# Is wood burning as carbon neutral as many of us think?



## semipro (Oct 23, 2015)

An interesting take on the environmentally sustainability of wood burning.
http://reports.climatecentral.org/pulp-fiction/1/
One interesting quote
"...But chopping down trees — many of them in the U.S. — and burning the wood heats the planet more quickly than burning coal."

I haven't read this thoroughly, just tossing it out there.


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## Jags (Oct 23, 2015)

I find this article to be a bit biased.  They make is sound like a tree will live forever and never keel over and die, thus releasing the same stuff it would if it was used for fuel (yes, I am aware that the process of "burning" the wood results in other compounds, I am talking about the "renewable" argument). There is no argument that it DOES take dino juice to get the wood to the generator.

If this article was intended to convince us that we should not use wood as fuel - it does a very weak job of it.


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## PWash (Oct 23, 2015)

the only fact i saw was that burning wood outputs 20% more CO2 than coal for equivalent heat output.  so what.  its irrelevant that a coal stove has higher efficiency than a wood stove.  pseudo science...


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## spirilis (Oct 23, 2015)

The overall logic makes sense to me.  It's only carbon neutral so long as you've reserved enough acreage to grow back and sequester the carbon at a rate equal or higher than you're using it.  I get a hunch none of those power plants or their suppliers are doing that.  So wood just becomes another unsustainably harvested resource, on par with fossil fuels.

(Of course, as a criticism for the video, they make reference to it taking 18 years to regrow trees that were cut down..... without quantifying context, i.e. 18 years to regrow how many trees that provided electricity for how long?)

I feel that high-tech energy such as electricity is better produced by high-tech means like solar, nuclear, etc... while biomass should be used more efficiently and directly, as folks here do with woodstoves but others have explored with rocket stoves, etc.  The whole idea of chipping up our trees (and shipping them overseas) to feed some hungry boilers whose energy is partly lost to the atmosphere, partly lost in transmission line losses, and what's left is sometimes used haphazardly with little regard to its real necessity just makes my head shake.  Europeans had to address this issue under fire (well, under snow & ice more like) centuries ago with masonry heaters and coppice forestry practices... shame they've forgotten much of it since.


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## Corey (Oct 23, 2015)

PWash said:


> the only fact i saw was that burning wood outputs 20% more CO2 than coal for equivalent heat output. ...



Maybe I'll have some time to sit down and read the article at some point, though I don't see how they can make the claim above.  Considering essentially ALL energy from coal comes from carbon and at least SOME energy in wood comes from hydrogen, about the only way for that to be true would be consider very high efficiency from burning coal and very low efficiency from burning wood. 

The way I look at it, a tree is going to grow, taking carbon from the air, then die and decay, putting that carbon back.  If I burn the tree for heat, I may speed that process a bit, but over a "geologic fraction of a microsecond"...say a couple hundred years to you and me, it's a stable cycle either way.  Same for any other plant...even (gulp!) corn.

With a different fossil fuel (likely natural gas, here), the tree is still doing its' live-die-decay cycle, but I pull extra carbon out of the ground and burn that, too.  100% of that carbon is 'extra' added to the atmosphere.


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## PWash (Oct 23, 2015)

Corey said:


> I don't see how they can make the claim above.  Considering essentially ALL energy from coal comes from carbon and at least SOME energy in wood comes from hydrogen,.


i think the reason for the efficiency difference is that coal is pure hydrocarbon chains, which can be  completely burnt, but wood contains water (which cant be burnt) and cellulose which is an inferior hyrdocarbon chain to the ones in coal.  
still, efficiency is irrelevant when considering carbon cycle of the forest that you described.


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## Snagdaddy (Oct 23, 2015)

A cursory inspection of the funding page at climatecentral.org reveals some of the typical major players pushing the climate hype for their own gain.

http://www.climatecentral.org/what-we-do/funding/

Names like Rockefeller, Eric Schmidt (of google), The World Bank, and the Nature Conservancy, just to name a few.  Sorry to bring some of you down, but this really should be looked at more closely before we wind up devoid of access to resources, including wood.   Global taxes and global corporate government (a scientific dictatorship)  are the overt and covert goals of these conglomerates, who claim to be unbiased and scientifically objective in the same breath.


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## TradEddie (Oct 23, 2015)

Snagdaddy said:


> ...some of the typical major players pushing the climate hype for their own gain.



