A Renewable Energy Technology That Gets No Respect - And Why It Shouldn't.

[wtmusic]

"No Silicon Valley venture capitalist has invested in it. Government subsidies for it are skimpy, at best. It lacks clout in Washington. And it’s been around forever. Yet it’s by far the most popular form of renewable energy used at home, dwarfing the impact of rooftop solar panels and appealing not just to well-to-do greens but to poor people, African-Americans and, we’d bet, climate change deniers, too.

Yep, I’m talking about–as Popular Mechanics put it recently-the 'high-tech, cutting-edge, carbon-neutral alternative fuel of the future: wood.'

About 80% of residential renewable energy is created by wood heat appliances (not including fireplaces), while just 15% comes from solar and 5% from geothermal, according to Energy Information Administration statistics provided by the Alliance for Green Heat, a small nonprofit created two years ago to promote environmentally-friendly wood heat. Some 15 million American homes use wood as a primary or secondary heat source."

http://theenergycollective.com/marcgunther/58504/renewable-energy-technology-gets-no-respect?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=The+Energy+Collective+%28all+posts%29

Two main reasons why biomass- (particularly wood-)burning is an awful choice from an environmental standpoint:

1) Combustion by-products. Though they can be mitigated with filters, high-temperature combustion, and even catalytic converters - the vast majority of fireplaces owners don't bother.

"Science is swiftly turning upside down the common notion that a fire built with wood is kinder to humans' well-being than gas and other modern fuels.

<>

Researchers can rattle off long lists of dangers in wood smoke.

They often focus on the tiny particles — a mere fraction of the width of a human hair — that can lodge in tissue and blood vessels and disrupt lung and heart functions. Some are so small that they can pass right through the walls of blood vessels. Wood smoke also contains well-known cancer-causing chemicals such as benzene and formaldehyde.

Scientists have published dozens of studies on the human health effects of wood smoke. In 2007, a 40-page review of those studies in the journal Inhalation Toxicology concluded, "It is now well established ... that wood-burning stoves and fireplaces as well as wildland and agricultural fires emit significant quantities of known health-damaging pollutants, including several carcinogenic compounds."

http://www.lungusa.org/associations/states/california/for-the-media/alacinthenews/chico-enterprise-record-a.html

2) Despite claims to the contrary, woodburning is not a "renewable" energy source. Old growth is burned; new growth takes its place and burns before it becomes old growth. Wood is converted to CO2 faster than it can be replaced, at a point in history when we can least afford it. Imagine ignoring birth control as a means of population control (because "everyone will die eventually anyway"), and you get the point.

[yellowcanine]

1. Not to mention what it does to houses. Wood stoves and fireplaces cause 36% of rural house fires.

http://www.usfa.dhs.gov/citizens/home_fire_prev/heating/fireplace.shtm

[kristopher]

2. Unrec as misinformation - IPCC defines biomass as renewable resource...

and does so with full awareness of the issues you raise. It explicitly differentiates between the problematic uses and bases biomass expected contribution on technologies that are both sustainable and not contributors to particulate emissions.

[buddysmellgood]

3. I love my fireplace. It's very efficient. I burn wood that would

otherwise rot or get shredded using fossil fuels.

[wtmusic]

7. It may be more efficient at cooling your house than heating it.

"Although wood-burning fireplaces have aesthetic appeal, they may actually remove more heat from a house than they produce. A typical, vertical-back fireplace with an open front is at best ten percent efficient in converting wood to energy and delivering it to a room. The rest of your wood dollars escape up the chimney. They also pull cold air into the house from small gaps around windows and doors. At the beginning and end of the burn, these convective heat losses are larger than the radiant heat provided by the fire. Also, most fireplaces are inappropriately situated on exterior walls. The large mass of masonry that makes up most fireplaces are poor thermal insulators and readily conduct room heat to the outdoors in cold weather."

http://www.energyguide.com/library/EnergyLibraryTopic.asp?bid=tva&prd=10&TID=25708&SubjectID=10168

[buddysmellgood]

8. Not mine. But that's probably true for lots of old units.

[kestrel91316]

19. I guess you and your friends have never heard of woodburning stoves

and fireplace inserts which are, IIRC, orders of magnitude more efficient than open fireplaces. My parents heated their trilevel home in Colorado Springs almost exclusively with a fireplace insert (with blower fan) and just a few cords of wood 30 years ago.

[wtmusic]

23. As the article says, woodburning stoves are about 80% efficient

So they're about 8x more efficient than an efficient fireplace. 1 order of magnitude is 10x.

