyrolysis recovers only a small fraction of the total energy available in biomass. products of pyrolysis are toxic.
http://buildaroo.com/news/article/biofuel-from-human-waste-project-england/
you know nothing. Plants do not sequester heavy metals, they filter them out. pyrolsis has an energy gain of 5-7 times, better than fossils is if 1000 times less toxic.
Our worlds organism evolved with burning bio mass, we are evolved to handle that. Not so the heavy metals in fossils and nukes.
'It was chilling to listen to the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources hearings on the Federal Clean Energy Standard (May 17, 2012), in which biomass energy was advocated while the vast potential of increasing energy efficiency to reduce our demand was barely mentioned.'
That's because efficiency is a loser at the strategic level. It is the equivalent of seawalls to protect a shoreline. At best, it's a delaying tactic.
Why?
Because only perhaps 1 billion of a planet of seven billion lives at anything approaching Western levels of energy consumption, but everyone wants to. That in itself means that demand will approach 10x at some point.
Because that 1 billion is constantly inventing new and essential ways to use ever more energy. See: smartphone.
Efficiency must be part of the answer, but it's a mistake to think it can address the demand changes that we face.
'Also due to their inefficiency, for each unit of electricity generated, biomass plants emit more carbon dioxide than any other energy source, for example, about 1.5 times that of coal for each unit of electricity generated.'
That should end such biomass plants by itself. More CO2 than coal? No thanks.
>>Because that 1 billion is constantly inventing new and essential ways to use ever more energy. See: smartphone.
That seems to be an argument for efficiency, not against.
"Efficiency must be part of the answer, but it's a mistake to think it can address the demand changes that we face."
No one denies the importance of efficiency and conservation measures but it is foolish to think that they alone are sufficient to meet growing demand as many seem to believe.
OF COURSE we need efficiency.
OF COURSE it is not the whole solution.
My point is that the construction of an opposition between 'biomass' and 'efficiency' is not a good argument. The author would do better to focus on why biomass is not good rather than make this comparison.
http://www1.eere.energy.gov/femp/pdfs/bamf_woodwaste.pdf
"Currently the most cost-effective wood sources are residues from manufacturing and wood waste otherwise destined for landfills. Manufacturers generate an enormous amount of waste residue in the process of making products such as lumber, furniture, pallets, and paper. In general, less than 50 percent of the tree ends up in a final product, and the balance represents a vast underutilized resource."
I entirely agree with author, fresh whole trees should not be cut down and destined for exclusive use in biomass plants. To my knowledge, this is not happening. The author seems to be implying that it is, but has not demonstrated this in any of her links or supporting documentation. And if this is taking place, why isn't the solution a simple tweak to prevent the practice, rather than a wholesale condemning of the industry (which produces reliable, sustainable, scalable, cost-effective, carbon neutral energy in an increasing and important share of our energy mix).
There just is not enough of the material you describe to fuel these monsters. It is a false choice to imply there are only two options - burn it or landfill it. The uncontaminated materials you describe should be appropriately composted and ultimately returned to soil, as happens in nature.
http://cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/pages/155
"In boreal forests ... Fires are frequent and their ecological influence at all levels—species, stand and landscape—drives boreal forest vegetation dynamics. This in turn affects the movement of wildlife populations, whose need for food and cover means they must relocate as the forest patterns change."
http://www.sierraforestlegacy.org/Resources/Conservation/FireForestEcology/FireScienceResearch/FuelsManagement/FM-Nitschke05.pdf
The wood you see in those photos is waste wood … the product of ecologically sustainable and scientifically informed best forest management practices in the Northeast (Vermont). The choice here is absolute (and not false). The waste wood either goes to a landfill, or it is used for some other purpose. Since transporting waste wood is often very expensive, the most cost effective and viable use of this wood can often be in a local biomass plant (where all the waste wood is utilized). The best environmental argument in this instance is to utilize the whole tree (when harvested for another purpose), and not send half of it to a landfill. Composting is fine in theory, but there no shortage of more suitable materials for this purpose, and it is unlikely to be cost effective.
Trees are Earth's oxygen and fresh water factories. Plant biodiversity is at the bottom of the ecological pyramid, and every lifeform within that ecosystem, is dependent on the plant biodiversity for habitat/homes, shelter, cover, food and nurseries.
Ecosystems are the natural sequestration of those climate warming, heat trapping gases. Each tree stores many pounds of heat trapping gases in its living, life giving body that will be re-released into the atmosphere when the tree is chopped down.
All ecosystems have feedbacks and loops to the atmosphere and to the climate, and all of them create the very life zone of the Earth, her biosphere/ecosphere.