Strange seeing a source of income in Farming Simulator 2019 being to cut silage to turn into biogas, I'm assuming to make electricity. How realistic is this?
Growing trees sequesters carbon and burning wood chips releases it again. This does not change the total amount in circulation and is much less of a problem.
There is also, potentially, an opportunity cost in burning forests that could otherwise be acting as long term carbon stores (either leaving the trees intact, or harvesting their timber for something where the carbon will be stored longer term, such as construction/housing).
This is most technical description I could find, other articles frequently focus on the negative effects of resulting monocultures: https://www.vde.com/de/etg/arbeitsgebiete/informationen/biom...
Which is not an endorsement of incinerators. I don't know all the whatifs, but I'm hoping incinerators will be replaced, phased out.
Additionally, biogas is at best carbon neutral/slightly positive rather than carbon negative. Since you're still producing CO2 burning stuff, but it does get mostly reabsorbed by plants every cycle.
Such as? Wind/Solar/Hydro/Batteries all have their weak points.
The farms for biofuels are typically mono cultures, which is going to involve pesticide use and commonly fertilization. Both of which have some significant downstream effects that the world is trying to deal with right now (see the deadzones in many river estuaries, possible insect decline, etc).
Hydro is looked at less and less as a green energy solution because of the significant damage done to river/ocean systems (elwha river restoration, possible klamath river undamming). I don't think there will be any more large dams added to rivers that aren't already dammed in North America.
I'm also not a huge fan of utility scale solar. I understand that it is currently moving the needle significantly since the infrastructure costs are cheaper than residential solar, but there are so many added benefits of residential solar (reduced urban heat islands, no additional land used) that I see it as the main way forwards. I think that the solar power split that we'll eventually end up with is something like 40% residential solar, 60% utility as panels get more efficient.
I'd disagree
> biogas is at best carbon neutral/slightly positive
Of course that's the point - much better than oil/gas/coal. Yes ideally we'd like energy with no downside. Burning renewables is a great compliment to solar/wind.
UK Biomass in the last year is about 2GW average, Gas about 12.8GW, Coal 0.7GW
They apparently aren't any more ecological than natural gas because the process generates large amounts of methane of which some is being released into the atmosphere due to the machines not being able to be 100% sealed.
Also the land needed for the biomass to grow is enormous.
I thought the problem with fossil fuels is that we're taking the carbon out of the ground instead of the air.
Methane is 21x more potent than CO2 over a 100 year period, and 72x over a 20 year period. So, if you're concerned about what's happening now, that's the figure you need to consider.
The former will have little impact on environmental CO2 versus the later.