They're also far less efficient than natural gas heat, and kick out quite a bit of poisonous byproducts.

Do you know my friends? I didn't think so. :eyes:

[Courtesy Flush]

4. For a moment I thought they were going to say whale oil.

Renewable, yet not popular.

[FiveGoodMen]

5. At the rate we're going, that won't be renewable for much longer.

[bananas]

6. Wow - you really twisted the first link around

"If the goal is to reduce CO2 emissions, a dollar spent on wood buys more GHG reductions than competing clean technologies"

“Basically, low and middle income people are excluded (from renewable energy subsidies) because they can’t afford solar or geothermal,” he said. If the goal is to reduce CO2 emissions, a dollar spent on wood buys more GHG reductions than competing clean technologies, he said. It’s way more effective than turning biomass in the form of corn into ethanol. The drawback of burning wood is that even efficient stoves produce some particular pollution, so they should be used in places like Los Angeles or Denver where smog remains a problem. “It’s not for everyone and it’s not for everywhere,” John said.

But as is so often the case with environmental or health problems–think about excessive packaging, or overly-processed foods–solutions lie not in some futuristic technology but in the past.

(I think he meant "should not be used in places ... where smog remains a problem")

[PufPuf23]

9. There is much mis-, slanted, and just plain wrong information in this a post.

I do not mean to insult the OP.

There is a place for biomass energy from forest, manufacturing, agriculture, and urban wood waste.

Wood burns to water, carbon dioxide, and ash. If one burns urban wood waste with lead paint, one has a toxic waste to landfill. If one burns clean wood waste, the ash can be used as a soil amendment rich in calcium and other not volatile elements. Some wood from trees grown on soils with heavy metals may also accumulate magnesium in lieu of calcium and undesirable heavy metals.

There are win-win situations with forest, agriculture, and urban biomass fuels as opposed to wildfire, controlled fire, and landfill.

Most situations are local. There are incentitive to abuse steps in the cycle for excess profit. These incentitives should be the points of regulation and encouragement of long term policy.

For example.

Many forests are degraded by past forest management/exploitation and fire supression. There are often too many rather than too few trees, and there is an unnatural species shift and higher fire danger because of human-actions in the industrial era. Biomass removal can decrease risk or fire. pathogens, and insects and better species diversity to before what was essentially repeated forest rape in many cases.

Plantation forestry on forest soils is not the answer but neither is ignoring the specific site-specific cases where thinning for biomass recovery is more optimum than biomass otherwise open air burned or present as a wildfire fuel or insect hazard.

I know much about the biomass energy industry tho I have had no involvement since 1999.

etc. I may talk in PM.

[wtmusic]

11. .

I would like you to point out what is specifically wrong in my post, and correct a few things in yours.

"Ash" is an ambiguous term which can mean a lot of things. In the case of the combustion byproducts of forested wood many are not benign - some are poisonous and others have been identified as carcinogens which are released in the form of airborne particulates. Some are present in coal ash, others are not, and virtually none are present in natural gas combustion byproducts. You can say there's a "place" for it in power generation, but that place comes at a health cost which is in my opinion unacceptable. Upwards of 20,000 people die from the effects of coal smoke inhalation every year in the US, and coal smoke (with the possible exception of leftover radioactive minerals) is cleaner by virtue of the fact it can be scrubbed at the stack. Most wood smoke is not.

I'm aware of the fire supression problem, but most of the brush which needs to be burned makes for poor fuel anyway (it takes almost as much energy to recover as it produces). We're better off, and forests are better off, by burning it where it is and leaving the minerals behind.

[PufPuf23]

15. The smoke is scrubbed at the stack by law and permitting

at commercial biomass facilities.

Emmisions (and ash) are also controlled by what goes into the plant eg lead painted demolition wood is bad.

Many biomass power plants are required by their permitting and part of their financing to burn specific fuels that would otherwise be open air burned in agriculture and forests or landfilled. Cogeneration at wood product facilities burns manufacturing debris (sawdust, bark, etc)and produces steam for kilns and electricity to run the mill and more to be sold. Sawmills without cogeneration have a new profit center by selling "hog" fuel to commercial biomass facilities. Fuel supply, emissions control, and ash disposal are addressed in environmental permitting specific to each facility.

Wood smoke from home fireplaces is not scrubbed and there are good reasons to limit or ban fireplaces and open air debris burning in suburban and urban areas. In the woods, smoke and particulates are part of the natural world's nutrient cycle.

