US Forest Products Industry Nervous About Biomass-Fueled Generators
by John Laumer, Philadelphia on 09.25.08
A biomass-burning power plant in Scotland. Image credit:EcoWarrior, Biomass Burner.
Wood-Fired Electricity; What's Not To Like?
Create new incentives for a massive industry to compete for a primary natural resource - trees in this case - and costs for existing consumers of trees will go up, as will adverse environmental impacts. Check out the title of this news release which appeared today on PR Newswire (via Yahoo): New RISI Biomass Study Finds Government Renewable Energy Mandates Would Lead to Unsustainable Harvests.
Seeing The Fuel For The Trees: An Upside Down View Of Forests
Is the pulp and paper industry going all tree-hugger over biomass burning power plants? Will lumbermen stand and defend the stands? Not quite. But, an industry market report on the future of biomass burning begins to address a critical question: what are the unintended consequences of biomass burning? Corn-base ethanol all over again?
The Emerging Biomass Industry: Impact on Woodfiber Markets -- published by RISI, the leading information provider for the global forest products industry, found that federal and state mandates, if fully implemented, would lead to over-harvesting of forests in the United States and are therefore unrealistic.
A full copy of the referenced study costs more than you or I will spend on TP in a lifetime. But, the idea of an industry study defending American trees against the prospective onslaught of utility-paid loggers, spurred on by 'well intended' government incentives, is rich indeed.
What preceding trends underpin the concern?
American forest products firms have, in recent years, unloaded millions of acres of forest lands - lands bought or accumulated via M&A. Much of these heritage forest land holdings went to real estate developers (now dead in their tracks with the financial system meltdown), and land speculators (short on cash to pay for it) who will now be wanting to recover some value. Along comes "biomass burning".
If wood-fired electricity becomes popular, advertised as a climate friendly alternative to coal, given incentives by government, and accelerated by the booster rocket of a carbon cap and trade mechanism, demand for trees could reasonably be anticipated to drive the price of pulp wood out of reach of traditional industries. Hence the study.
Watch for land speculators and real estate interests to lobby for biomass burning incentives in Q1-2009. And, get ready to hug them trees.
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Wood-fired electric electricity sounds like a terrible land use plan. Its is like solar, only many times less efficient and less sustainable. If we're going to cut down trees, we'd better use them for something better than electricity.
Using wood for fuel on a large scale is a very, very real threat. Deforestation has caused more than one society to collapse in the past, and like it or not we're still dependent on wood for a lot of things today. And if wood-fired electricity spreads globally, then we have CO2, soil, water, and oxygen-generation problems to think about as deforestation rates soar.
What hasn't caught on is that if we're going to keep consuming energy like we do today, nature isn't going to provide it for us in a ready-to-use form like fossil fuels or biomass. We're gonna have to do the work ourselves. It can be done, but this isn't one of the feasible or desirable options.
I think that the main benefits of forest fueled biomass are in the use of waste products from other manufacturing sites.
but the cost of oil changes the game
Bad Idea!! The "waste" that will be collected and turned into biofuel is what used to return many needed nutrients to the soil. By removing every single part of a tree from a forest you will strip all the nutrients from the soil and won't be able to grow anthing on the site.
Wood waste products from other manufacturing sites are used as primary inputs for composite wood product manufacturing such as: particle board, MDF and Hardboard.
There are currently fiber shortages for some of these composite wood manufacturers due to the down-turn in tradtional lumber and plywood manufacturing, driven by the housing crisis.
Another stream for this wood waste to be diverted to will only force the CWP manufacturing industry into depending more on chipping full logs for their raw materials.
Biomass burning will be Corn-base ethanol all over again.
having grown up in a farming comunity Bio Mass of straw and grass does give something back to the soil. But there are hundreds of tons of hay and straw bails across the country that sit in fields and rot. I believe if someone could figure out how to produce small community based power generation. With a reason besides being green for farmers to haul straw to the plant. I am not saying end research on solar and wind this all needs to work together.