By Steve Goreham
Originally published in The Washington Times
Is wood the best fuel to generate electricity? Despite wood’s low energy density and high cost, utilities in the US and abroad are switching from coal to wood to produce electrical power. The switch to wood is driven by regulations from the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and other international organizations. These regulations are based on the false assumption that burning wood reduces carbon dioxide emissions.
Wood has never been a major fuel source for electrical power. In 1882, when Thomas Edison built the first power plant in New York at Pearl Street Station, he used coal to fire the plant. A switch to wood is not going back in time; it’s adopting a fuel that was regarded as inferior at the dawn of the electrical age.
Pound for pound, wood contains less energy and is more expensive than other fuels. A 2008 study conducted at the Rapids Energy Center plant in Minnesota found that, compared to coal, more than twice the mass of wood was required to produce the same electrical output. A 2008 study by the UK House of Lords concluded that electricity from biomass was more than twice the cost of electricity from coal or natural gas. Nevertheless, an increasing number of electrical power plants are switching from coal to low-energy-density and high-cost wood fuel.
This irrational behavior is driven by the EPA, the US Department of Energy, the European Union, the California Air Resources Board, and other world organizations that assume that biomass fuel is “carbon neutral.” Biomass-fired plants receive carbon credits, tax exemptions, and subsidies from promoting governments.
When burned, biomass emits carbon dioxide into the atmosphere like any other combustion. A 2012 paper by Synapse Energy Economics estimated that burning biomass emits 50 to 85 percent more CO2 than burning coal since the energy content of biomass is lower than coal relative to its carbon content.
The “carbon neutral” concept originated in a 1996 Greenhouse Gas Inventory paper from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of the United Nations. The IPCC assumed that, as biofuel plants grow, they absorb CO2 equal to the amount released when burned. If correct, substitution of wood for coal would reduce net emissions.
But a 2011 opinion by the European Environment Agency pointed to a “serious error” in greenhouse gas accounting. The carbon neutral assumption does not account for CO2 that would be absorbed by the natural vegetation that grows on land not used for biofuel production. Substitution of wood for coal in electrical power plants is actually increasing carbon dioxide emissions.
Nevertheless, governments have adopted the “carbon neutral” assumption and continue to promote biomass as a substitute for coal. As a result, nations and utilities are not required to count their CO2 emissions from biomass combustion.
In July, Dominion Virginia Power completed conversion of its Altavista Power Station to biomass fuel, the first of three planned facility conversions at a total cost of $165 million. The change was lauded as a method to “help to meet Virginia’s renewable energy goal.” Virginia citizens paid for the conversion and will pay higher electricity bills in the future.
The Altavista station and other biomass plants claim to be using “waste” fuel that would otherwise be going into landfills. But according to the DOE, 65 percent of US biomass-generated electricity comes from wood and 35 percent from waste.
Finding sources of wood to feed ravenous power plants is not easy. The small wood-fired EJ Stoneman power plant in Cassville, Wisconsin is rated at 40 megawatts. Each day it burns 1,000 tons of wood delivered by 30 different suppliers. The 100-megawatt Picway power plant in southern Ohio considered a conversion to biomass, but could not secure a good wood supply. Picway will be shut down in 2015 when tougher EPA emission regulations take effect.
Following President Obama’s direction, the EPA plans to impose CO2 emission limits on existing power plants, requiring the shuttering of US coal-fired power stations. In 2012, 37 percent of US electricity was produced from coal, with only 1.4 percent produced from biomass. Without some common sense about CO2 emissions, look for expanded efforts to cut down US forests to feed a growing number of biomass plants.
The height of eco-madness is the conversion of the Drax Power Station in the United Kingdom from coal to wood fuel. Drax is the largest power plant in Europe, generating up to 3,960 megawatts of power from 36,000 tons of coal per day, delivered by 140 trains every week. In order to “reduce emissions” at Drax, more than 70,000 tons of wood will be harvested every day from forests in the US and shipped 3,000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean to Britain.
Conversion of the Drax facility will cost British citizens £700 million ($1.1 Billion) and the new wood-fired electricity will cost double or triple the cost from coal. Drax Group plc will receive a subsidy of over £1 billion ($1.6 billion) per year for this green miracle.
Steve Goreham is Executive Director of the Climate Science Coalition of America and author of the book The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism: Mankind and Climate Change Mania.
‘Harvested’ is too mild a word for what actually happens. Whole forests are bulldozed flat.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887324082604578485491298208114
It only works if all the boats and trains bringing wood to Drax run on wood, too. ;p
Re: Drax power station in the UK.
