Dear all, I received many expresions of interest, and one content-rich reply, to my earlier post in which an investigative journalist critiqued Europe's wood-burning power plants. I heard from Daniel Clark, a doctoral student in biology at Rutgers who wrote a master's thesis on wood pellets and power plants. In a follow-up email I pushed a bit for a "bottom line," which is the first of the two messages below.
-Life-cycle analysis is important. It sounds like some of these European plants may be no better than using fossil fuel plants in terms of whole life-cycle carbon emissions. -There are promising technologies in development that have lower carbon emissions though their economic viability may be debatable. It depends on highly on location, type of plant, type of biomass burned, and what the alternatives are. -As anyone who spends much time working on GCC will repeat - we're not going to use one technology to fix this mess (climate change). This is one technology that has shown promise in some areas and shouldn't be discounted. Pragmatically too, non-renewable energy sources are definitely finite in a specifically measureable way. Woody biomass is renewable and may become a more viable option if oil were to run out even if it's got the same carbon footprint. Dear Paul Steinberg, My name is Daniel Clark, I'm a current PhD candidate in Ecology and Evolution at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ. A colleague forwarded your email to me. I did my MS in Forest and Natural Resource Management at SUNY-ESF and wrote my thesis on the viability of growing short-rotation coppice willow in the Northeastern US on marginal land. I'm not sure what exactly your interest is in term of reactions but I've read the article and would be happy to react a bit. -The analysis of C releases is within the range of what I've read regarding this topic. Europe's wood-burning plants may not be as good as purported. -One thing this article is a bit light on is life-cycle analysis. I've seen some reports that paints these plants in a bit nicer light when you take into account the entire life cycle of non-renewable sources. This would of course include extraction, refining, transport, etc. -these make the pellet plants look better to some extent. -Modern pellet burning plants in the US are more efficient than these (last five years, mostly pilot programs). They're highly scale-able which makes transport essentially nil. -My study looked at short-rotation willow for pellets which some of these plants can run on. This means the willows grow "bushy" and you can harvest on a 2-7 year cycle. This mitigates lots of the issues this article talks about since the rotation is so short. Additionally these use mostly marginal farmland that was previously used for grazing and studies indicate that short rotation coppicing adds carbon to the soil compared to alternative uses. -- Paul F. Steinberg Malcolm Lewis Chair in Sustainability and Society Professor of Political Science & Environmental Policy Harvey Mudd College http://www.hmc.edu/steinberg Department of Humanities, Social Sciences, & the Arts 301 East Platt Boulevard Harvey Mudd College Claremont, CA 91711 tel. 909-607-3840 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "gep-ed" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
