Interesting report from the USDA. https://www.fas.usda.gov/data/european-union-eu-wood-pellet-...
It's not that simple. Coal (/oil/gas) burning releases CO2 that was previously safely stored in the ground and didn't affect the Earth atmosphere. Burning wood only (granted, prematurely) releases CO2 that is already in circulation.
The main ecological problem with burning wood is deforestation and impact of harvesting on the animals and plants. If wood comes from renewable forests (there are lots of countries that properly manage their forests) then the environmental impact is much lower than with coal/oil/gas.
That said, importing the wood from half the world away sucks.
If one believe CO2 is an issue (personally I don’t buy it), then burning trees is not a great way to fix the issue.
It's not a permanent storage of CO2 unless we cut it down and bury it or build something long-lasting with it.
Europe is the second smallest continent in the world. It has roughly the area of the United States. Despite that, Europe has the highest forest coverage of all the continents.
More like a subcontinent of Asia, like India.
Nuclear is expensive, it's unsafe, there's the proliferation risk, and only very few countries figured out how to store spent fuel. Promises of safe and cheap tech to solve these problems are common but still unfulfilled.
Solar and wind energy on the other hand is so cheap to build up and don't need decade long mega projects. We can have a better, cheaper energy source right now. Nuclear has nothing to offer.
Germany is dark and windless plenty of the time during summer: ~8 hours a day
I frequently saw our solar and wind usage below even 5% of their respective capacities
wood in particular is the worst offender.
plus logging and transportation both are very unsafe industries.
spent fuel storage is a complete non-issue. even bringing it up shows the ridiculousness of the anti-nuclear lobby.
the only real risk is proliferation. which fortunately is again a non-issue in Europe, because the counties in question already have nuclear capabilities.
As for nuclear, step one is certainly to stop listening to arguments like "it's too late, it would take too long to build":
https://twitter.com/mlanetrain/status/1556381583585804291
"This is some grim real life dramatic irony: Nick Clegg opposing nuclear power in 2010 because it would only come on-stream by 2021 or 2022."
If you haven't won the geographic lottery then...
You can burn coal like there is no tomorrow (see Poland)
Or gas (see Germany, and most of Europe for heating), and enable Russia and other undesirables
Or nuclear and have energy security without directly and indirectly causing death and suffering for millions
Both are true because "spent" fuel isn't reprocessed because mumble mumble nonproliferation, yes?
In the mean time, obscene amounts are being spent on fusion, which will never even compete with fission on any metric.
Wood is already in the biosphere. Even if we don't burn it, it will decompose and release all its CO2 that way, or burn in a forest fire. The CO2 of that wood is already circulating.
It doesn't actually increase CO2 levels the way that digging up long-buried fossil fuels does.
Biofuel is almost as bad as fossil at 230 gCO₂-eq/kWh. [1]. Compare to solar pv at 40 and nuclear at 12.
[1] https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5...
> Direct emissions from biomass combustion at the power plant are positive and significant, but should be seen in connection with the CO2 absorbed by growing plants. They can be derived from the chemical carbon content of biomass and the power plant efficiency. For a comprehensive discussion see Chapter 11, Section 11.13
https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5...
> have led to strong forest Carbon sinks in many OECD regions (Pan et al., 2011; Loudermilk et al., 2013; Nabuurs et al., 2013; Erb et al., 2013). However, the capacity of these sinks is being reduced as forests approach saturation (Smith, 2005; Körner, 2006; Guldea et al., 2008; Nabuurs et al., 2013; Sections 11.2.3, 11.3.2). Active forest management, including management for bioenergy, is therefore important for sustaining the strength of the forest carbon sink well into the future (Nabuurs et al., 2007, 2013; Canadell and Raupach, 2008; Ciais et al., 2008), although countries should realize that for some old forest areas, conserving carbon stocks may be preferential, and that the actively managed forests may for some time (decades) act as sources.
True but meaningless.
Sitting in my deck chair also maintains an equilibrium level of CO2, but it doesn't provide any heat or benefit to anyone.
We can't look unfavorably on energy approaches just because they fail to actually reduce CO2. That's some kind of unrealistic purity test.
But we don’t want to fully avoid the greenhouse effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect:
“Earth's natural greenhouse effect keeps the planet from having the below freezing temperature that it would have if there were no greenhouse gases”
The natural greenhouse effect has CO₂ constantly (I think at least since there’s any carbohydrate burning on earth) remaining in the atmosphere.
