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.
If I was a shareholder in a private company – providing energy, say, for profit, and the board decided that the best way to run our company was to run it under the most inefficient methods possible – given that there were better ways to do it – I would call for the board to resign and seek ways to impeach them for malfeasance in office.
However, if that company was going to get a kick-back from a wealthy (and probably corrupt) ‘backer’ of a BILLION or so, I guess, as a shareholder I’d be expected to keep quiet.
Well, I don’t want to keep quiet. UK power users are being ripped off by their own Government!!
I burn wood to heat my house. I always have because it’s very difficult to purchase coal. Daily, I watch long lines of coal trains headed to China.
We pay a heavy “Carbon Tax” here in BC so everyone drives across the southern or eastern borders to buy gas. But the BC government says we are using less gas because of their tax. They want everyone else to also have a “Carbon Tax” so then we won’t need to drive in order to pay less.
The British pay more taxes to ship our forests to Europe so they don’t burn their own coal.
We hire the government to make good decisons.
Are these stupid taxes or taxes on the stupid?
BTW, jquip, I’m amazed to find that you may have said something that I actually agree with. I’m still parsing what you said in case there’s something I missed and you’ve fooled me. (Goess off to sit in quiet room to contemplate….)
The gasification of ‘wood’: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0961953411002029
How does this compare to coal?
I have complained on WUWT about the domestic ‘burning’ of wood and paper-products in fireplaces during the winter time before and the local pollution (and direct health hazard!) that creates; here is a paper on that subject:
“Domestic wood burning and PM2.5 trace elements: Personal exposures, indoor and outdoor levels”
http://www.vtwoodsmoke.org/pdf/domesticwoodburning.pdf
“EPA, clean up this air!”
. . . . . . . . . . . . – unknown air breather …
Invite them to work down in the ‘pits’ where the rubber meets the road, where the REAL work gets done? It seems to me most of them lack any practical experience or exposure to the real world …
.
I have offered to go halvsies on a billboard across from the UN to one other poster where we would run daily/hourly changing messages; would that be a start?
.
And here is yet another failed government program in case you have confidence in their crazy schemes (like wood burning to create electricity):
I wonder if they were planning to burn wood to provide electricity for recently failed charging stations for EV’s. Most taxpayers do not know that we were paying for charging stations for Electric vehicles.
Like most other Government programs, here is another example of wasting your $$.
“”Department of Energy officials hid from investigators information about financial and performance failures of a company that got $135 million in government-backed loans.”
“Concealed were details of electric vehicle company Ecotality’s inability to fulfill the terms of green energy loans it received under President Obama’s economic stimulus program, according to the DOE inspector general.”
“The officials later claimed they didn’t intentionally withhold the information during a July 2013 IG audit of their management of the loans.”
“We found that the department had not fully disclosed known concerns regarding Ecotality’s ability to meet its EV (electric vehicle) project obligations to the Office of Inspector General prior to completion of our previous audit,” the IG report said.”
“Ecotality’s financial troubles prevented it from meeting its obligation to install EV chargers and ultimately led to the company’s September filing for bankruptcy.””
http://washingtonexaminer.com/doe-hid-green-energy-company-ecotalitys-financial-ills-from-ig/article/2538652
There is more!!
“Now here’s a fine mess, as Laurel and Hardy used to say. One of the biggest electric vehicle charging companies, Arizona-based ECOtality (a Nissan Leaf partner), went bankrupt, stranding about 13,000 commercial and residential stations. We all have a stake in this, because American tax dollars supported these installations through the so-called EV Project.
In the early rounds, only one bidder emerged, an unknown company called Tellus Power, which proposed acquiring ECOtality’s assets for just $3 million. Consider that the federal grants totaled almost $115 million (of which almost $100 million was spent) and you begin to see the issue here. There are clear parallels to what happened to the U.S. investment in Fisker Automotive, which went bankrupt after spending $192 million of a $529 million loan (the feds then seized $21 million in assets). ”
http://evautoshop.wordpress.com/2013/10/14/ecotality-goes-bankrupt-stranding-13000-docking-stations/
Is there any end to the craziness?
This reminded me of a couple of things I read recently. Sale of wood burning stoves are up in the UK due to hight energy costs and fashion and some Germans have started stealing wood from their forests – to burn in wood burning stoves. Back to the Future?
http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/bills/article-2478847/Woodburning-stoves-Can-cut-energy-bills.html
http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/tree-theft-on-the-rise-in-germany-as-heating-costs-increase-a-878013.html
Another environmentally disastrous and politically reactionary “fix” for climate change – when will they ever learn? Funny how they whine about deforestation, and then they do the thing that will result in the most deforestation.
The hypocrisy and irrationality and mean-spiritedness of the Criminal Reactionary Left knows no bounds
Looks like the coal-huggers are well on their way to conserving their precious coal seams and destroying those evil forests!