My primary heat is wood (predominantl madrone) burned in a fireplace insert but my residence is on a National Forest inholding and way out in the sticks. Twice since 2001 air quality has been so bad from large wildfires that there were suggested evacuations of elderly and breathing impaired that lasted weeks.

I can see no good reason to debate forestry or soils with you.

[wtmusic]

16. Unfortunately wood smoke doesn't stay put.

In a day when the world had only a few million people that wasn't a big deal. It is now, even though being in the sticks it might seem like you have the place to yourself. It isn't part of the human nutrient cycle - it causes cancer and exacerbates global warming.

Still waiting for you to point out something that's incorrect, and I really can't see any reason to debate forestry with you either. :eyes:

[PufPuf23]

17. This is one of the more hyperbolic and technically wrong in applied silviculture.

"2) Despite claims to the contrary, wood burning is not a "renewable" energy source. Old growth is burned; new growth takes its place and burns before it becomes old growth. Wood is converted to CO2 faster than it can be replaced, at a point in history when we can least afford it. Imagine ignoring birth control as a means of population control (because "everyone will die eventually anyway"), and you get the point."


"Old growth" is less than 5% of the timber harvest in the USA. Even "old growth" has waste materials that were once essentially open air burned in tee pee burners or land filled but waste or profitable by-product is a function of turning round trees into square lumber whether for paper chips or for wood co-generation fuel.

Catastrophic burns have increased in the American West over the past 30 years because of land management that excluded fire and created too dense of stands of young timber, ripe for severe fire or bark beetle attack. The forest biomass productive potential if managed to mimic the "park-like" stands first glimpsed by European conquerers. The natural stands stored more biomass and, until true old age, were high in cubic foot productivity (max CO2 storage in the forest and in solid wood products because of larger diameter when removed from the forest) because of more frequent but less intense fire and more animal and Indian use of the understory.

etc. I am not going to get into any more detail.

I have academic journal articles published on wood fuels and their properties and handling and worked on the development as a wood fuel consultant to about $4 billion investment in biomass power and wood waste recovery from 1986 to 1999; from Maine to Boston to Toronto Metro to Michigan to urban and forested California to Hawaii.

I live 29 miles from the Pacific on a major River. Smokes flows down the River canyons and concentrates during major wildfires. I am surrounded by 7 million acres of Federal or Indian Reservation lands where less than 1% is Fee Simple private. Like it or not, forest fires are part of the nutrient and "immune" system (for insects and disease and genetic problems) cycle of most forest types (and wildlands in general).

I do not believe biomass fuels to be a major answer but a piece of a puzzle that addresses local and regional niches where energy production makes feasible more robust forest and wildland vegetation structures.

[wtmusic]

18. Without straying into the area of forest management

(on which I think we agree) there is very little to recommend burning biomass for energy. Despite hype to the contrary, commercial facilities are only 20% efficient and most fireplaces are worse, even to the point of cooling a house more than heating it.

In practice so-called waste materials don't make up enough to run a plant, so harvested, mature trees (labeled "whole tree chips") make up the difference. That's exactly what's being proposed to provide a major source of Vermont's energy when Vermont Yankee Nuclear Generating Station is closed next year. The Burlington Electric Dept., which runs the McNeil biomass generating facility, claims that in the 1970s,"BED conducted studies to find a fuel source that would be locally available, reliable, cost-effective, non-polluting and publicly acceptable. Wood scored high on all counts." The reality ended up being different:

“Biomass power should be in a different category than zero-waste, zero-emissions sources like solar and wind,” says Schlossberg, even though he acknowledges that each of those has environmental impacts.

Topping Schlossberg’s list of concerns is public health. McNeil is 400 feet from a residential area of Burlington”s old North end. Schlossberg quotes the Environmental Protection Agency’s National Emissions Inventory Database as revealing 75 different air pollutants coming from McNeil”s smokestack.

Those emissions include everything from dioxin, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, volatile organic compounds, formaldehyde, chlorine, heavy metals, and particulate matter (PM) 2.5. “PM-2.5″ is particulate matter 2.5 micrometers in diameter-so small it can”t be seen, and so tiny that it can lodge deep in the lungs, bloodstream, and internal organs. American Cancer Society studies demonstrate there is no safe level of exposure, says Schlossberg.

BED accurately characterizes McNeil emissions as being below regulatory thresholds, but the plant is still burning wood. Where there’s smoke there’s fire, and vice versa-and BED can’t possibly keep all the smoke from entering the air and ultimately the lungs of residents.

