By Bruce Beaver, Chemistry Professor, Fossil Energy Expert & Practical Environmentalist
The last several decades have seen massive destructive wildfires in regions as diverse as Alaska, Alberta, California, Colorado and most recently in Tennessee. These fires negatively impact the economy, carbon emissions, forest and human health. Mounting evidence suggests that fire ecology has always been the norm for many forest regions. The media has tended to simplistically attribute these fires to climate change rather than historic land use changes . U.S. Forest Service (USFS) wildfire policy over the last century has also inadvertently contributed to worsening these fires; in addition, recent warming makes the fire season longer. Whether recent warming is greater than historic warming cycles is an area of current active debate.
To address wildfire, existing USFS policies could be rapidly expanded to promote rural economic development while simultaneously enhancing forest and human health. A program to thin one million acres in the dry ponderosa pine forests in Arizona over 20 years was started in 2013. The Four Forests Restoration Initiative (FFRI) is thinning trees to stimulate the health and vigor of the remaining trees and seedlings, increasing their CO2 utilization, and decrease forest biomass making future fires less severe. Such a silvicultural prescription is similar to the natural fire ecological regime of this region. Forest Service subsidies enable small diameter trees to be converted into small dimension lumber to help economically. However, approximately 40% of the harvested biomass was not appropriate for lumber so a biodiesel facility was planned to utilize the biomass. However, financing for this facility was never obtained due to the poor economics of biomass to liquid fuel technology. This situation limits the FFRI economics, and similar plans in other western locations, because the residual biomass has no market. Consequently, this biomass is pile burned on site, which wastes much energy and generates significant air pollution.
The FFRI is part of a larger national USFS initiative called the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration (CFLR), which according to the five-year progress report has been hindered by the lack of biomass markets:
Download here: https://www.fs.fed.us/restoration/documents/cflrp/CFLRP_5-YearReport.pdf
“By utilizing woody byproducts from restoration treatments, CFLR projects can help offset treatment costs and generate economic benefits for the community. To date, the 23 projects have generated more than 2.1 million green tons of woody biomass from hazardous fuel reduction and restoration treatments on Federal land made available for bioenergy production. Because of a number of factors external to CFLR, however, including low natural gas prices and the unanticipated impacts of the 2008 economic downturn on the timber market, many of the cogeneration and milling facilities that were planned in project areas are on hold or have shut down. … Even so, without a significant change in demand for biomass and associated development of processing infrastructure, it will be challenging for the projects to meet the proposed lifetime goals for biomass utilization.”
For reference the energy content of 2 million green tons of biomass, produced over 5 years, is about enough to power 24,000 homes per year, if fired in a commercial power plant (1MW/1yr x 1yr/13,000 green tons x 800 homes/1MW x 400,000 green tons/yr = 24,000 homes/yr). Obviously, commercial power plants are already connected to the grid to deliver this power to the homes. However, harvesting, processing and transporting biomass for energy generation is expensive and the economics of the process requires short haul distances (i.e. ~100 mile round trip). This is where the Obama Clean Power Plan becomes important. Since there are over 500 coal-fired power plants dispersed throughout the U.S. it is likely that some power plants are near to forests in need of restoration (thinning). Millions of tons of green biomass are available if forest fuel reduction and landscape restoration projects are started in appropriate regions. Existing commercial coal-fired power plants in these regions, should not be viewed as a source of air pollution to be regulated out of existence, but rather as highly valuable infrastructure for rural economic stimulation. Some of these plants have been or will soon be closed due to the Obama Clean Power Plan. If Mr. Trump stops the Clean Power Plan some of the existing power plants could be rapidly reconfigured to co-fire biomass and provide a market to facilitate USFS thinning polices. The location of the power plants relative to national forests in need of thinning is most important. Implementation of this energy policy would rapidly increase domestic coal consumption since only a maximum of 20% of the co-fired fuel can be biomass in coal power plants. This idea is not far fetched.
In a timely paper Beagle and Belmont report a limited techno-economic assessment of biomass co-firing in existing coal-fired power plants in the Western United States. This limited study examined the potential of co-firing 5 existing coal power plants in Wyoming and Colorado with beetle-killed trees from neighboring national forests. It was found this strategy was both technically possible and economic if currently existing USFS incentives are used to remediate insect damaged forests by biomass co-firing. When coupled with the increase in local employment from biomass harvesting, transportation and processing, this scenario holds great potential for simultaneously enhancing regional air quality, forest health and other local rural social benefits.
