Full Thread: Renewable Energy
View Single Post
Old February 19th, 2020 #13
Dawn Cannon
Senior Member
 
Dawn Cannon's Avatar
 
Join Date: Jul 2010
Location: The Vampire Ball
Posts: 6,411
Default Europe’s renewable energy policy is built on burning American trees

In the lowland forests of the American southeast, loblolly pines and cypress trees are grabbing carbon dioxide from the air right now. Using power from the sun, they release the oxygen and bind the carbon, building trunks, barks, and leaves.

But much of that carbon won’t stay there. As it turns out, millions of tons of wood from these forests each year are being shipped across the Atlantic, and burned in power plants in countries like the UK and the Netherlands, in the name of slowing climate change.

As they steadily wean themselves off coal, European Union nations are banking on wood energy, or “biomass,” to meet their obligations under the Paris climate agreement.

That’s because 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.

Burning carbon to store carbon?



There are few bigger players in the biomass industry than Drax Group, whose flagship power plant in the north of England sucks up nearly a quarter of global wood pellet production, about two-thirds of it from the US. The UK has bought big into biomass, and Drax powers 10 percent of the British electric grid, in large part thanks to massive government subsidies: about $1.2 billion a year.

Burning wood in its former coal plants, said Drax CEO Andy Koss, means 80 percent savings in carbon dioxide when compared to coal. “And in 25 to 30 years’ time, we’re delivering carbon savings.”

The carbon neutrality argument of Drax and others in the wood pellet industry rests on a couple of ideas: first, that the carbon burned in the pellets can be brought back to Earth in the form of new trees; second, that the wood burned is industry waste that would be lost to the air anyway.

continued:
https://www.vox.com/science-and-heal...ellets-biomass

Last edited by Dawn Cannon; February 23rd, 2020 at 12:11 PM.