Today NRDC, Friends of the Earth, The Wilderness Society and a host of other groups listed below are participating in a social media push to draw attention to the risks of biomass energy. We hope this will help our readers get educated about the topic, generate a lot of healthy back and forth, and hopefully inspire people to take action.
Talking about “biomass” doesn’t always hit close to home. Both the science and policy in this debate may seem esoteric and complicated. But to kick off the day, I want to take a step back and make the simple point that if you care about forests, if you care about clean air and water, if you care about saving wildlife or the climate, I hope you’ll tune into this discussion and learn about biomass and the policies that are shaping the bioenergy industry. It matters.
We all know that burning coal for electricity has, literally, deadly consequences. Coal plants fill the air we breathe with soot and smog linked to premature deaths and health problems. Of all fossil fuels, coal also causes the most carbon pollution pound for pound and releases massive amounts of toxic substances such as mercury.
That’s why there has been such a major push to find alternative fuels to burn for power. One of the fuels that energy companies are increasingly looking to is biomass. Biomass is any plant life that was recently alive (as opposed to fossil fuels, which come from plant matter that hasn’t been alive for a very long time). Biomass can be burned or gasified or fermented and turned into heat or electricity or liquid fuels.
Plants use sunlight, water and nutrients in the soil and air to turn carbon from the atmosphere into biomass. That means they’re essentially a special form of solar energy—and like the sun, plants can keep coming back because they can re-grow or be re-planted. This idea that the biomass we harvest and burn for energy will grow back has led many to assume that biomass is automatically a renewable fuel and that its use is environmentally sustainable.
Unfortunately, the reality is that one of the main places energy companies are looking for biomass is in our forests. Our forests are so critical to the air we breathe, the water we drink and to mitigating climate change that burning up wood for power just can’t be considered renewable or sustainable. If we’re going to protect our climate, fresh water supplies and biodiversity for our children and their children, we need intact natural forests more than ever and we should be adding to them not cutting them down.
To be clear, wood is not the only source of biomass used by the bioenergy industry and there are sustainable ways to cultivate and harvest biomass. For example, restoring degraded pasture land to polyculture grasslands and using some of the biomass from these fields could produce soil, water, wildlife and climate benefits. Another example would be using forest residues that would otherwise be burned in the forest releasing the stored carbon anyway.
Unfortunately, these types of sustainable sources of biomass are currently very limited and not the cheapest options in the market. Nor are they prioritized by our bioenergy policies. In fact, a recent proposal by the EPA to give even the most polluting forms of biomass a three year, free pass from carbon pollution rules threatens to push the market further in the wrong direction.
That’s why NRDC and our partners in today’s efforts are drawing attention to the risks of runaway biomass burning. NRDC believes that we can and will eventually need to figure out how to develop truly sustainable bioenergy. But first we need to recognize that today’s policies are taking us in the wrong direction. Burning more of the wrong kinds of biomass means more pollution, more destruction of our forests and a poorer world to leave for our children.
Please check out our campaign website “Our forests aren’t fuel,” my colleague Sasha’s blog on the basics of biomass and today’s action alert, and what our partners are doing. And, most importantly, join the debate.
Here are all the groups that are drawing attention to biomass, our forests and clean air today:
Websites:
You can also follow most of them them on twitter or find them on Facebook here:
Twitter:
Facebooks:
Follow Nathanael Greene on Twitter: www.twitter.com/@nwgreene
Mike Malloy: Climate Change You Can Believe In
Nathanael Greene: Scientists to Congress & Obama: count the carbon in biomass
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-05-04/un-renewables-bible-says-in-report-that-clean-energy-can-outstrip-demand.html
There is no sulfur and little nitrogen in biomass. During combustion AutoPellet boilers produce no sulfur oxides, less nitrogen oxides and less carbon monoxide than oil or gas boilers. They also produce very little particulate matter but a bit more than oil or gas boilers (oil boiler .007 lb/million BTUs, AutoPellet .019 lb/million BTUs). This performance has the AutoPellet systems achieving the very demanding standards that the EPA is proposing for biomass boiler systems.
Could our forest sustain more home heating with wood and remain healthy?
The Wood to Energy Task Force considered a 10% conversion of residential heating in Maine to pellet heating over the decade. In looking at longer term forest products implications, the Task Force drew on the “Maine Forest Service Assessment of Sustainable Biomass Availability: Absolute Supply is not the Issue” in concluding “…there can be enough wood in Maine in 20 to 30 years to eventually make a significant proportion of Maine’s homes and businesses independent of imported oil without a demand induced scarcity of forest-based raw material and thus without a demand
induced price rise even if the pulpwood demand remains constant.”
http://greenenergymaine.com/blog/wood-heat-posts/looking-environmental-questions-about-heating-wood-pellets
MONSANTO!