You could not make this up – importing 70,000 tonnes per day of wood chips from the USA!!!!!
However, the UK’s incredibly goofy energy policy makes the EPA in the USA seem quite reasonable.
Sadly, the UK needs a really cold winter, power shortages and tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths from the cold to make ‘the greener than thou’, so called political elite do the right, economically sensible, thing – i.e. put green energy in history’s trash can of really goofy ideas that cost a fortune and did not work.
There is however a large and growing number of people asking the very obvious question: “So where is the warming and why do I have to pay so much for your stupid theories?” In the not too distant future, these people will become a large majority.
These people need to be seriously MOCKED. Maybe then things will dawn in their brain.
Then again maybe not.
Peter Miller is correct, of course. Here in the UK we have a total twat named Ed Davey, as Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change. Our MPs, government, parliament, and the EU are stark raving mad. They cannot ‘do’ mathematics. But perhaps I’m being rather hard on them, because there is another theory: that they know full well what they’re doing, and that if you trace their personal investments, you’ll find things that will stun you. As Peter says, we may need a major energy upset to change things, just as we may need a major incident before we do something about immigration, the justice system, and the Human Rights legislation.
In it’s raw form wood is carbon neutral, but the energy expended in harvesting, processing and transporting it, generally in the form of fossil fuels i.e. diesel oil changes that.
The cost of a fuel delivered to a power plant is a reflection of the energy expended in extracting or harvesting and transporting it, thus wood by virtue of the fact more tonnes of it are needed, and in this case the distance of transportation makes one wonder just what the bright sparks pushing this agenda are thinking.
But that’s not all folks. Perhaps the biggest tragedy is the nutrients that are being dragged out of the soil by the trees which must be replaced if the soil is to remain productive and not rendered infertile over time. The supply of essential nutrients is in my opinion going to become one of the greatest challenges for future generations as the world attempts to feed an ever increasing population.
There is no logic in AGW, the story about Drax power station was reported by Christopher Booker in the Sunday Telegraph a few months ago. Drax was built to take advantage of the nearby coal reserves, now instead of mining coal and moving it a few miles by train, the Greens think it is better for the environment to chop down thousands of trees in the USA, transport them by train over a thousand miles, use more energy to grind them into a pulp, recombine the pulp into pellets, ship them 4000 miles across the Atlantic to Liverpool and then take them 200 miles by train, to Drax. Also, Drax has had, at great expense, to be converted to use this inefficient fuel.
The logic of this is totally flawed, because the proponents of this wonderful way of reducing CO2 emissions, conveniently forget about:
1) The energy used to cut down, pulverise and recombine the wood into pellets.
2) The energy used to transport the wood the additional 5000 miles.
3) The CO2 is only removed from the atmosphere in significant amounts when the trees have grown, saplings only remove tiny amounts.
4) The inefficiency of wood compared to coal in producing heat.
We have a worldwide energy policy governed by morons!
I know how to save all that fuel the ships use! Just dump the logs in the Gulf Stream and let Nachure take its course!
Considering all the money spent on green energy scams and to fight global warming, it might just be cheaper and more efficient to burn $1 bills in a conventional power plant. We might get more energy for our dollar that way.
The real truth is that the Greens in the UK actually want Drax and all other ‘fossil and biomass’ generators shut down. They really do believe that they can all be replaced by wind or wave, and that everyone will be delighted to pay triple the price for power. What it is really all about is driving industry out of the UK and population reduction. Then we can all return to the Wordsworth and Shelley idyll of charming country-bumpkins weaving and spinning in little cottages, buccolic farmers using biomass to fertilise their “bio” foods all locally produced and grown.
Yeah, I know, dream on …
I note not one mention of the type of fuel ocean going transports use in international waters. While there have been improvements the diesel is still very dirty in terms of CO2, NOx and sulphur emissions. This is total madness if emission reductions were the main driver, which of course, it isn’t. I would like to know how many politicians have a vested, financial, interest in this project given we know Cameron’s father in-law is heavily invested in “green energy” wind farm projects in the UK.
Steve
As can be seen in the Met office graph the temperature in the UK has been escalating rapidly over the last decade
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/
The need for power is…..wait a minute…..I was looking at the graph through my patented ’tiljander’ upside down glasses….It seems the temperature in the UK has been PLUMMETING over the last decade.
So what the Govt needs to do is to continue its policy of substantially increasing the cost of energy whilst reducing supply as that will….
Hmm. I’m getting confused here. Obviously the UK govt energy strategy is going to be perfectly logical and based on climate facts. So I must be misreading something, otherwise I would have to come to the conclusion the UK govt has gone mad and that obviously can’t be right.