A Trump policy to immediately promote biomass co-firing in select existing (or recently closed) coal power plants would decrease the intensity of future wildfires in these regions and improve power plant emissions. This plan would also stimulate future forest health while simultaneously invigorating rural economies both near the power plants with logging and distant coal mining jobs. Such a program would increase or at least slow the rate of decline in near term coal use and be a tremendous public relations boost for the politically battered coal industry.
Bruce Beaver is a Professor of Chemistry at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, PA
I never thougt that wood and timber are so abundant in US/Canada. Here in Germany every bit of wood is used, and heating houses and bigger buildings or facilities with wood chips is quite common – an even cheaper like oil or coal.
I own two houses for several families and we are burning timber leftovers in in wood gassifying burners for central heating. Efficiency more than 90%. Extremely clean exhaust gasses. Yearly cost of heating a flat is less than 200€.
That is because here in the US we seem to suck at basic engineering.
and I dare say your properties are well insulated too, needing even less in the way of heating!
Forestry companies have been building “co-generation” plants to get rid of their wood waste for decades. I worked on one site services for one of the early ones 40 years ago. (Nope, that isn’t a typo – FORTY Years ago.) Virtually all the forestry companies I know are burning wood waste and turning it into energy for their own use and selling surplus to the grid. For at least 25 years in my knowledge, maybe longer. Not exactly a new or unique concept. Has been discussed here before. Beehive burners were seen to be a pollution problem and got turned into an asset.
Just go here for one OLD example with a list from 17 years ago:
http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy00osti/26946.pdf
Well, there’s a halfway decent idea here… if the forest is being sustainably managed and there is 40% biomass otherwise not being used and coal plant close by, why not?
The key here is that the forest regrow and that the trees not be cut solely for power… and the transport distance.
It makes no sense cutting down US wood to ship to a UK power plant (no UK green group is in favour of that) – local waste wood to an existing US coal plant could be different.
Something we can finally agree on.
In the late 1950s, I was a chokerman on the mountain slopes of Jarvis Inlet north of Vancouver, BC working on the world’s largest clear cut – one of the features you could see from the moon apparently. Dragging the huge logs down slope to a pile around a ‘spar tree’ rigged with a large block at the top through which was threaded the mainline cable (IIRC, 1.25 inch) with a donkey engine winding it up below, we knocked down everything standing in a hooked up log’s way.
They cut only timber with an 18″ top, so for a prairie boy, the stuff knocked down and broken up looked like big trees. I would say the waste looked to be about 20-25%. I’m not sure it would have been economic to gather this up to feed a coal fired plant. The sawmill waste was another matter. A good proportion of Vancouver homes were heated with sawdust burners in those days and in later years they made chipboard and sawdust board products.
The real culprit here, with wildfires and a swathe of other environmental and health problems, is a sinister atmospheric constituent which until recently was considered to be benign, even beneficial, but now progressive post-modern scientists and media talking heads know better.
Oxygen.
Atmospheric oxygen causes wildfires. It also rusts metal, degrading motor vehicles and increasing danger of traffic accidents. Moreover this sinister gas actually kills us. The gradual oxidation of biological tissues, although delayed by antioxidants in tomatoes and watermelons and other fruit and vegetables, nonetheless will eventually kill every one of us.
New research led by Oregon State University is already leading to an emerging consensus, expected to reach 97%, that the EPA should declare oxygen to be a toxic pollutant. Trees have now been identified in breaking research as posessing a protein which builds plant tissue while generating dangerous oxygen and releasing it into the atmosphere. Satellite imagery has also shown that forests release the other toxic and climate damaging gasses CO2 and methane into the air. Therefore green policy must now be to cut down all trees and burn them, a process that can generate valuable electricity while at the same time removing harmful oxygen from the atmosphere.
Biomass is such an watermelon weasel word. The mention of tree branches however, suggests a grand business opportunity for tough minded individuals. http://www.hainaultforest.co.uk/3charcoalburnershut.htm
The biggest single problem with this OP is that Wild Fires are not as bad as they were historically.
They have only got worse due to “Green” initiatives, as they have in Australia.
In the 1930s there were more and bigger fires.
Do not believe the current Hype, Fires are down, Hurricanes are down, Severe Tornadoes are down, Severe droughts are down.
Another chamber economist. I bet he doesn’t manage any woodlot.
He obviously have a point : “Obama Clean Power Plan” need to be trashed and burned as quickly as possible.
That said, whether biomass burning make sense (or not), I leave it to people eager to bet their real own money (or not).