Since the OP report was saying coal wasn't necessarily worse than wood, your point makes no sense. Reports like this show that members of the "climate change conspiracy" are willing to discuss and accept scientific evidence that is contrary to the prevailing view. There is only one side of this issue that won't listen to contrary evidence.

TE


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## iamlucky13 (Oct 23, 2015)

It's a FUD piece with lots of problems.



> But chopping down trees — many of them in the U.S. — and burning the wood heats the planet more quickly than burning coal.



No citation given, not to mention a failure of basic logic - burning carbon that is sequestered out of the carbon cycle as buried coal and thereby returning it to that cycle, versus burning carbon that is an active part of the carbon cycle.



> It ignores the decades it can take for a replacement forest to grow to be as big as one that was chopped down for energy



Only if you treat climate change as a 1-2 decade problem.



> The assumption also ignores the loss of a tree’s ability to absorb carbon dioxide after it gets cut down, pelletized and vaporized.



Only if you ignore the statement you just made about replacement forests. The stupid article isn't even consistent within single paragraphs. It also ignores that a lot of wood that gets burned was going to removed anyways due to windfalls, land clearing for other purposes, lumber processing waste, etc.



> Analysis of Drax data reveals that its boilers release 15 to 20 percent more carbon dioxide when they burn wood than when they burn coal.



But it's carbon that was taken out of the air in the last 100 years, as opposed to 1/2 billion years ago. I'm not going to bother at the moment trying to dig up the source they claim to have but refused to provide or do the chemical analysis whether this claim actually makes sense or if they're playing with the metrics (such as using pounds CO2 per pounds fuel mass, rather than pounds CO2 per BTU heat output).



> To feed the growing appetite of power plants now burning wood, forests of the U.S. Southeast are being cut down, pelletized and shipped across the ocean.



And we have lots to spare. US timber harvests dropped back into the sustainable range in the 80's or 90's depending on the region. I've  read replenishment rates in some areas are nearly double the annual harvest rates. Also, by my math, the 4.4 million tons of pellets the EIA says we exported last year amount to 7% of our 48 billion board feet of annual lumber production, but was almost certainly most made mostly from waste wood anyways.

Given how the article tries to portray wood use as opposed to wind and solar use, I suppose the UK wind and solar industries are trying to manipulate public opinion in favor of even more subsidies than they already receive.


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## bholler (Oct 23, 2015)

they also don't mention the co that coal releases in massive quantities when burnt.  No wood is not carbon neutral at all but it is not worse than coal at all


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## Snagdaddy (Oct 23, 2015)

TradEddle said, "Since the OP report was saying coal wasn't necessarily worse than wood, your point makes no sense. Reports like this show that members of the "climate change conspiracy" are willing to discuss and accept scientific evidence that is contrary to the prevailing view. There is only one side of this issue that won't listen to contrary evidence."


We should follow the money back where it came from and see what the agenda is.  I never mentioned or compared coal nor did I criticize "semipro",  the original poster of the article.   Without "semipro" posting the article, none of us would have gotten a glimpse of the open propaganda on the climatecentral.org website, which even goes so far as to spin a false Syrian narrative.

I have been peaceable in my endeavors to get people to think objectively about why the issue of climate change receives so much (mostly of ours) funding and attention.   It is an open conspiracy, one that can be easily seen.  The money leads back to centers of totalitarian control, each and every one a stakeholder in the desired outcome - a piece of the carbon tax and carbon trading and carbon credit derivatives pie.


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## jatoxico (Oct 23, 2015)

The article is not really talking about our home's wood stoves. Our stoves are largely burning wood from residential tree work, storm damage or private land and is occurring on a scale small enough to be mostly or totally replaced by new growth,

It's addressing wood burning done on an industrial scale where, according to the article, wood harvesting is outpacing replanting/regrowth, If there is a net loss of trees that then the process can no longer claim to carbon neutral.


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## iamlucky13 (Oct 23, 2015)

jatoxico said:


> It's addressing wood burning done on an industrial scale where, according to the article, wood harvesting is outpacing replanting/regrowth, If there is a net loss of trees that then the process can no longer claim to carbon neutral.



I don't think they actually made that specific claim, and if they did, it's false. US timber growth is outpacing the harvest rate and has been for a decade or two. Currently, net growth is about 18% higher than the harvest rate, according to the Forest Service, and has been trending upwards lately, in part due to better forest management.

