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.
Where does the money come from to replant a forest? I know they use the unemployed to plant new trees in the uk and that people own and run carbon offset websites that receive money to plant new trees but they don’t use that money to plant trees.
The big risk for Thorium advancent: US research initiatives to introduce IP’s (International patents) and lock up the technology.
I don’t say it will happen that way but a 40 year period of active suppression of Thorium technology has made me extremely mistrustfull.
http://www.the-weinberg-foundation.org/2013/07/23/bill-gates-nuclear-company-explores-molten-salt-reactors-thorium/
anyone know what happened to the idea of thorium nuclear power? I thought that had so much potential but haven’t heard anything new in a long time? thanks
Just a couple more points on the lunacy of Drax:
Its built on top of coalmines
Wood chips emit carbon MONOXIDE during transportation. Several crew members on a wood chip ship died recently when checking the cargo.
Wood chips have a tendency to self-ignite. There was such a fire in the wood chips stored at Tilbury power station, which burned for days (mighht have been weeks). Sometimes the fire is impossible to put out.
There must come a time when state governors (or the like) in America say: ‘Enough desecration of our forests’. Where to then for supplies – the Brazilian rain forest..?
You couldn’t – as has been said – make it up…
Robert Orme says:
November 9, 2013 at 6:17 am
“Nothing wrong with a local sawmill burning its waste to generate power, but you have to wonder about the sanity of these bureaucrats as well as their arithematical skills. Where do these people come from?”
I agree, but that’s how an Austrian company introduced the wood pellet twenty years ago that enabled automated feeding of a furnace. A tax credit on pellet wood ovens (just like we have in the USA) triggered a boom and today Europe is importing pellets and wood chips from all over the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pellet_stove
The idea behind this concept must be clear. The same people behind the AGW doctrine made the claim that human kind is a cancer to the planet. Burning our biosphere to power coal plants for electricity and pellet ovens in individual households at such a massive way will indeed turn human kind into a cancer to the planet. Case proven. It will provide the with the stick to enforce UN Agenda 21 = mandatory population reduction
Are you all awake now?
Once again, decreasing technology being portrayed and perceived as increasing technology. Even George Orwell would have been surprised at this twist of the tale. WE all live in a cosmic insane asylum, and the universe sends all the incurable lunatic souls to this planet, for it’s own protection. GK
Pamela Gray says:
November 9, 2013 at 6:22 am
“I project a long successive line of stupid voted into the White House. And it all started with something as simple as a free phone”.
No, it started with Nixon closing down the Thorium experiment , watch the Thorium Problem video I have posted earlier. Obama’s policies on the field of thorium and rare earth metals is only a continuation of Nixon’s policies.
The free Phone’s and the bio ethanol mandate (turning food into fuel for cars) in Europe and the USA were used as a planned scheme to shape foreign politics by triggering the Arab Spring Revolutions. Of course you will remember the Arab Spring Revolution started as a food protest in Tunis. Obama’s Cairo speech did the rest.
It deems the Swedes (amongst others) have the right idea. They are burning garbage in their modern power plants. It’s been so successful that they are actually running out of fuel! For example:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/30/world/europe/oslo-copes-with-shortage-of-garbage-it-turns-into-energy.html
” Oslo, a recycling-friendly place where roughly half the city and most of its schools are heated by burning garbage — household trash, industrial waste, even toxic and dangerous waste from hospitals and drug arrests — has a problem: it has literally run out of garbage to burn.
The problem is not unique to Oslo, a city of 1.4 million people. Across Northern Europe, where the practice of burning garbage to generate heat and electricity has exploded in recent decades, demand for trash far outstrips supply. “Northern Europe has a huge generating capacity,” said Mr. Mikkelsen, 50, a mechanical engineer who for the last year has been the managing director of Oslo’s waste-to-energy agency.”
We need a new “Age of Reason”.
Pamela Gray says:
November 9, 2013 at 6:22 am
“I project a long successive line of stupid voted into the White House. And it all started with something as simple as a free phone.”