Make no mistake who is firmly entrenched in the biomass push. Just ask USDA head Tom Vilsack, he's a big proponent of Monsanto.
Ceres and Monsanto work hand in hand.
This is big trouble, not a solution.
http://goo.gl/iDV72
No one knows the first use of ethanol (or alcohol) by humans but the ...
www.mascoma.com/pages/sub_cellethanol.ph
Mascoma Corporation
Mascoma Corporation Named April “Innovation Rocks!” Award Winner. LEBANON – Mascoma Corporation, a leader in advanced low-carbon fuel biotechnology, ...
www.nheconomy.com/innovation.../Mascoma-Corporation.aspx
Mascoma's Plan for Ethanol Plant in Michigan Likely Delayed, CEO ...
May 24, 2010 ... Lebanon, NH-based Mascoma has made strides with its process for producing ethanol from non-food plants such as wood chips and grass.
www.xconomy.com/.../mascomas-plan-for-ethanol-plant-in-michigan-likely-delayed-ceo-says
http://www.sunbeltbiofuelsllc.com/docs/FreedomFactSheet.pdf
http://otc.msstate.edu/aboutus/docs/Winter2010.pdf
http://www.biofuelsdigest.com/blog2/2009/12/07/mississippi-state-university-licenses-giant-miscanthus-cultivar-with-18-20-tons-per-acre-tields/
http://www.ethanolproducer.com/articles/7360/2011-miscanthus-acres-to-mushroom
Boy you two, alvdh1 and BannedNBoston, don't happen to have a dog in this fight do you?
Nothing Monsanto does is good.
HEMP 6X MORE BTUS THAN CORN
HEMP 8X MORE bio-diesel than canola.
Hemp seeds best animal and people food ever.
Use the fiber for ethanol.
In 2006, U.S. producers planted nearly 80 million acres of corn, 10 million acres shy of the projected demand for 2010.
Hemphasis.net ~ Hemp Fuel & Energy
1) Biomass has a heating value of 5000-8000 BTU/lb, with virtually no ash or sulfur ... Hemp can produce 10 tons of biomass per acre every four months. ...
www.hemphasis.net/Fuel-Energy/fuel.htm
Pyrolysis gasification to electricity is price competitive with coal, natural gas and nuclear. Updraft gasifier technology appears to be the mosts efficient and cost efective. The technology is scalable and can be used as a combined heat power source with the addition of heat exchangers on the genset or gas turbine. Gensets and gas turbines can utilizes natural gas as a backup fuel in the event of organic matter supply problems. Gensets require more control over the moisture content of organic fuel supplies than gas turbines do as a rule.
There is a thriving fuel pelletization industry emerging in America around switch grass, wood and Miscanthus with drying facilites to reduce the organic matter moisture content. Utilizing our forests as a source of fuel for creating wood burning power plants or utilization of wood as an admixture for burning coal is insane when pyrolysis gasification is available.
Take pine wood chips put them in a kiln and eat them WITH A VACUUM
Take the wood-oil and mix with diesel.
Take the carbon chips and mix with seawater pump them under ground. like old oil wells.
I'm not sure whether Nathaniel's original intent was to conflate biomass power with biofuels; they are different, and the differences are significant.
The numbers you cite in points 1 and 2 of your comment relate to the process of converting biological material into liquid fuel (biofuel) which is then burned to generate energy of some sort (typically in an internal combustion engine).
This is completely separate and distinct from the process of burning biological material to directly (more or less) generate electricity.
So in light of my earlier comment to Nathaniel's article, I have to disagree w/the 3rd point in your comment; as far as I am aware, no one is cutting down forests to fuel biomass energy plants. Primarily, they burn fuel sources that otherwise would decay and release methane and carbon.
1.) For the main source in the US (corn), we barely get enough energy out of it to cover what we put into it.
2.) Using corn and other food crops drives the price of food up.
3.) Just what you mentioned... if we cut down old-growth forests for it (which are carbon sinks), we're actually increasing our carbon footprint, not decreasing it.
Until these 3 things are addressed, or unless we go in another direction (solar, wind, geothermal / batteries), we might as well just stay on fossil fuels. As it is, the industry has effectively become the next "Big Oil" with all the Big Ag lobbyists pushing their agenda.