My own guess leading to may own decision to NOT bet my money on it:
From history: humans switched from biomass to coal for a reason, you know. Collecting biomass, and bringing it to where you want it, is a very inefficient, hard labor, high cost, low ROI and EROI process. You’ll get much more energy (at least x3) for the same investment and work when you can mine coal (or oil, or gas, or pretty much everything, actually, may be including wind or sun !).
From my own experience: fine to heat your home with a woodlot next to it, if you don’t have a better use of your work-time, and enjoy some useful physical efforts (as opposed to : cycling on a home-trainer).
So why bother ? You need to be either very poor (no better use of your workforce) or very rich (enough to don’t care to put a better use of your money when you fancy). I am neither.
From the article:
Implementation of this energy policy would rapidly increase domestic coal consumption since only a maximum of 20% of the co-fired fuel can be biomass in coal power plants.
No, it would reduce coal consumption by, you guessed it — 20%.
Don’t inject math or common sense into the discussion.
After all, the fact that the Tennessee wild fires were arson isn’t germane to the discussion at all.
“Even so, without a significant change in demand for biomass and associated development of processing infrastructure, it will be challenging for the projects to meet the proposed lifetime goals for biomass utilization.””
As pointed out on this thread already, the European Union is using environmental directives to require the use of biodiesel instead of coal.
This is a misuse of wood and a price distortion. What Americans need to re-familiarize themselves with is a list of what products we already make from wood. There are countless chemicals, fibers and plastics which are made from trees.
Here is a blurb from an educational website in Idaho:
(besides the lumber, particle board and plywood that we need for homes and furniture, or wood for making fences and heating homes, etc..)
The thousands of uses for wood is the kind of thing that has been entirely omitted from children’s education, and that is a shame because young people will be too easily persuaded by environmentalists that there is waste everywhere. In fact there are extraordinary lessons in chemistry, history and many wonderful biographies behind all of the objects in our daily lives that we take for granted. This is all applied science, history and biography. It is far more useful and instructive to teach young people about our industries than to expose them to these idiotic big bang documentaries and warping space time.
We always need help in discovering and constructing a list of the names of the inventors. Anyone who can help us with the history of wood pulp and silvichemical products can drop suggestions on a post card (:
IN CONCLUSION, there should be a priority on the above uses before a single branch ever goes towards any destructive Green Vanity Projects in Europe.
Zeke,
Nice comment. Very thoughtful. It would be great if the economics of your idea would work. Unfortunately, there is much more biomass available than the industries that produce the products you mention can use. The problem my post is addressing is what are we going to do with the vast amounts of biomass in the west that have been produced by the various beetle tree kills. This will be a recurring problem for economic and ecological reasons. Some of these dead trees do ultimately catch fire and end up creating an uncontrollable fire that burns small western towns up. This is the issue that the USFS programs (and subsides) are trying to address. It is cheaper in the long run to clean up the dead tree mess, just around towns, then to rebuild the towns after they burn.
The cheapest solution to this problem I believe is co-firing this biomass in old existing coal power plants that have been or will soon be shut down for environmental/economic reasons (i.e. This is currently happening at the Colstrip Power plant in Montana). Keeping these plants around is how some coal mining jobs could be saved. The rural economic stimulus really comes from the many logging jobs, some of which will need to be subsidized, because wood has much less energy than fossil fuels. Thus, many more logging jobs are needed than the coal mining jobs lost due to co-firing biomass. For co-firing to make economic sense the subsidy for this program needs to be cheaper than rebuilding burned down rural towns in the long run. After the dead trees are harvested in a region logging efforts could then be focused upon thinning regional ‘living’ forests to minimize the intensity of future fires. This would provide a constant sustainable stream of biomass for power. In the long run this would also stimulate a local timber industry because thinned forests produce big trees much faster.
I personally do not think that it makes economic sense, in the long run, to spend hundreds of millions of dollars every summer trying to save some small western towns from forest fires. This is what we are doing now. In the long run co-firing would be cheaper and better for the economy of many western towns.
My solution makes economic sense. To do nothing makes no economic sense in the long run.
I underestimated the annual amount spent on fighting wildfires.It seems to be between $4-5 billion and more importantly many fire fighter lives. http://www.mensjournal.com/adventure/outdoor/how-america-is-wasting-money-and-lives-to-fight-wildfires-20150616
can’t suppress NGOs to invest into sustainability.
according to wild green dreams there had to be a market for biomass:
https://www.google.at/search?client=ms-android-samsung&biw=360&bih=264&ei=8aeBWIbIOcKtsgH7nIrwDA&q=biomass+gas+motor+&oq=biomass+gas+motor+&gs_l=mobile-gws-serp
Another environ mental illness.