More likely caused by left wing media, poor to completely false history, science and math being taught in schools by teachers educated by left leaning colleges and unionization of government employees, including teachers. All the free stuff is definitely a big assist as well as the whimpy republican party and the ridiculous “sweetness” of compensation ( including bribes, oops I mean political donations), benefits and power of elected positions. The stupidity resulting is a positive feedback mechanism.
While I heartily agree that the woodchips-for-power idea, at least on a large scale, makes little sense, the post would have benefited from more facts to establish how short of CO2 neutral the practice would be and the assumptions on which this is all based.
I for one did not find it very enlightening on the issue of carbon-dioxide-concentration neutrality..
Hmm… Not familiar with this tech at all. Are they burning the wood chips directly? Or are they going the producer gas route? The latter being to burn the chips in a reducing atmosphere to produce CO. And then burning the CO for power, with CO2 as the exhaust product.
As a generality, there’s no sanity in it from a ‘carbon neutral’ standpoint. If you assume that vegetation will consume the CO2, then you assume that regardless of what you burn to produce the CO2. Anyone pushing this as carbon neutral for one plant food source and not for another are misinformed, insane, or too ashamed to state their Peak Oil position plainly.
Specifically, to be ‘eco-neutral’ then each such wood-burning plant would host its own tree farms. And only burn off its stock at the same rate that it grows them. At which point you could state that it is properly ‘sunlight netural’ and that it’s CO2 output and uptake are balanced. But in that condition you’re simply stating that coal is ‘bad’ because you’re providing plant-food, free of charge, to others.
Of course none are going to state this, or go this route, as it would simply demonstrate closed-loop biomass conversions as little more than a very Rube Goldberg set of solar panels and batteries.
Hold a moment, and think about this.
For biofuels the atmosphere works as a transportation line between burning and uptake.
Increased burning and uptake still lead to more CO2 under transportation by the atmosphere and as a consequence a rise in CO2 concentration.
You can make a practical model test any day by counting the number of cars on a bridge from morning to dawn. Higher traffic means more cars on the bridge despite the fact that all cars that enter also moves off the bridge.
If CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is the problem, biofuels are NOT the solution!
But wait… if burning wood creates more CO2, then the increased levels of CO2 will cause the trees to grow faster, thus reducing the amount of CO2, which… no.
I remember a professor in my technology commercialization course saying, “The problem with biomass energy is not the bio, it’s the mass.” In other words, in order to get energy out of a product with low energy density, you have to put huge amounts of that stuff into the generating stations. Of course, environmentalists will ignore the sudden doubling of trains needed to keep Drax going because this is THEIR idea.
Well, I agree it’s nuts to convert a coal plant to wood, but building a wood-burning plant in a forest area makes a lot of sense. In the past, wood chips from lumber mills used to be burn in so-called ‘bee-hive’ burners. Now they’re trucked to power plants, like the one in Kettle Falls, Washington, to do something useful.
I worked for a city utility in Florida for 32 years. The city commission, which was then fully controlled by environmentalists forced the utility to allow a biomass plant to be built instead of the 250 MW fossil fuel plant that the engineers wanted. The consequences now that the plant is almost ready to go into service are back to haunt the politicians:
1) The city already has a 240 MW coal fired plant. The same bunch on the city commission forced the utility to install a scrubber system on the plant that was not required by law. The plant had met all environmental regulations by only burning low sulfur coal up to that point. The scrubber provides no improvement since they started burning high sulfur coal once it was installed. It also forces the plant to run at at a minimum 120 MW otherwise the catalytic system would be destroyed.
2) The contract that the city has with the biomass plant gives power produced by that plant priority over the coal fired plant. If total electrical demand falls below a certain level then the coal fired plant would have to be shut down to allow the biomass plant to sell power. This comes from the point made above, the coal plant cannot operate at less than 120 MW.
3) The cost of the power produced by the biomass plant is about 4 times higher than the coal fired plant. Electric bills are set to skyrocket. There are also lots of other power producers in the state so selling high priced power is not going to happen. That only leaves the City’s captive population to pay for this. The politicians NOW see that this will bring political doom.