Schlossberg is also concerned about the wood supply demanded by McNeil and other similar biomass facilities, either built or proposed. when McNeil is running at full load, it consumes 76 tons of whole-tree chips per hour, according to BED, or the equivalent of 30 cords of firewood. it uses 400,000 tons of chips per year, the energy equivalent of 800,000 barrels of oil."

<>

"A discussion of biomass wouldn’t be complete without carbon. Biomass proponents say that it is carbon-neutral: For every tree burned at McNeil and similar plants, another tree replaces it in the forest. While that may be true, climate change is an urgent issue today, and it will take decades for that new tree to grow and absorb carbon."

http://fissuring.com/biomass-vs-biomass/

And again - once you cast your CO2 into the atmosphere you've abandoned your claim to value for a "local and regional niche". Similarly, dumping all of my trash on the freeway would save me a lot of money.

onedit: Vermont would require 12 plants like McNeil to provide the same energy as Vermont Yankee.

[kestrel91316]

20. Burning wood is a carbon neutral act. That CO2 was CO2 a millisecond

ago on a geologic timescale. The tree's biomass tied it up only momentarily, and another tree will do so almost immediately.

Not the case with the trillions of trees worth of fossil fuels we are unleashing on the world in another relative millisecond after they have been tied up for millions of years.

But you knew that.

Disingenuousness. U haz it.

[kristopher]

22. Motive?

wtmusic wrote in post #18: "In practice so-called waste materials don't make up enough to run a plant, so harvested, mature trees (labeled "whole tree chips") make up the difference. That's exactly what's being proposed to provide a major source of Vermont's energy when Vermont Yankee Nuclear Generating Station is closed next year."

[wtmusic]

24. And sex is a population-neutral act, too.

Got it. :D

[NickB79]

10. WRT carbon sequestration, you fail to take into account root structures

When most people consider carbon emissions and the burning of wood, they fail to realize that a huge amount of carbon is stored in a tree's root system. Sometimes over 50% of the tree's total biomass is actually underground. When the tree is logged for firewood, all of that carbon remains behind. Some of it does decompose rapidly (the thin feeder roots in particular) but the larger roots can remain for decades.

By logging an area of trees and then replanting new trees between the stumps (or simply allowing the stumps to resprout in the case of deciduous trees), you can more than offset the amount of carbon released from burning the logged wood by building up a carbon reserve in the soil in the form of roots. If you replace with fast-growing species like birch or locust, your offsets are even greater because they're building soil biomass faster. The alternative is usually burning fuel oil or propane, both of which are impossible to use in a carbon-neutral fashion.

[wtmusic]

12. Good points.

Are you aware of any study that would support your claim that "you can more than offset the amount of carbon released from burning the logged wood by building up a carbon reserve in the soil in the form of roots"?

onedit: intuitively, it seems that net CO2 sequestration in root structures would be a wash, given that CO2 sequestered in the decades it takes to grow large ones would be cancelled out by the CO2 generated from decomposition over a similar time period.

[XemaSab]

14. A lot of the CO2

from roots and branches is converted into humus.

Only 15% of the total carbon in the tree is contained in the bole.

[bvar22]

13. Wood is our primary heat source.

Our cabin is mostly one large room, and we have a recirculating wood stove which we love.
It has a glass front which allows us to see the flames.


In 2006, my Wife & I moved from Minneapolis to the rural South (Ouachita Mountains, Arkansas).
One of the reasons we chose the South was for the lower Winter energy consumption.
We burn Hickory and Oak which is in abundance here,
and my sympathy goes out to anyone trying to keep a fireplace/wood stove fed with the softer woods.

20 years ago, this area was timbered for hardwood,
and multiple new trees have emerged from the old stumps.
For the health of the tree, it is necessary to remove all but one new tree from the old stumps.
After 20 years, these are now the perfect size for the wood stove.

We also cut dead but still standing hardwood, storm falls, and remove hardwood from neighbors property that has either become a threat to their homes (storms), or unwanted. Keeping the wood shed full has become a year round activity.

We cut (chain saw), haul, and hand split (Wedges & Maul) our own wood.
It is a good way to stay in shape over the Winter, but I'm 61, and I don't know how many more years I can keep doing it. Most of the elderly in our area have given up on Wood, and changed to Propane for heat, and we will eventually be forced to do this as we get older.

Our total Winter Heat cost last year was less than $100 out of pocket (gas for the chain saws and small truck), but the labor involved would be hard to calculate.

I fully realize that this is not practical or sustainable where there is high population density (smoke, ash, particulates), or less than abundant wood resources, but the smell of a hardwood fire on a cold morning is one of the pleasures that make life out here worth the effort.

[kestrel91316]

21. +1000