Guest essay by Eric Worrall
h/t Breitbart / James Delingpole – Greens have discovered to their horror that producing renewable wood pellet biomass requires a large supply of dead trees.
Hardwood forests cut down to feed Drax Power plant, Channel 4 Dispatches claims
Brendan Montague | 16th April 2018
A Dispatches investigation has uncovered evidence of hardwood forests being chopped down to provide ‘green energy’ for the UK. Experts say unique habitats rich in wildlife are under threat as Britain’s power stations switch from burning coal to wood, writes BRENDAN MONTAGUE
Huge areas of hardwood forest in the state of Virginia are being chainsawed to create ‘biomass’ energy in Britain as the government attempts to reach targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in efforts to tackle climate change, an investigation by Channel 4 Dispatches has found.
A key part of government efforts to hit its green energy targets is to switch from generating electricity from burning coal to burning wood – or so-called biomass. It’s a policy that is costing taxpayers more than £700 million per year through a levy on their electricity bills.
The biomass industry and government argue that because wood is a renewable source of energy and trees can be replanted to reabsorb carbon dioxide this policy is good for the environment.
…
The power station giant claims that burning pellets instead of coal reduces carbon emissions by more than 80 percent.
However, Dispatches conducted a simple experiment at a laboratory at the University of Nottingham to compare the carbon dioxide emitted when burning wood pellets, similar to those used by Drax, instead of coal.
Dozens of scientists
It found that to burn an amount of wood pellets that would generate the same amount of electricity as coal it would actually produce roughly eight percent more carbon.
…
Lets hope the next Dispatches investigation is a wind turbine special titled “where have all our birds gone?“.
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It is an expensive exercise to ship wood pellets to England and the entire biomass debate being hijacked by the “carbon pollution” label. There are several aspects to “denuding” forests in the US.
https://vtdigger.org/2013/05/29/facing-climate-change-vermonts-biggest-polluters/
In the northern tier of the US and along the spine of the Appalachians forests have reclaimed much of what was cleared in the 19th century for small farms. In Vermont most of our hillsides were denuded by sheep and dairy cow grazing and are almost unrecognizable in pictures of the early 20th century. The accelerated movement off small farms since WWII has allowed the forest to reclaim all of that pasture. It is to the point where the Vermont State Agency of Natural Resources encourages land owners to keep some of the pasture cleared for wildlife habitat. It is an endless battle. I bush hog our old hill farm pasture every three years and it is not frequent enough and it really needs to be bush hogged every two years. Keeping the forest at bay is like trying to sweep back the ocean tide.
We have more than enough wood to keep two wood chip power plants operating at 95% capacity – the 50 MW McNeil power plant in Burlington and the 20 MW plant in Ryegate. The fracking revolution and rapid shift to inexpensive natural gas power plants across New England have undercut all previous generation power production facilities so that the wood chip power plants have been operating well above the cost of ISO New England’s natural gas plants and could not operate without subsidies. However, the February ISO New England briefing identifies the concern of depending on a single fuel type power supply.
https://www.iso-ne.com/static-assets/documents/2018/02/02272018_pr_presentation_state-of-the-grid_2018.pdf
http://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/green-mountain-power-cost-of-electricity-c-kwh
At the home owner level we do not have access to natural gas and the bizarre Vermont green politics try to prevent pipelines from being built for natural gas. We can use oil, propane or wood. Wood is the cheapest for the homeowner and we currently pay about $9-10/million BTU’s for wood heat. That requires moving 15,000 pounds of wood several times a year and is a component of my personal fitness regime. Heating oil is a high density fuel but has suffered from fuel contaminants so that the burner needs frequent maintenance. Propane is cleaner burning and with newer boilers 95% efficient but is a low density fuel and we changed over to propane several years ago. At this winter’s prices it would cost $22.90 /million BTU’s to heat our home.
Yes, wood heat is a lot less expensive than propane per heat unit. After accounting for the greater inefficiency of the wood heat compared to propane where does that put you comparing costs?
Vince: That is not an easy question to answer because like everything else the manufacturer’s efficiency claims are going to vary considerably based on the real world installation and temperature profiles. I use 75% as a rough estimate for judging my wood heating efficiency. In northern Vermont temperatures down to -30F to -35F are not unusual as we experienced this last winter during December and early January. In those temperatures the Buderus GB142 condensing boiler (95% claimed efficiency) cannot keep up and is used in backup mode. Brute force heat is the only way to keep up even with solid masonry walls insulated with expansion foam (12″ wall thickness) and new high efficiency windows. On the other hand heating with wood above the mid 30’s in the Jotul woodstove (73% claimed efficiency) and anything above freezing in the TARM furnace (above 80% claimed efficiency) is inefficient so I let the Buderus handle what little heating is required and to heat the domestic hot water above those temperatures – typically between the end of April and the end of September. As I write it is snowing with temperatures in the 30’s and the TARM just kicked on to heat the hot water tank. The cost savings of wood with the earlier backup oil burner was about $2,000/year. Even with the Buderus boiler’s higher efficiency and propane’s much lower price the cost saving burning wood is still about $1,200/year.