Page 23 here:
http://www.fia.fs.fed.us/library/brochures/docs/2012/ForestFacts_1952-2012_English.pdf


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## jatoxico (Oct 23, 2015)

iamlucky13 said:


> I don't think they actually made that specific claim,



They pretty much did. Whether its true or not I don't know.

*The expanding use of pellets in power plants is harming the climate,* but burning wood for energy isn’t always harmful. If it would have been burned in a field as logging waste, it may be better to burn it in a power plant instead. The carbon was going to enter the atmosphere anyway, and using the wood for electricity could reduce fossil fuel use. And* if a forest loses a sustainable amount of firewood every year, a balance with the climate is eventually struck*.


Mitchell’s and Harmon’s modeling experiments showed that planting a forest on an abandoned farm — and eventually cutting it down and burning it for energy every few decades — helps the climate overall. That’s because carbon dioxide was absorbed by a formerly barren landscape prior to it being released to the atmosphere.


*None of that is happening in the American forests where whole trees are being cut down to meet the needs of this fast-growing energy industry.* Forestry waste isn’t normally burned off in the Southeast, where most of the wood pellets are being made. And *the industry has quickly grown too large to rely on forestry waste.*


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## iamlucky13 (Oct 23, 2015)

To clarify, when I said they didn't make a specific claim, that was not to absolve them from being misleading, but to highlight the form of deceit they're using.

They're playing a common game in the "think tank" and lobbyist world, where you frame a series of claims in a way that strongly implies the conclusion you want the reader to make. In this way, you can convince people they read a "study" (which they assume to be incontrovertible science) that proved something it never actually said, while avoiding being called out for making a false claim.

It is not an outright lie, but it is dishonest, because the intent is to deceive.

Making ambiguous claims, like saying that a mixed fuel plant releases more CO2 when burning wood than when burning coal, but neglecting to explain their metric or provide their source for the claim is another way to play the game.

Also, a point I forgot to make earlier: wood waste that is not burned but allowed to rot releases much of its carbon in the form methane. Since methane is considered to be roughly 20 times as potent of a greenhouse gas as CO2, creating a market that burns wood waste instead of leaving it to rot has a disproportionately large theoretical climate benefit.

Although in recent years, use of sawmill waste has grown significantly (hog fuel, engineered wood, mulch, etc), a huge amount of wood still gets thrown out - roughly 1/3 of the mass of a tree (branches, tops, stumps, etc) gets left where it was cut. 

The link is worrying about the UK using wood equivalent to 7% of our annual harvest being lost from sequestration, when 33% is not only also lost, but much of it is converted to methane.

That's not to mention what dies and goes to waste. Historically, an amount of US timber equivalent to 1/3 to 1/2 of the total commercial harvest goes to waste from natural mortality. With the invasion of emerald ash borer, pine beetle, etc, the proportion has jumped to nearly equal amounts of timber harvested versus dying and left to rot.


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## jatoxico (Oct 23, 2015)

iamlucky13 said:


> To clarify, when I said they didn't make a specific claim, that was not to absolve them from being misleading, but to highlight the form of deceit they're using



Could easily argue that labeling a it propaganda piece is another tactic. It's a complicated topic so open to debate but several of the sources they cited are no joke. The journal Science for instance is top notch.

I certainly like to consider heating with wood as step towards getting some balance back in the world and I still think it does. But wood stoves aside, subsidized industrial scale wood burning may not be the answer.


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## Cynnergy (Oct 23, 2015)

I wish some of the wood waste around here was pelletized instead of burnt off.  The air in my town was thick with wood smoke from burning multiple 'slash' piles a few days ago.  Apparently it's not cost effective to recover the waste due to transport costs, so it all gets burnt here.  I guess that means it's not carbon friendly to make it into pellets, but jeez couldn't it at least be turned into chips/mulch for the new trees rather than burning?


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## Cynnergy (Oct 24, 2015)

I read the first page of the article, and I'm not convinced.  Their entire issue seems to be with how the wood is being processed (and possibly not replanted) in the SE US.  Don't throw the baby out with the bath water.  If there is something wrong with the process, change it.  Don't abandon the tech unless you can't make the process work.  

In BC, replanting is the law on Crown land.  Pellets are only made from sawmill waste because that's the only way it's cost effective.  The only extra carbon that comes into it is from transport.  An entirely different scenario to the one that is described.


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## LocustPocust (Oct 24, 2015)

semipro said:


> burning the wood heats the planet more quickly than burning coal.