__Jim: “Wow … that is so, like , TWO centuries back. The greens make progress in such a strange and backwards way …”
Yeh, that’s why I’m wondering about the tech. From the comments it seems they burn it directly, with all the attendant problems that come from it. (Particulate abrasion, etc.) Not that I’m in favor of wood for powergen at all, but the producer gas route lets you run baseload boilers off the reducing combustion and capture the CO for later combustion in peaking loads. Or burn off/sell any excess. Which, if you’re unhappy about coal/natgas seems to be the right twofer go after. At least if you’ve got a happy on about deforestation for iPods.
Every time you introduce an intermediate step in a process you reduce the efficiency. Just a fact of thermodynamic life. Conventional fossil fuel plants work very hard to capture an extra 0.1 or 0.2% increase in efficiency. Doing so can save them a lot of money in fuel costs. A 240 MW coal plant burns over 1500 tons a day of coal, so a slight efficiency improvement adds up fast. Adding this extra step with all the associated parasitic energy and equipment costs, plus increased maintenance and possible waste disposal costs makes this process unlikely.
BTW you are correct, these plants chip the wood feed and burn the chips.
People that promote this kind of crap need to be locked up in some deep dark hole for the rest of their pitiful natural lives.
Worth pointing out that the disgraced Lib Dem politician Chris Huhne – still on licence after being released from prison after being convicted and sentenced to 8 months for perverting the course of justice – is now a senior manager of Zilkha Biomass Energy, the company that exports US wood to fuel Drax.
Nice work if you can get it.
Worth remembering also that one of the major incentives to Britain’s initiation of the Industrial Revolution was the serious shortage of timber for both charcoal burning and shipbuilding, as the great forests of the British Isles had all been chopped down to make space for agriculture and to supply the insatiable demand of the Admiralty for ships to fight the ongoing naval wars with Europe.
At one point in fact it was illegal to use new timber for buildings, all such had to be recycled from scrapped navy vessels, some of my roof timbers bear witness to that.
So the new fad for burning timber is misguided in the extreme.
Maybe the ash from burning wood can be used to make cheap fraking fluid. What else is it good for?
If it meets their standards (low carbon mainly) it can be used to make cement.
All better than burning wood: Thorium-Nuclear Waste Processing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAVCaUonrbE
This presentation from UBC summarizes supply of Canadian wood pellets to Europe. Essentially, wood pellets are only marginally better than NG in terms of GHG emissions (assuming this is even a valid analysis). http://www.lcacenter.org/InLCA2007/presentations/55.pdf
However, when considering the massive amount of wood to be harvested, there are other impacts to consider. On the positive side, forest management and jobs creation in forest communities will be beneficial as some locations have 40% unemployment and probably higher underemployment. And it is better to harvest a forest than to have it burn, and roughly 60% of the total trees lost each year burn vs 40% harvested (rough numbers). So good forest management is a positive for Canada.
On the other side, there is a lot of wasted economic activity making fuel remotely for use in the EU, with the UK only being one example. the EU pays for jobs in Canada under this scenario, and there is no net economic benefit to the combined societies.
After being aware of the environmental movement to promote biofuels for 15 years, I have reached the conclusion that they will end up doing so much damage to the environment trying to save it that they will ultimately come begging for fossil energy to save the environment from their own policies.
Someday they will figure out the obvious that wind power kills birds and habitat, solar panels have a net negative GHG emissions profile when manufacture and replacement are considered, and solar panels destroy desert habitat (or agricultural land in the case of solar fields in Bakersfield, CA).
But I think the environmental movement will have to go through a very destructive cycle before they realize what havoc they have brought to the environment. Only once the damage has been done will they turn on alternative energy producers for damaging the environment. Much like the MTBE scenario where government mandated MTBE to be blended into gasoline to clean the air using faulty emissions scenarios and then banned its use due to unintended consequences (ground water contamination) and blamed the oil companies for using what the government (under duress from environmental factions) mandated.
Gunnar Strandell says:
November 9, 2013 at 8:18 am
“If CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is the problem, biofuels are NOT the solution!”
All these measures are not applied to solve the problem of CO2 because it simply doesn’t exist.
It’s al designed to increase costs an therefore undermine the living standards of humans.
It’s all Agenda 21 BS.
I can see it now: the UK converts (has converted) one of its best coal-fired power stations to bio-mass, sourced from USA, and then EPA change their mind about CACC – and the UK is b*ggered when it can’t get enough wood. Great plan. NOT
Doing a little number crunching, the 70,000 tons of wood per day for that one British power plant means harvesting approx. 300 acres per day, or 109,500 acres/year. Which is approx 171 sq miles. Atlanta, Ga is only 132 sq miles. The USA has about 747 million acres of forest, total private and public. But figuring in the loses from fires, and other uses for timber (from railroad ties to houses, furniture, paper, etc.) we really don’t want to burden our forests any more than they already are. And when forests are clearcut, the costs include everything else that depends on them, including wildlife, soil erosion, etc. This is such a bad idea I can’t believe it.