4) The housing community located near the power plant are seeing a continuous line of dirty dusty logging trucks clogging the roads into the plant. These housing areas are upscale communities filled with lawyers, doctors and university administrators. Not the type of people to suffer quietly. They are raising H#ll right now and the plant is only in a low powered testing phase right now. And the noise from all the trucks is another issue.
5) Lastly, there is a major downside of using wood in these plants. You cannot remove all the abrasive sand and grit that is on these logs. That grit blasts the interior parts of the furnace shortening the equipment’s life drastically.
There is just nothing good to say about these plants.
PaulH says:
November 9, 2013 at 7:31 am
It deems the Swedes (amongst others) have the right idea. They are burning garbage in their modern power plants. It’s been so successful that they are actually running out of fuel! For example:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/30/world/europe/oslo-copes-with-shortage-of-garbage-it-turns-into-energy.html
” Oslo, a recycling-friendly place where roughly half the city and most of its schools are heated by burning garbage — household trash, industrial waste, even toxic and dangerous waste from hospitals and drug arrests — has a problem: it has literally run out of garbage to burn.
The problem is not unique to Oslo, a city of 1.4 million people. Across Northern Europe, where the practice of burning garbage to generate heat and electricity has exploded in recent decades, demand for trash far outstrips supply. “Northern Europe has a huge generating capacity,” said Mr. Mikkelsen, 50, a mechanical engineer who for the last year has been the managing director of Oslo’s waste-to-energy agency.”
Right, the Netherlands today import 100 million tons of garbage from Italy, the UK and Ireland, big business. At the same time cities with one of the burners that process the imported garbage close their cities for cars older than 15 years because of those horrible emissions. Now that is utter madness.
Frank, spot on. Also BLM grazing helped to tromp left over floor fuel into the ground, speeding up natural decay and keeping the forest floor clean. This allowed renewable harvest at a rate faster than natural overturn. It worked like a charm till watermelons stopped logging industries and the government shut down BLM grazing access. Now we have overgrown forests, overloaded floor fuel, and catastrophic forest fires so hot that entire fire crews lose their lives in this current madness.
This is just plain nuts …
Bruce Cobb says:
November 9, 2013 at 7:40 am
We need a new “Age of Reason”.
I agree but that new age of reason will only become a reality if we get rid of the madmen and madwomen who have taken control over our politics, our schools, our institutions and universities, our media and our administrations.
Any idea how to smoke them out?
First, if the wood fuel requirement at Drax is 76,000 tons a day, you could custom build a ship to carry that much. If you could get a R/T voyage down to 10 days (1 day to load, 4 days across, 1 day to unload, 4 days back.) You would need 10 ships custom built AT A MINIMUM to support the fuel requirement. I suppose that there is bulk ship technology that would work, still loading/unloading 76, 000 tons in 24 hours is a daunting task and would require a dedicated dock facility. And a rail network to move the wood from the dock to the power station.
And don’t forget the production/transportation infrastructure in the USA.
All of that will take years, just to get the permits! Of course, I can’t imagine that they could ever get the permits here in the USA.
(A hint: there are no rail connections between the UK and the USA.)
Hi, Ms Pamela, how you doing these days?
Regards,
Steamboat Jack (Jon Jewett’s evil twin)
Anybody do the “wood distillation” experiment in junior high or high school? Do you recall how vile and ‘smelly’ some of those components that came out of the ‘wood’ were? WHERE do those products go in this ‘burning’ process? Are there a series set of scrubbers down-stream of the combustion process – or are those compounds simply vented to the atmosphere up a ‘stack’ (i.e. a smoke stack)?
.
These plants, at least the one I’m familiar with, use a fluidized bed furnace. All those “tars” and such would be completely burned. Your experiment was intended to produce a different product than a power plant. The power plant is designed to burn everything that is fed into it, as fuel, down to ash, carbon dioxide and water. This maximize energy product while doing so. However these plants are designed to burn a strictly controlled feed stock. A certain type of coal for example or natural gas. Wood is a wildly varying feed with unknown BTU, water and ash content. That makes biomass plants less efficient and probably dirtier.
Wow … that is so, like , TWO centuries back. The greens make progress in such a strange and backwards way …
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_gas_generator
.