Category: biomass

Europe’s Renewable Energy Policy is Built on Burning American Trees

Published on by sunshinehours11 Comment

More CO2 thanks to the EU. As the EU says: CO2 bad … unless we say otherwise.

in 2009, the EU committed itself to 20 percent renewable energy by 2020, and put biomass on the renewables list. Several countries, like the United Kingdom, subsidized the biomass industry, creating a sudden market for wood not good enough for the timber industry. In the United States, Canada, and Eastern Europe, crooked trees, bark, treetops, and sawdust have been pulped, pressed into pellets, and heat-dried in kilns. By 2014, biomass accounted for 40 percent of the EU’s renewable energy, by far the largest source. By 2020, it’s projected to make up 60 percent, and the US plans to follow suit.

Fueling this boom is a simple, intuitive idea: that biomass is both renewable and “carbon neutral,” and a way to keep an economy built on burning fossil fuels humming along.

But a cadre of scientists and policy activists are now pushing back, saying that biomass energy rests on deceptive accounting. Rather than being carbon neutral, biomass is liquidating millions of tons of irreplaceable carbon stocks in the midst of a climate crisis already out of control.

Image by Javier Zarracina/Vox. 2019.

If you believe CO2 is bad and more CO2 is worse:

The analysis was later confirmed by a colleague at MIT, John Sterman, who did the math, and confirmed that burning wood today would worsen climate change, “at least through the year 2100 — even if wood displaces coal, the most carbon-intensive fuel.”

More here

 

Climate warming experiment finds unexpected results

Published on by sunshinehours1Leave a comment

It’s always a surprise when they actually do experiments on the main tenets of the church of climate change.

Tropical forests store about a third of Earth’s carbon and about two-thirds of its above-ground biomass. Most climate change models predict that as the world warms, all of that biomass will decompose more quickly, which would send a lot more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. But new research presented at the American Geophysical Union’s 2018 Fall Meeting contradicts that theory

Stephanie Roe, an ecology Ph.D. student at the University of Virginia, measured the rate of decomposition in artificially warmed plots of  in Puerto Rico. She found biomass in the warmed plots broke down more slowly than samples from a control site that wasn’t warmed.

Her results indicate that as the climate warms, forest litter could pile up on the ground, instead of breaking down into the soil. Less decomposition means less carbon dioxide released back into the atmosphere. But it also means less carbon taken up by the soil, where it’s needed to fuel microbial processes that help plants grow.

The money quote:

But instead of seeing faster rates of decomposition, Roe observed the warming produced a drying effect in the plots, which slowed decomposition. “What we found is actually it went the other way because moisture was impacted so much,” Roe said. Moisture in the litter from the treatment sites was reduced by an average of 38 percent.

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2019-01-climate-unexpected-results.html#jCp

Bioenergy Climate Bomb

Published on by sunshinehours1Leave a comment

Trees are not the solution to high CO2 despite what “scientists” say.

I’m not worried about CO2, but I am worried about the governments and people who lie and say burning trees is low-CO2. Some people get it.

KATOWICE, Poland – Today, it’s being called the bomb that could explode the United Nations carbon climate emissions accounting system ­– and possibly destabilize the global climate.

When first conceived, this bomb was thought to be a boon: turn trees and woody biomass into wood pellets. Burn that woody biomass at power plants instead of coal to generate electricity. Plant more trees where the wood was harvested to offset the emissions produced by burning pellets. Then call it green and celebrate a sustainable way to reduce coal emissions.

Some 20 years ago, bioenergy produced from biomass was seen as the next new thing, and a valuable sustainable resource. And because it was deemed renewable, countries that burned biomass – wood pellets instead of coal – would not be required to count those carbon emissions. All that carbon dioxide was believed to be absorbed by the new tree seedlings.

For the purpose of United Nations carbon accounting policy, established under the Kyoto Protocol, the burning of biomass was established as, and is still considered, carbon neutral.

But in recent years, the supposed benign process has been revealed through a series of scientific studies and reports to be a dangerous fraud. It is the ticking bomb underlying the UN accounting system; a potentially large-scale hidden, unreported source of carbon emissions that helps developed countries to meet their Paris pledges.

Read the rest

You can’t be a climate leader and burn trees for electricity

Published on by sunshinehours1Leave a comment

It appears the UK has realized that biomass (imported wood pellets) produces more CO2 than coal.

