Get Your Heat From Peat
by Bonnie Alter, London on 05. 8.08
The rising price of gas is leading to all kinds of changes: bicycles instead of cars, camels instead of tractors and now peat to burn as central heating. In the Outer Hebrides, Scotland they are reviving the ancient tradition of cutting peat to fire their stoves. More people are starting to cut their own and are re-installing their formerly bricked up peat-burning stoves. As a result, orders for the tools used for cutting peat have risen; 40 cutters have been sold this year as opposed to 6 last year. A blacksmith whose father started making the cutters in 1920 said ""This year they've really snowballed, I reckon it's the price of fuel. With prices going up, I was thinking, oh well, they may be wanting peat irons this year; then it turned out true enough. People were saying to me, 'I'll cut peat this year to help out'."
The cutting of peat on the May holiday weekend was once a central activity, as whole families would join together to cut it and stack it and dry it for use as fuel during the winter months. Then electricity came to Scotland's remote outposts and people threw away their peat cutters and turned up the heat. There are environmental issues; now many peatlands are protected because of the endangered species living in the fields and many of the areas are already depleted. But with the price of gas doubled, it is expected that hundreds of people will take to the hills this week to do it, the way generations of villagers did in the past. :: Guardian
Peat can be viewed as a non-renewable resource due to the length of time it takes to regenerate. People are destroying beautiful land, pushing some flora and fauna to the brink, as well as destroying large carbon sinks. Peat burning should be frowned upon, not glorified as a old tradition.
Sweet suffering jellulah, what is this article ? Happy villagers sitting on their turf/peat. As someone who spent his childhood cutting turf in Ireland, let me give you some news:
Peat is one of the dirtiest fuels known to man.
Basically its, bad coal, really bad coal. We have some ridiculous peat-powered electricity stations here in Ireland ( one of results of our own version of pork-politics ) and the stats are over 1000gCO2e/kWH, thats way worse than gas, worse than oil, even worse than coal.
This is a disaster story not a "Oh look at those happy scots reviving their traditions" story.
Have a look at this article for a more balance discussion. You cut off the heather topping to get to the peat leaving a bare surface which then leads to the same effect as permafrost melting in the tundra regions, i.e. even more emissions.
/ Colm
Doesn't this produce a lot of CO2?
"At 106 g CO2/MJ, the carbon dioxide emissions of peat are higher than those of coal (at 94.6 g CO2/MJ) and natural gas (at 56.1) (IPCC)" -Wikipedia Article
Shouldn't we be aiming for less peat use since it uses more CO2 than natural gas does? It also destroys wetlands. Ireland is moving from using peat power plants to using more clean energy sources to prevent this destruction and carbon emissions. I don't see how this is positive.
Burning Peat is a HORRIBLE idea, it is a NON renewable resource as it is, and if we start mining it even faster it will make it worse.
Peat bogs take thousands of years to grow and fill in, and in doing so trap tons of carbon, so ripping these bogs out of the ground is helping the global warming, if not as much, then close to the rate of heating those houses with electricity. As when you cut/burn it those thousands of years of carbon retention is then released back into the environment. In fact cutting peat is so bad that the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, England (http://www.kew.org/) has quit using Peat for their plantings and have switched to composted cow manure and Coir (coconut shreds) because it works better then Peat for planting and is does not have the wildlife and greenhouse gas problems that Peat does. For more information check out: Grow!USA (http://www.grow-usa.org/)
Peat is, oddly enough, a renewable resource, but that doesn't make burning it good, as the above posts note. Making new peat may actually contribute to minimizing CO2 levels, as a piece in this week's New Scientist points out:
"Eight years ago, Roger Fujii of the US Geological Survey undertook a study to see how quickly it might be possible to rebuild the peat. The answer appears to be even faster than it was lost: up to 10 centimetres per year once a marsh has had a few years to mature. That offers the prospect of a substantial amount of carbon sequestration. Fujii and Bergamaschi calculate that reflooding the whole delta and converting it back to tules - a form of bulrush - would be equivalent to swapping all of California's SUVs for high-efficiency hybrids."
But burning it is obviously the reverse of this, and a bad idea on many fronts.
Peat is a precursor to coal, but burns less efficiently, so it ends up expending more CO2 per watt of energy than coal does. Burning and mining peat sucks. This is really bad news, not good news.
thank you so much treehuggers for your negative response to this post... it saves me from a morning rant :)
Jeez guys,
How in hell can you write about this as if it were a good thing.
Peat bogs trap CO2 (though they probably generate methane too.)
I believe most of the negative comments made are verifiably, true. I, only, wish to add that many, many of the Scots and Irish and Brits, in rural areas are very, if not extremely, poor, compared, with people in the States, in certain areas; and, there are literally, (or were) thousands of acres of Boglands (in the three countries perhaps a hundred thousand acres) and in many places they are very, if not extremely deep, in the northern latitudes (islands) and the Bogs a shared Communal Townland, Resource, for anyone, in most cases, free, to a certain limit per season(area)and hence, it will be very, difficult to keep the average poor villager, who is, now, again, hard pressed, from heating his home. The slant on the negatives above and their analysis was somewhat misdirected. It is more a case, of most, of these cash-strapped villagers, not doiong it, for the environment, necessarily, so much, as that, the cost of electricity is more dear than the free Peat, hence, a ready, quick saving, solution.