Heating with wood does require tinkering and in the coldest temperatures the wood stove and furnace consume seasoned hard wood at an extraordinary rate. The TARM is a 140,000 BTU wood gasification furnace with air forced into the combustion tunnel to achieve 1,800F combustion temperatures. The furnace is 2,600 pounds of steel with 72 gallons of water and the 3,200 lb mass is heated to 190F. During the bitterly cold days between December and March the baseboard hot water system has a lot of heated mass to draw on. The retained heat in the boiler heats the entire below grade basement zone to 63F with the boiler kicking on only when I bring loads of wood into the basement from the woodshed. The 50,000 BTU Jotul wood stove is on the main floor and is set into a 7’x7′ brick and stone fireplace, which when burned 24 hours a day in mid-winter, retains enough heat to coast through the night. The masonry mass raises the heating efficiency above the 73% quoted.On the coldest nights the main floor zone kicks on the TARM only a couple of times during the night.
This is a long answer to what appears to be a simple question but heating with wood in this climate is more of an art than what appears to be a straight forward construction and heating design problem.
Keith
A very large percentage of ‘Green’ energy is the credit taken for the renewable energy of pulp and paper plants that rely almost or wholly on burning of bark and wood waste created in the manufacture of paper. Using this as proof of ‘Green Energy’ when it is simply a common sense usage of what would otherwise be waste product is disingenuous at best and dishonest at worst.
As long as we turn our backs on nuclear power, we must burn something to generate the baseload power that we need to live our lives because of the facts of physics that the sun doesn’t shine 24×7 and the wind doesn’t always blow. It is just stupid to burn something that has a high value human use, like food, or competes with the production of those things, like GMO corn, when we could burn something that has low value instead. Like coal.
But the people who advocate that the earth is improved by sending ship-loads of ground up forest to a power plant 1/3 of the way around the world, are far more concerned about appearing to care about the planet than they are about caring for any other thing. Their virtue signals are of the highest quality known to humanity.
The Brita are still exploiting their colonies.
On a serious note; some level of forest disturbance is actually beneficial to mega-fauna such as deer, as it facilitates pioneer species growth favorable to browsing.
“Dozens of scientists
It found that to burn an amount of wood pellets that would generate the same amount of electricity as coal it would actually produce roughly eight percent more carbon.”
Carbon? The process does not produce carbon.
It may produce soot, CO2 and many more, but not so much carbon.
C is not equal CO2 but in the confused green minds.
Where is GreenPeace when you need some good arsonist activity, equipment sabotage, and some good old tire slashing?
Wait…they are using trees for wood?! Why can’t they just buy the wood at a lumber store like the rest of us?
(Slight variation of the “Why are they killing cattle for beef when they can just buy it at the grocery store” rant)
The stooopididy of the LEFTIST knows no bounds. Disgusting.
Drax… isn’t it Doctor ax? makes sense.
Now they have plenty of open space for solar farm. And, double bonus: since forest are know to prompt rain, those farm will have more sun.
Keep up the good work Drax!
The true goal of the climate change scam is to destroy the fossil fuel industry and all of it’s wealth. Once they have achieved that, expect a takeover of the remaining devalued assets by those pushing the climate change apocalypse scenario (Steyer, Soros, Buffett, Chinese Communist Oligarchs, etc). Then “new technology” will be discovered which will enable them to reintroduce the use of fossil fuels “safely”.
How do these murdered trees become ‘chips’?
The picture in the article is a pine tree being cut down. Here in Georgia we have about 25 million acres of commercial forests grown specifically to be harvested. Most of that is pine trees. If Drax is burning pine pellets, I have no issue with it.
Take away the consumers and those 25 million acres will be put to an alternate use. I’d much rather it stay forest.
I wondered if anyone would recognize a loblolly pine shown in the photo.
Is the vine poison ivy or is it Virginia creeper?
3 leaves and not looking woody, I’d bet on poison ivy and the itch I’m getting looking at the picture.
I’ve lived in Georgia since ’75. If I couldn’t recognize that bark by now they would kick me out of the state!
They are burning marsh hardwood trees. Pine cannot be used because it burns a lot dirtier than hardwood which is already dirtier than coal as it is.
They sent a reporter to Virginia who “saw” vast acres being cut? You can’t see such a thing, it is distributed all over the place. And why is it ok to cut pine but not hardwoods? Most hardwoods sprout from stumps or have seeds/seedlings and the forest pops back in no time. You cannot destroy a hardwood forest by cutting it down. I have seen stump sprouts greater than 10 feet tall (black locust) or 5 feet tall (oaks) in 1 year after cutting. There is a funny thing where it is sort of ok to cut trees to make furniture but not to make pellets but in either case you are making money.
Of course, who could have forseen that if you build a biomass plant people would need wood? Well, the enviros did because they imagined that a plant would be able to use just “waste” wood but there is no such thing. Tops take too much work to collect after logging and the waste at a sawmill or paper mill goes either to make particle board or they burn it to make electricity at the plant.