Not too long ago burning wood was the best thing ever for the environment, and was one of the "greenest" things anyone could do. Now it's just as bad as coal? Stuff like that aggravates me to no end.



Snagdaddy said:


> We should follow the money back where it came from and see what the agenda is.



My point!

Someone realized there wasn't much money to be made off wood burners. Now we have wood stoves that cost thousands of dollars and that many people can't afford. Can't afford Oil or Electric heat either? No problem, the Government will pay your heating bill. That's the goal of it all right there. 

I'm not saying wood burning doesn't pollute but come on enough is enough. I'll never forget the morning last winter I woke up and it was still dark out, probably 5am. There was an incoming weather system that created an inversion in the atmosphere and kept any pollutants from mixing out. The air outside strongly smelled like rotten eggs, everyone's oil furnace emissions. But that's okay right?


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## iamlucky13 (Oct 24, 2015)

jatoxico said:


> Could easily argue that labeling a it propaganda piece is another tactic.



When they manipulate the research of others and use half truths to make a flawed argument, that's propaganda. When somebody calls them out on propaganda and details the flaws in their arguments, that is not propaganda. It's fact-checking.



> It's a complicated topic so open to debate but several of the sources they cited are no joke. The journal Science for instance is top notch.



It's hard for me to call their reference to a paper in Science a citation since they basically ignored what the paper said and merely used one quote out of context. The paper pointed out that the reduction in carbon by switching from a fossil fuel to a biofuel is less than 100%. The article contends the reduction is negative.



> But wood stoves aside, subsidized industrial scale wood burning may not be the answer.



I'm fine with cutting subsidies. As for whether or not using wood as industrial scale fuel is a good idea, at the point where harvests and natural mortality exceed growth, that is true.[/QUOTE][/QUOTE]


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## Rossco (Oct 24, 2015)

Wow. Holy long posts batman. 

Yeah well cutting dead tree's and burning them releases the same as letting it rot on the forest floor. 

Wait, you guys do burn dead trees right?


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## jebatty (Oct 24, 2015)

An important aspect of this issue which is ignored is "full cost accounting for the life cycle of coal". Google this term and you will find that coal is a very expensive and harmful fuel indeed. 

Also ignored and extremely important are the environmental positive benefits of using wood for fuel, including wildlife habitat, maintaining a sustainable resource, keeping land in forestry rather than cleared for development or other uses, protecting soils from erosion, providing clean ground and surface water, and much more. 

Wood for fuel, in addition to those mentioned by others, has solid benefits far beyond the carbon question. Focusing on just one aspect is extremely misleading and deceitful.


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## semipro (Oct 24, 2015)

LocustPocust said:


> semipro said: burning the wood heats the planet more quickly than burning coal.
> 
> LocustPocust said: Not too long ago burning wood was the best thing ever for the environment, and was one of the "greenest" things anyone could do. Now it's just as bad as coal? Stuff like that aggravates me to no end.


I'm misquoted above (post 19)
What I wrote was:


semipro said:


> One interesting quote
> "...But chopping down trees — many of them in the U.S. — and burning the wood heats the planet more quickly than burning coal."


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## jatoxico (Oct 24, 2015)

iamlucky13 said:


> When they manipulate the research of others and use half truths to make a flawed argument, that's propaganda. When somebody calls them out on propaganda and details the flaws in their arguments, that is not propaganda. It's fact-checking.



I'm not sure where you are getting this. Taken from the abstract;

Results demonstrate that the times required for bioenergy substitutions to repay the C Debt incurred from biomass harvest are usually much shorter (< 100 years) than the time required for bioenergy production to substitute the amount of C that would be stored if the forest were left unharvested entirely, a point we refer to as C Sequestration Parity.

Harmon, one of the authors of the article in Science was interviewed and quoted. The article has a point of view but ts not hard to understand that if you burn more wood than you grow then the process won't be neutral. Further while it takes a very short time to harvest and burn the fuel it takes a much longer time to recover that carbon with new growth.


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## beatlefan (Oct 24, 2015)

Man has been burning wood for thousands of years. Trees have been falling and rotting for even longer.  Humans & animals (both carbon based), have been dying and rotting all this time too.  So either the planet has been slowly destroying itself from day one, or maybe carbon is not so bad after all.


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## jatoxico (Oct 24, 2015)

beatlefan said:


> Man has been burning wood for thousands of years. Trees have been falling and rotting for even longer.  Humans & animals (both carbon based), have been dying and rotting all this time too.  So either the planet has been slowly destroying itself from day one, or maybe carbon is not so bad after all.