“Recently, the UK government tightened its carbon intensity requirement for any biomass-burning power plants seeking future support from its Contracts for Difference subsidy program. This was a crucial first step, as my colleague and I described in detail here.

The new emission limit is now set at 29 kg of CO2 equivalent per MWh. This effectively rules out the use of imported wood pellets for electricity production for new UK biomass plants. In justifying the change, the UK government says that “continuing to apply the existing GHG [greenhouse gas] threshold would lead to GHG emissions [for biomass electricity] significantly above the projected UK grid average.”

Translation: burning wood pellets for electricity is bad for the climate and is not part of a credible solution to decarbonizing electricity grids. Coming from the world’s largest importer of biomass, and a country that spent over $1 billion last year alone subsidizing this industry, this is a big deal.

Unfortunately this is not retroactive and DRAX keeps burning massive amountsof imported wood pellets.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a big fan of wind/solar. I just think it is a giant con to think wood pellets are “carbon neutral”.

Palm Oil Catastrophe

Published on by sunshinehours1Leave a comment

Beware of environmentalists coming up with brilliant plans to save the world. And fuels with “bio” in front of the name.

… in the mid-2000s, Western nations, led by the United States, began drafting environmental laws that encouraged the use of vegetable oil in fuels — an ambitious move to reduce carbon dioxide and curb global warming. But these laws were drawn up based on an incomplete accounting of the true environmental costs. Despite warnings that the policies could have the opposite of their intended effect, they were implemented anyway, producing what now appears to be a calamity with global consequences.

The tropical rain forests of Indonesia, and in particular the peatland regions of Borneo, have large amounts of carbon trapped within their trees and soil. Slashing and burning the existing forests to make way for oil-palm cultivation had a perverse effect: It released more carbon. A lot more carbon. NASA researchers say the accelerated destruction of Borneo’s forests contributed to the largest single-year global increase in carbon emissions in two millenniums, an explosion that transformed Indonesia into the world’s fourth-largest source of such emissions.

 

Biomass : Accounting Fiction / Accounting Fraud

Published on by sunshinehours11 Comment

The big fraud:

It takes more than 30 tractor-trailer loads of wood a day to feed Nova Scotia Power’s Port Hawkesbury biomass plant when it’s running.

But according to the province’s new cap-and-trade carbon-pricing plan, nothing comes out of the facility’s stacks.

The plan classifies biomass as a carbon-neutral way to create electricity or heat.

The province is taking its cue from federal government policy, along with that of the United States and European Union.

All are attempting to meet promises they made at a much-touted 2015 summit in Paris to reduce carbon emissions to a level that would ideally slow global warming.

The problem is that a tremendous amount of greenhouse gases come out of a biomass plant – often more per unit of electricity than if you’d burned coal.

“It’s an accounting fiction,” John Sterman, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s System Dynamics Group, said of the carbon neutrality of biomass.

“I’d go so far as to call it an accounting fraud.”

Last January, Sterman released a model for analyzing the life-cycle carbon emission of biomass.

He joined a chorus of scientists warning that in the rush to be seen to be doing something to reduce carbon emissions by subsidizing biomass, the western world will actually make them worse.

Read the rest …

 

Wood chips are piled up in preparation for burning at Nova Scotia Power’s biomass-burning power generating station at Point Tupper.

BC and Carbon Taxes and Wood Pellets And Green Ain’t Necessarily Renewable

Published on by sunshinehours12 Comments

The EPA in the USA has followed the EU in declaring wood pellets burning to be carbon neutral.

Even DesmogBlog is throwing a hissy fit.

Me … I’m sad and I’m also laughing. For years the greens have deliberately confused people and tried to make it seem like green = renewable.

They used terms like biomass and biofuel etc etc. And made it seem like it was green and way better than coal.

Burning wood for electric power may be renewable but it isn’t green. It produces 2x the CO2 as natural gas and more than coal in many cirumstances.

I live in British Columbia … a place with lots of trees and a carbon tax. But guess what, our public power utility subsidizes the burning of trees for power.

A couple of miles from me is a pulp mill. They built a 55MW power plant burning wood waste and BC Hydro buys power from them at subsidized rates.

Here’s an article on one of the small projects replacing diesel with wood waste gasification.  This is the sad sad paragraph:

That adds up to greenhouse gas reductions of about 400 tonnes a year, and is in-line with BC Hydro’s ongoing efforts to help remote B.C. communities – too far away from the electricity system to be serviced by the 98% clean energy generated by BC Hydro – reduce their fossil fuel emissions.

