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Comment by Arbalest | Hacker News Reader

Peat? Seriously? Peat in Tasmania (Australia) is protected, because it occurs in national parks. This suggests it is a big deal for biodiversity. Yet apparently people are burning it for energy...

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Yes, peat. Ireland does not have significant coal deposits, and our forests were chopped down for, amongst other things, our next door neighbour's collection of boats, which is part of how your ancestors likely ended up in Australia in the first place. That left peat as a fuel source up until recently.

We do not see the fact that we've been so dependent on it as a fuel source as a good thing.

Bleh. Meanwhile England has been cheering itself recently for going days/weeks without burning any coal for electricity...

But burning a lot of natural gas instead. Still fossil fuel!

Current national grid status meters/graphs:

  http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/

CCGT == "Combined cycle gas turbine"

A fair chunk of which gets piped over from Ireland these days.

I'm Irish; many of us are ashamed of how we treat our bogs. We have tiny peat-burning power stations which:

  * Are extremely polluting
  * Destroy a unique ecosystem
  * Are loss-making

all for the sake of "protecting" a few local jobs.

Is all peat created equal? How are we going to make whiskey when the peat is all gone?

I suspect the requirements of the whisky industry for peat are probably pretty tiny - as far as I know its only the smaller higher end distillers that actually burn peat.

Peated whisky is a specialty product, with rather small production scales compared to unpeated Highland and Speyside malts. So yes, it is quite sustainable, given the regrowth rate.

Many years ago when I was a student I had a summer job working in one of the huge industrial scale maltings that supplied quite a few of the popular whisky brands - I can't remember if they produced peated malt but I do remember their analysis lab having gas chromatography equipment for analysing such things.

Not all whisky is peated. At the current rates, there is enough peat for hundreds of years of whisky production, even if no new peat was formed, and it regrows at around 1mm/year, which is quite sustainable, if we stop using it for power generation.

All of the makers of peated whisky are committed to protecting the peat, as far as I know. And their peat usage is absolutely miniscule compared to its current use in power generation.

Bruichladdich has a good summary: https://www.bruichladdich.com/faq/is-peat-sustainable/

I believe peat use is rare in the malting for Irish Whiskey. More common in Scotland but still not the majority.

But presumably you could burn other fuel and get a similar result. The traditionalists would be grumpy though.

It is quite rare, but not nonexistent. I believe there's only about three to five distilleries who produce or will be producing peated Irish whiskey, at least one of which isn't yet in production at the moment.

> But presumably you could burn other fuel and get a similar result

I'm not so sure about that. Peat smoke has a quite distinctive smell.

Peat is a renewable resource, like hardwood forests. It grows, but it is very slow so it's more expensive than other renewable resources. Someone here quoted 1mm/year but in active areas it's closer to 1 inch (26mm)/year

>all for the sake of "protecting" a few local jobs.

a lot like people that give out about fishing it appeals to petty nationalism.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braunkohlebergbau

In Germany they have relocated some 100.000 persons over the years, just to mine and burn lignite (not peat - corrections) for electricity. I think that's crazy. (The irony is that the Green party is currently the strongest political party in Germany, but the energy sector seems to have a stronger influence, go figure)

Braunkohle isn't peat.

Peat == Torf

Not a big difference to the environment, is there?

Peat is worse.

That's not to say lignite is in any way "good", it's still a horribly inefficient way of getting energy. But peat stores large amounts of methane and carbon which gets released when drying it. Mining lignite coal also release some of that, but in much smaller amounts.

A quick estimation about the environmental impacts (with data for Germany only) shows peat is at least 5-20 times worse in terms of surface destruction - I have no idea how to compare the ecological impact of removing a biotope vs. moving a town.

Lignite:

- thickness of a lignite bed 11-35m [0]

- surface destruction per metric ton: 220-700 cm² [0]

Peat:

- thickness of a peat layer 1,5-2m [0])

- surface destruction per metric ton [1]:

-- at least 3,850-5,130 cm² (using the same density for coal and peat)

-- 6,000-8,000 cm² (moist peat, 0.8g/cm³ [2])

-- 10,000-13,300 cm² (dried peat, 0.4 g/cm³ [2], considering the higher calorific value for peat [4])

-- at worst 12,000-16,000 cm² (dried peat, 0.4 g/cm³ [2])

[0] (Data from 2015 for German mining areas; page in German) https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/daten/flaeche-boden-land-oeko...

[1] There was no data for the surface destruction for peat in [0] so I estimated it using densities from [2]:

thickness lignite bed x surface destruction lignite x density lignite / density lignite / thickness lignite

e.g. 700 cm² x 11 m x 1.25 g/cm³ / 0.801 g/cm³ / 1.5 m = 8011 cm²

[2] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=peat+lignite

[3] https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/fuels-higher-calorific-va...

[4] The gross calorific value for peat is 5-20 % higher than for lignite [2]-[3]; though I guess that does not exclude the energy needed for drying the peat.

Just had very quick look at coal subsidies in Germany, it seems stone coal alone is getting 3.2 Bn per year... Not verified the source, so. Based on the last Wp prices for solar modules of roughly 0.3 €, doubling to cover installation, that amounts to 5 GW, give or take a little bit... Not too bad I think considering that in 2017 or 2018 world wide installations amounted to roughly 100 GW. And you would have jobs to get the plants installed and maintained.

Ireland has been burning peat as a source of heat in homes for hundreds of years. It's the only abundant fuel source in Ireland. In recent years much of the raised bogland has been protected for conservation, and stripped bogs being converted into solar and wind farms.

Peat is a reasonably common domestic fuel in parts of Ireland and Scotland - also the "peaty" taste in whisky traditionally comes from drying malted barley using peat fires.

However, I agree that for a variety of reasons that peat should mostly be left where it is.

It is pretty polluting for the amount of energy you get out of it but I don't think it necessarily follows that because it occurs in national parks in Tasmania that it is important for biodiversity on the other side of the world in Ireland.

Bogs can play a major role in capturing and storing carbon. I think it's safe to say that they play an important role in the ecosystem no matter which side of the planet they're on, and should remain unmolested.

This happened in the Netherlands as well until coal was found in the province of Limburg. Quite a few of the old polders are actually dug up peat (veen) reserves which were originally converted into a lake and then afterwards dammed and drained.

Hey, we got a lot of coal in Australia, maybe Ireland wants some!

Hello from the south island!

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