Most lumber for construction is mostly from managed tree farms while Drax is destroying previously untouched low land wildlife habitat and for no good reason at all. They’ve now begun clear cutting in Virginia and they won’t stop expanding until we stop them.
http://www.carbonbrief.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/biomassbritain3.png
ya but the costs of transportation across the Atlantic defeats the whole purpose. The English people near the Drax plant are paying big subsidies just to satisfy the EU and the greenies. We need more CO2 in the atmosphere NOT less.
Ecology is a chink in the alarmist message. Destruction of habitat and direct injury to wildlife from bio-fuels, solar and wind are real and easy to document. Sites like Grist and Thinkprogress are already against Drax destroying our forest land, even Carbonbrief looks ripe to come over to our way of thinking. Local chapters of Sierra Club and Audubon are beginning to raise their voices against the insanity too.
Here we have armchair ecologists who are waking up to painful realization that they allowed themselves to be hornswoggled into believing burning trees would somehow be better than hugging them.
Drax Power wood consumption and the absurd UK polices that created it is like the movie “The Little Shop of Horrors”, it’s a REAL menace to forest habitat and must be stopped.
Coal is what saved forests from complete destruction over 100 years ago, how can abandoning coal now not simply resurrect the same problem all over again? How long before this Drax madness turns your backyard into a Pennsylvania Desert? I don’t want to wait to find out; petition Trump and Congress to end all US wood exports destined to be used for fuel.
Bring in the bunnies and the polar bears to change perceptions.
Now flood the UK media with images of stumps and clear cut areas.
Sorry. Just can’t get past inane headlines about “murdering” plants.
I believe it’s called satire. An acquired taste, I know.
The guy in the picture with the chainsaw felling the tree has an awful undercut. Knows about as much falling trees as most of the lame commenters here today on biomass. Using Drax as the comparison for an entire global industry is stupid. Sure, transporting biomass pellets across an ocean to feed a coal plant that sits atop a coal mine is stupid. But that doesn’t make all biomass globally bad. Most of the pellets made are from wood waste that would have been up in smoke in Bee Hive burners 20 years ago. Just stupid…almost as stupid as the stupid CAGW’ers.
Pines are grown commercially like any other crop. As long as Drax is using pines we should have no problem. And clear cutting is no problem since the forest will be replanted and regrown.
When I’ve looked at the Drax pellet from the US bit, I couldn’t find any real CO2 savings if you included the harvesting, processing and shipping and not just burning a lower density fuel in England.
Drax is not using pines. They’re cutting hardwoods growing in wetland habitats – the same areas that most of us are not allowed to cut down even when they are growing on our own property such as here in Massachusetts; AKA “conservation land”. Such swampy marshy places were among the last refuges left untouched for wildlife to be left alone but then along came the lie that CO2 controls global temperature.
The hypocrisy of the left is them screaming out of one side of their mouth that global warming is caused by more CO2 and that it is causing more wildfires – and out of the other side that burning trees as fuel will reduce CO2.
The idea is downright asinine and far more expensive than coal anyway. If not for UK government subsidies few people could afford the cost of electricity from wood and this “idea” would already have died on its own.
…..And the subsidies are contributing to budget deficits…..which will have to be repaid from economies that have been ransacked by applied stupidity.
If the man in the photo is actually falling that tree then he is definitely muti-tasking. Suiciding and destroying the chain saw simaltaneously.
” destroying the chain saw” Looks like it was staged for the photograph – no smoke & no chips.
Fee-fi-fo-fum,
I smell the blood of an Englishman,
Be he living, or be he dead,
I’ll grind his bones to mix my bread.
P.S. They even (wilfully) pay a TV tax without much protest. Fee-fi-fo-fum…
Why is any of this a surprise to anyone?
The Greenbeans/CAGWers really ARE that stupid, stupid enough to believe that burning wood is less harmful in any way at all than using fossil fuels or nuclear power, and this proves it. I do not believe that there is one working brain cell in the bunch.
So why is anyone AT ALL surprised by the news that these ridiculously uninformed, intentionally ignorant people finally woke out of their fog?
Nothing new.In Easteurope the last untouched forests where cut for pellets.
Pellets was an idea to made a long foe with the rest of woods from factorys etc.
But the “Greens” think:Oh Wood is so GREEN,we must heating with it instead of gas.
Channel 4 is asking for trouble again
The Great Global Warming Swindle.
What about the baby trees slaughtered in this genocide? Who will save the children?
I know of examples her in the US where mature forests were taken down for solar panels.
The portions of the southeastern US suitable for farming were largely deforested by the mid-nineteenth century, with wood serving as the primary fuel for river boats and trains and providing the revenue needed to clear vast swaths of land. After the switch to coal, much of the southeast slowly returned to forest land with a significant percentage becoming softwood plantations.
We then spent a generation trying to save old-growth stands on ridge lines all along the eastern US, only to see the wind turbine industry clear them to build service roads, electric connections and the ugly noisy towers precisely along the ridges which were preserved. Meanwhile demand from Drax and similar schemes lead to increased cutting of both softwood and hardwood lots. Someone needs to save the planet from those who would destroy it in the cause of saving it.