We were having some fun on Twitter the other night, thinking up more marketable names for fossil fuels, following the lead of the friendly-sounding "natural gas" which replaced "town gas" which used to be made by heating coal in the absence of air. We then talked about coal:
How's this?
'Solar power, conveniently packaged by nature'
— Es Tresidder (@EsTresidder) March 7, 2019
When you think of coal this way, it really becomes obvious how appalling it is that 65 percent of the so-called renewable energy inputs for power generation in the EU comes from burning biomass, basically wood. That's why there is a big lawsuit protesting the new Renewable Energy Directive (known as RED II) which accepts biomass as renewable.
“RED II will accelerate widespread forest devastation and significantly increase greenhouse gas emissions by not counting CO2 emissions from burning wood fuels. Wood-fired power plants emit more CO2 per unit of energy generated than coal plants, but RED II counts these emissions as zero. The treatment of forest biomass as low or zero–carbon renewable energy in both RED I and RED II has and will continue to increase harvesting pressure on forests in Europe and North America to meet the growing demand for woody biomass fuel in the EU.”
Wood is also not nearly as dense as coal, so it costs more to ship, which isn't included in its carbon output. A lot of it comes in the form of pellets from the American Southeast, supposedly made from the scraps left over after chopping trees for lumber. Theoretically, it is carbon neutral because when the trees are replanted, the CO2 that was emitted when the pellets were burned is re-absorbed by the growing trees.
© Biomass fuel sure looks like wood to me/ BORIS HORVAT/AFP/Getty Images
Except the pellets are kiln-dried in the USA and shipped across the Atlantic, where they release their CO2 in an instant carbon burp, while the trees take decades to grow. We get a huge carbon debt now which takes years to repay. Or, as biochemist William Schlesinger told the Guardian,
When you cut down existing trees and burn them, you immediately put carbon dioxide in the air. None of the companies can guarantee they can regrow untouched forest to capture the same amount of carbon released. The whole renewable forest industry is kind of a hoax in terms of its benefit as climate mitigation.
And, according to the Guardian, the are not necessarily just scraps.
The wood pellets industry claims that it uses tree branches and waste wood, but environmental groups say there is strong evidence that vast swaths of valuable, untouched forest have been felled in states including North Carolina and Florida to feed the growing sector.
We might as well call coal biomass, or solid sunshine, because really, the only difference between it and a wood pellet is how long it has been since it was converted into fuel. If one reforested or afforested land to offset the CO2 emitted by burning coal, one could make the claim that it was as carbon-neutral as biomass. Because it is Biomass.
Lloyd Alter/ Steico wood fibre insulation boards/CC BY 2.0
The wonder of wood is that it turns sunshine and CO2 into a solid material that stores carbon. They could take all the scraps and waste that they turn into pellets and instead, turn it into building insulation like Gutex Fiberboard or high-value products like those made by Steico. Put the wood fibre on our buildings instead of in our power plants and that will really be doing something about reducing carbon emissions.
As a supporter of the EU lawsuit notes,
“The EU’s policy relies on the false and reckless assumption that burning forest wood is carbon neutral,” said Dr. Mary S. Booth, director of the US-based Partnership for Policy Integrity (PFPI) and lead science advisor on the case. “However, scientists from around the world, including the EU’s own science advisors, warned that burning forest wood actually increases emissions relative to fossil fuels.”
Let's just be honest: they might as well just burn that German lignite solid sunshine and give up this biomass hoax. We have to stop burning stuff, period.
Both are just compressed trees or ferns and we shouldn't be burning either of them.