Someone help me out here….
tonyb
Twice the mass for the same energy, twice as many of Hansens “Death Trains” then
Totally off topic, but grab a copy of this…
The Age of Global Warming, by Rupert Darwall – ISBN 9780704372993, Quartet Books
It’s a fantastic walk through how we got to where we are.
The lunatics have enacted a coup at the asylum.
The Drax power station situation is too insane to think about. Due to policies of the three “main” political parties, the UK is going down the pan at a tremendous rate. The Industrial Revolution is being undone by a single generation of idiotic politicians, who have all come from the same mold. Or is that mould?
“Misguided” is far too polite and gentle a word in this context. I salute the author’s supression of how I would personally describe the UK energy policy-makers’ mental processes. I refrain from stating my forthright views here as I wish to avoid being gagged by the ‘mods’!
The lunacy of converting Drax is a crime against the UK population, all in the name of fractionally reducing the <2% of global CO2 emissions emanating from the UK.
@Brian H – great idea. And all of the sea salt can be used on the roads to melt the snow & ice we were told we'd never see again.
Drax supplies 7% of our (UK’s) power, it’ll need double or treble the weight of wood, to produce the same power as it does with coal. So, double or treble the number of trains, factor in their CO2, add the transatlantic shipping, the transport from woods to ports, processing of the wood & I’ll bet the “savings” in CO2 is minimal.
The only reason this is being done, is the 100% subsidy that the owners will receive for the electricity produced and, of course, the fact that increasing “Green” taxes & levies will render coal-fired power stations uneconomical.
kalsel3294 says
“Perhaps the biggest tragedy is the nutrients that are being dragged out of the soil by the trees which must be replaced if the soil is to remain productive and not rendered infertile over time. The supply of essential nutrients is in my opinion going to become one of the greatest challenges for future generations as the world attempts to feed an ever increasing population”.
A very good point, not to mention the wildlife that calls these forests “home”.
It really does make me mad, that these idiots in trying to save the planet from a delusional threat are prepared to sacrifice whole ecosystems and waste more fossil fuels to promote the view that “something is being done”.
One piece of good news though, in this morning’s Daily Telegraph (front page) one of our senior ministers has been having talks with Rick Perry, the governor of Texas and as a result exploratory fracking will take place in SE England.
The Ghost of Big Jim Cooley is totally right about Ed Davey.Just read this drivel he has spouted
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/oct/25/ed-davey-green-levy-energy
I think it might be a pretext to eventually outlawing burning wood, so that the coal plants go further out of business.
“Twice the mass for the same energy, twice as many of Hansens “Death Trains” then”
Worse – wood’s not only less energy dense (GJ/Kg), but less physically dense too (Kg/M3). So you won’t be able to get as many tonnes on a train…
And the other shoe dropped.
We keep hearing “You can’t make this up”… but here’s a perfect example. If I was to make something like this up and put it in a book, nobody would believe it could ever happen. Publishers would tell me to get rid of the ludicrous plot twist. In the movie they’d replace the terrorists with “right wing extremists” (sorry, just saw the ridiculous “white house down”… grrr).
Personally I think Americans should rise up and protest the rape of their forests. And if that were to succeed they’d next have to go shopping in Canada, with a far more intelligent leader. Eventually Drax and its siblings will be denuding forests all across Europe and the Americas, after which somehow the logic-challenged will STILL be blaming the use of fossil fuels for the destruction of the forests.
Once again, many folks here are amazed that the political forces involved in schemes like this are somehow dumb, can’t do simple math, etc.
This is absolutely not the case…they are, as we say here in the states, crazy like a fox. They know, and frankly don’t care, exactly what they’re doing.
As always, follow the money.
The reason our president is now pushing the climate “control” portion of his agenda is not that he believes any of the statements he makes. It’s because he knows he can get OTHER people to believe it because they lack the will/knowledge to stand up to it. People will say “Well, at least he got THAT part right. At least he took care of the environment, so he was a good president.”
The leaders know exactly what they’re doing; extending government control, moving money to where they can use it to further extend their base of support.
Jim
A friend of mine is making a very good living indeed installing wood burning stoves. It’s clear that many of his clients are greenies who have no concern about this practice. Apart from the Kantian thought “where’s all the wood going to come from if everyone did this?”, the justification appears to be as stated above – “as biofuel plants grow, they absorb CO2 equal to the amount released when burned”. If that argument turns out to be false, I’d imagine we’d have a lot of egg on a lot of green faces. Or are they shameless?