GunnyGene: “Which is approx 171 sq miles. Atlanta, Ga is only 132 sq miles.”
By memory, and probably faulty at that, the turn over rate in softwood tree farms is 20 years. So about 3,420 square miles to keep those numbers going at a constant clip. Or a bit more than half again as large as Delaware.
Do the logistic requirements to transport the wood to Drax even exist, or can be made to work ?
If they currently use 140 trains a week to transport 36,000 tons of coal, but they now need to transport 70,000 tons of wood which will presumably need a greater number of trains each week, perhaps double. That’s 40 trains a day, which presumably are not allowed to run all night, say 40 trains over a 16 hour day, that’s a train every 24 minutes that has to be unloaded and moved on before the next one arrives.
I really hope it all goes horribly wrong for them. Once people in the USA see the environmental destruction becoming all too visible to vast areas of their land then we can hope to see sufficient protest to bring the exports to a stop and Drax converted back to coal until such time as the eco-loon politicians finally wake up and smell the thorium.
kalsel3294 says: @ur momisugly November 9, 2013 at 12:39 am
… 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.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Boy have you got that right.
I had the timber harvested off my land BIG MISTAKE. It was too much of a mess, too rutted and too step to sow grass seed on with a tractor and I couldn’t do 80 ac by hand. Within 6 months all the topsoil was gone and all I have is gravel and very hardy weeds. (Send in the goats) The wood not suited for lumber was chipped and hauled off to the nearest power plant to be burned so there were no limbs left to slow down erosion.
Add in mono-culture corn, a heavy feeder that depletes the soil and the cutting down of the wind barriers in the mid west planted after the 1930s dust bowl and you have a real problem. Especially when the land is owned by multi-billionaires only interested in turning a high profit and not preserving it for their grand children.
We have two wood-fired power plants in Vermont – the 50 MW McNeil Station in Burlington and the 20 MW Ryegate power station. In addition dozens of schools, hospitals and other municipal buildings have switched to wood chips mostly for heat and a few for CHP cogeneration of electricity. Vermont experienced the hysteria of bulldozing the forests when McNeil was proposed but that did not happen. Vermont has enough wood in its forests to sustain these two plants. Biomass works in Vermont on a limited scale because the plants are surrounded by their fuel supply. The McNeil plant was upgraded to run on both natural gas and wood. See https://www.burlingtonelectric.com/page.php?pid=75&name=mcneil for details on wood chip operations. The Ryegate plant emissions permit is here: http://www.anr.state.vt.us/air/permitting/PermitsTAs/95031permit.pdf.
The North Country hospital wood chip CHP cogeneration numbers are here: http://www.nrbp.org/publications/biomass-chp/appendixa.pdf
A summary of biomass CHP technolgies is here: http://nebiomassheat.com/pdfs/2012/biomassCHP/olmsted_chp.pdf
Wood consumption numbers are here. http://truenorthreports.com/biomass-in-the-vermont-comprehensive-energy-plan.
Expanding biomass power production beyond McNeil and Ryegate is unsustainable.
The shutdown of Vermont Yankee’s 650 MW power plant by a 30-year anti-nuclear crusade cannot be replaced by biomass.
http://www.vermontbiz.com/news/august/entergy-close-decommission-vermont-yankee-beginning-2014.
In the imagination of some this lost power will be replaced by moonbeams and unicorns. A portion of the lost power will be replaced by an agreement with Hydro-Quebec to supply 225 MW. http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2010/08/vermont-utilities-hydo-quebec-sign-long-term-hydropower-deal
The other 300 MW ( after deducting for biomass, moonbeams, and unicorns) will be purchased on the open market unless new production facilities are built.
The Gray Monk says: @ur momisugly November 9, 2013 at 1:01 am
….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 …
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Meanwhile Cornell University is busy doing research on the amount of food that can be ground in a hundred mile radius called a “Foodshed” using money from a grand from the USDA.
“… the Local Foodshed Mapping Tool main Page!
This instrument is the product of a larger USDA CSREES funded project entitled “Mapping local food systems potential in New York State.” This project, hereafter referred to as the “Mapping Local Food Systems Project.” investigated the capacity of agricultural land in New York State to meet the food needs of the state’s population centers….
…What is a “foodshed”?
Though it may be unfamiliar, >b>the term “foodshed” was used almost 80 years ago in a book entitled How Great Cities Are Fed (Hedden, 1929) to describe the flow of food from producer to consumer. Seven decades later, the term was used to describe a food system that connected local producers with local consumers (Kloppenburg et al., 1996). In this project, the general definition of a foodshed is a geographic area that supplies a population center with food….”
http://css.cals.cornell.edu/extension/foodshed-mapping.cfm
Why are we going back to a food system the became obsolete?