I don't believe that is correct. Unless you are counting all of Russia. https://ourworldindata.org/forest-area
In hindsight, it should've been obvious that Europe (~10 million sqkm) couldn't have 1 billion hectares of forest coverage.
I'm under the impression that logging is far less efficient due to the nature and complications of the work, but that is, I admit, simple conjecture: You're constantly moving, maybe with some gravity assist, to transport and load the raw material, I imagine for packing efficiency they're chipping straight into a 53' trailer, which will then port a relatively small sum, about 21-22.5 tons, compared with a haul truck, which range from 153-410 tons for back-and-forth movement. If we consider this holistically, BTU/man, BTU/manhour should both be accounted for as well, since those are real inputs which at scale (I imagine) represent a pretty substantial expense in terms of CO2.
Coal is also "processed" on site, with pretty minimal input: being crushing, drying, and sometimes spraying. There aren't secondary and tertiary processes.
Energy from PRB coal, at the minimum of my data is about 7,420 BTU/lb. Some dry wood can "compete" at this level, apparently, when dry in fact one data point indicates 9033 BTU/lb (Colorado Pinyon). Maximum mean BTU for coal in the PRB is 11k (compared to 8.2 kBTU/lb pellet). I say compete because from what I've heard, generator designs aren't indiscriminate and require certain energy densities to hit efficiency - which may be a benefit of biomass because there's a lot more control, I'd imagine, in pelletizing wood vs. coal, which is a simple mix-batch. At scale it might actually be a pretty considerable boon for biomass.
To me this reads that biomass is going to require more input to extract the same amount of energy. The processing to get biomass to similar energy density is going to require more energy input. But even the primary input, knocking trees over, chipping them, porting them, is going to be less efficient and less centralized, and even once it does culminate in some logistical knot... You said it yourself, it sucks. But also, deforestation sucks. So does human sprawl.
My point here is that I do think the idea that burning wood is "carbon neutral" is spurious, because there are a lot of points which fossil fuels are used, and used less efficiently, and that the process at least by my imagination is ultimately less efficient, and those losses will also inevitably contribute to increases in the CO2 chain which I think is largely ignored. Maybe it's more like slightly-less carbon - cause the whole "if it's wood and we burn it now and let it grow back later while we keep cutting more and more down to satisfy the constantly increasing energy demands..." reads like we're displacing consequences into the future.
But! This is with the caveat that I'm not particularly familiar with the processes of biomass fuel production chain, and that my calculations are based on US information and doesn't necessarily pertain to industries in the EU.
So it's important that we reduce emissions in the short term. Burning wood increases short-term emissions. By the time it all balances out, it'll be too late for it to matter.
And even that assumes that the forests grow back enough to balance out. Those tipping points include drought and forest fires, so that's not a given.
This sounds crazy to me. The whole issue with climate change and CO2 is there is too much on a global scale. So it's all fungible. Yet people continually talk as though the CO2 molecules have labels on them to determine if they're sinful or not.
How about this number? Coal consumption in the EU in the last 30 years: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/de/web/products-eurostat-news/...
Still more than 10x the number of burnt wood. Should we replace all coal by wood? Heck no, that'd be insane, but Doomberg framed this whole thing in a sensationalist way. Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is what the whole thread is about:
- UK burned wood a hundred years ago, which was totally inefficient.
- Then they discovered coal, which is more energy efficient.
- Now the EU is back to burning wood, even though it is less efficient than coal and they call this green, which is dumb. (Ignoring many aspects of the whole thing)
- The EU is stupid and they should go full nuclear instead.
I'm simply pointing out that Doomberg's chain of arguments lack actual numbers and neglect a few things (stove efficiency, different goals, etc.), even though the gist of it at least somewhat true.
Policies differ between EU countries. Finland just brought a reactor online. France is planning to build 14 reactors in the next decade. On the other hand Germany is going to shut down 3 reactors.
As I understand it a large problem has been with poor quality welds being caught too late in the process.
Quality isn’t an easy thing to change, but I trust they can remedy for future builds.
Plants built during the nuclear boom in the 1960s and early 70s often had inflation -adjusted costs of 1-2 billion USD per GW of capacity. And that's with no intermittency and a capacity factor of over 90%.
That doesn't seem possible unless we are discounting the carbon captured while the tree grew.
There's complications and details, but overall if everyone is doing what they should its okay and most of the hype is fossil fuel propaganda. Windmills upset the worms etc.
Half of it
The other half lies still safely under the surface. When a tree is chomped we take only half of the tree. This amount should be taken in mind in the model.