Its sad because they can only claim GHG reductions if they lie and claim wood is “carbon neutral” and produces no net CO2.

800MW of power from burning wood etc (Ignore the waste heat stations) Here is a list.

Here is a sample:

800MW!!!!

Huge amounts of CO2 and particulate matter.

If BC shut those down, we could skip the carbon tax!

 

The Biomass Scam

Published on by sunshinehours1Leave a comment

The EU is behind the biomass scam where coal is replaced with wood and wood produces more CO2 than coal.

The EU was also behind the diesel scam which has made the air filthier.

“The British government pushed to weaken EU controls on biomass energy in December, even though the technology will undermine efforts to contain global warming for up to half a century, according to research released today.

Despite its imminent Brexit, the UK successfully rewrote a proposal to almost quadruple the potential size of wood burning plants before they had to meet efficiency criteria, according to documents obtained by Unearthed, and shared exclusively with Climate Home News.

The win for Whitehall’s lobby offensive – in alliance with Poland and Spain – was pushed through in a ministerial revision to the renewable energy directive in December.

Shortly before it was approved, a group of high profile climate scientists warned the directive’s biomass articles were “a critical flaw” in the proposal, and would accelerate climate change.

This was because the proposal tolerated the cutting down and burning of whole trees, a process that releases more CO2 into the atmosphere than replanted trees can absorb for decades, if not centuries.”

 

“Because burned pellets emit carbon at a faster speed than decomposing forest material, the paper finds that burning them creates more net emissions – when measured against their “alternative fate” as decomposing twigs and branches.

Mary Booth, the report’s author and director of the Partnership for Policy Integrity, a campaign group opposed to biomass, told CHN that counting biomass smokestack emissions – which tend to be greater than coal per megawatt-hour – was a more representative way of tallying net emissions than current assumptions of carbon neutrality.

“Scenarios that hold down greenhouse gas emissions to avoiding dangerous temperature rise require CO2 emissions to peak in the next ten to twenty years,” she said. “However, this analysis shows that wood-burning power plants burning green chips and wood pellets will inject a lot of extra CO2 into the atmosphere just in [that] period when it is most urgent to reduce emissions.”

The paper finds that cumulative net emissions from residue pellet-burning will also increase over a 40–50 year period, though less steeply.”

http://www.climatechangenews.com/2018/02/21/documents-reveal-uk-push-water-eu-biomass-regulations/

 

EU Will Be Razing Whole Forests to Save Them Or Something

Published on by sunshinehours12 Comments

The EU will be razing whole forests and burning them to produce lots of CO2 … all in the name of saving the planet from global warming.

“Today’s European Parliament vote, like yesterday’s marine vote, delivers yet another dramatic death blow to our living planet. Razing whole forests to the ground to feed our energy use releases vastly increased carbon into our atmosphere; carbon which would otherwise be naturally stored in the forest. Converting land into biofuel plantations means wiping out nature and evicting local communities. This is a crime when well-located wind and solar power offer viable alternatives. Energy from biomass should be limited to waste and residues, not whole trees, forests and food. Such perverted outcomes do not help in the fight against climate change.”

I don’t believe the part about solar and wind offering viable alternatives.

And I don’t necessarily believe more CO2 is a bad thing.

But I do belive that burning whole forests is stupid and amazingly hypocitical when the AGW cult keeps telling  us CO2 is bad and fossil fuels are evil.

Coal is cheap. Natural gas is cheap and cleaner than coal. And produces less CO2 than coal and forests.

 

Biofuels = Centuries Long Increase in CO2

Published on by sunshinehours1Leave a comment

This paper is a pdf.

Biofules, biomass , wood pellets et al are a disaster if you believe more CO2 will cause Global Warming.

Does replacing coal with wood lower CO2 emissions?
Dynamic lifecycle analysis of wood bioenergy
John D. Sterman1
Lori Siegel2
Juliette N. Rooney-Varga3

 

In sum, although bioenergy from wood can lower long-run CO2 concentrations compared to
fossil fuels, its first impact is an increase in CO2, worsening global warming over the critical
period through 2100 even if the wood offsets coal, the most carbon-intensive fossil fuel.
Declaring that biofuels are carbon neutral as the EU and others have done, erroneously
assumes forest regrowth quickly and fully offsets the emissions from biofuel production and
combustion. The neutrality assumption is not valid because it ignores the transient, but
decades to centuries long, increase in CO2 caused by biofuels.