How to Make Biomass Energy Sustainable Again

A very interesting article which came out a couple of years ago about coppicing, pollarding, hedgerows, and the various sustainable historical uses for these types of manmade landscapes:

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/09/how-to-make-biomass-energy-sustainable-again.html

...as pretty much always, this text from the Low Tech Magazine / No Tech Magazine websites is excellently researched and clearly written, giving plenty of good points for reflecting about things that surround us or used to surround us.

Hope other people also find it useful and enjoyable!

Welcome to permies, Pavle!

As with all things that man involves himself with, it can be done well, or poorly. I'd *really* like to get the message out about doing this well - polycultures rather than mono-culture and using the right technique on the right land, and making sure we keep "giving back" by feeding the soil, while using the trees to heat our homes. There were coppiced systems in England that degraded the land when the human pressure was too great. When it was done well, the wild bird/amphibian populations that the ecosystem supported was incredible.

Oregon has 17 biomass electric generating facilities and 21 facilities that use biomass for heat (hospitals/schools) I'm on the fence with Biomass since what I have read it is creating more pollution than coal.  https://nltimes.nl/2019/10/30/biomass-produce-much-emissions-coal-natural-gas-study   In addition the infrastructure used to transport the material to a proposed plant in our area is mind boggling. Water useage is off the charts. In some areas it might be an effective and intelligent use but in the proposed facility in out little burg I just can't agree that in this case it is a smart choice.

Robert Ray wrote:Oregon has 17 biomass electric generating facilities and 21 facilities that use biomass for heat (hospitals/schools) I'm on the fence with Biomass since what I have read it is creating more pollution than coal.  https://nltimes.nl/2019/10/30/biomass-produce-much-emissions-coal-natural-gas-study   In addition the infrastructure used to transport the material to a proposed plant in our area is mind boggling. Water useage is off the charts. In some areas it might be an effective and intelligent use but in the proposed facility in out little burg I just can't agree that in this case it is a smart choice.

I agree - many of these sorts of things aren't producing the raw material inputs sustainably. Certainly, if they're using fossil-fuel based transportation and harvesting equipment.

We've still got a very large, "bigger is better" mindset in Industrialized Nations. Smaller, distributed power generation, where what in large plants would be labelled as "waste heat" can be used to heat a cluster of homes and greenhouses, and where the inputs can be coppiced wood from a polyculture of tree varieties, rather than a mono-culture of tree clones, could have very different numbers than examples in the article you provided the link to.  For example, trees have been shown to clean the air of many forms of pollution, so if the coppiced woodland that is supplying biomass for the cluster of houses is located around the houses and mini-power plant, the trees might be part of the solution.

Along with the "bigger is better" mindset, houses have increased in size dramatically since the 1950's driven by cheap energy.  I'm not suggesting that people should all feel pressured to live in 200 sq foot tiny homes as I know that many people would see that as a hardship. However I've got several friends living in 3000 square foot homes with just 2-3 people and a *lot* of wasted space that's being heated or cooled.

So coppicing is one tool, which used creatively, could improve sustainability, but we need to look at the big picture, and consider this just one piece of a more sustainable future.

You'd need to have a very poorly commissioned boiler to have the emissions profile of wood come out worse than coal. Even if that were the case and the plant were belching smoke, at least there would not be any heavy metals or radioactive isotopes coming out unless the wood they're using is badly contaminated.

Particulate output and NOx can be managed by adjusting the combustion parameters. This is not too different from what we do in RMH technology: by optimising the burning of wood gases in a well-oxygenated and turbulent environment, we can get very close to the ideal of only CO2 and water leaving the stack.

Also, the accounting in that Dutch study is shoddy. The carbon in biomass is atmospheric and burning it simply keeps it in the cycle. We can't do a 1:1 comparison of atmospheric and fossil sources, despite what the coal and gas lobbyists want us to believe.