That's just not accurate. Carbon is sequestered in the form of oil/coal/biomass. The small amounts of carbon released from wood burning and and other natural processes that occurred for the majority of human history cannot be compared to burning of all these resources in a relatively short period of time.

I for one still have some questions about climate science's conclusions but to doubt that we have and are releasing orders of magnitude more carbon that we did before the industrial revolution is frankly ridiculous.


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## iamlucky13 (Oct 24, 2015)

jatoxico said:


> The article has a point of view but ts not hard to understand that if you burn more wood than you grow then the process won't be neutral.



Which as I've been trying so say is irrelevant. The Science paper is fine on this point, but the climatecentral.org article is trying to draw readers into concluding that we are burning more wood than grow, which is false.



Rossco said:


> Wow. Holy long posts batman.


Sorry, but when there's a lot to address, things tend to get lengthy.



Rossco said:


> Yeah well cutting dead tree's and burning them releases the same as letting it rot on the forest floor.



Technically not quite. When a tree rots, some proportion (which varies depending on conditions) of its carbon is released as methane.


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## mass_burner (Oct 24, 2015)

We're going to do what we do until we can't do it anymore. That's the human way. Everything else is just blah...blah...blah.


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## jatoxico (Oct 24, 2015)

iamlucky13 said:


> Which as I've been trying so say is irrelevant. The Science paper is fine on this point, but the climatecentral.org article is trying to draw readers into concluding that we are burning more wood than grow, which is false.



IDK the Science article cites several references that question the viability of what they termed "broad scale" bioenergy to remain C neutral. They clearly question whether or not the near term release of C and the simultaneous loss of those same trees to sequester C is preferable given that the regrowth takes many many years. They then say their model agrees with that concern as you ramp up the use of forest for the purpose.

I don't think the article posted by the OP is simply saying we are burning more than we grow but that how C is being accounted for is allowing energy producers to hide how much C they are producing while receiving subsidies that causes money to be diverted from developing other C free energy sources. And it again questions if burning our current stock is worth it given the returns come years later which the Science article says it confirms.

None of this will change my feelings about burning wood for residential heating. Now if every house in the neighborhood wanted to heat 100% with wood I'd probably have to change my tune.


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## Rossco (Oct 24, 2015)

iamlucky13 said:


> Sorry, but when there's a lot to address, things tend to get lengthy.
> 
> Technically not quite. When a tree rots, some proportion (which varies depending on conditions) of its carbon is released as methane.



Iam only pulling your leg about the post length. Plenty longer on here.

Wood releases the same burnt vs down dead, well that's my story and Iam sticking to it. Same as wood burning is a renewable resource.

Gotta push back against the anti's.


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## bholler (Oct 24, 2015)

Burning wood is not carbon neutral at all no.  But it is burning a renewable resource which is better for the environment and for those of us that responsibly manage our wood plots or harvest waste that is already down it really is not much of an issue.


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## woodgeek (Oct 24, 2015)

I have read that scientists looking at ancient CO2 in antarctic ice bubbles can see signals from the plagues that swept Europe in the Middle Ages.  People cut down trees for fuel and to clear farmland.  When they die, the trees regrow.  Rinse and Repeat over the centuries.


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## dougstove (Oct 24, 2015)

"Wood releases the same burnt vs down dead, well that's my story and Iam sticking to it. Same as wood burning is a renewable resource."

When wood decays a fraction of the C in the wood is released in the form of methane (CH4), with the fraction depending upon the local environment.
The rest is released as CO2, or enters loooooooong term storage as humic material in the soil, with a turnover time of thousands of years.
Under the right circumstances, a tiny fraction might eventually become something like lignite.

When wood burns there is no methane release; the carbon is released as CO2, or CO + C (soot) if combustion is incomplete.
Methane is 21-24X as good at capturing infrared as CO2.
So if even 5% of the decomposing wood is released as methane, it is better to burn it to CO2.
On the other hand, if a large fraction of the decomposing wood enters stable pools of humic material then there is long term carbon sequestration.
The balances and answers are situational and interesting to estimate.


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## woodgeek (Oct 24, 2015)

The key difference with Methane, Doug, is that (i) if you release it today it will be GONE by 2100 and (ii) it does not acidify the ocean.


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## beatlefan (Oct 24, 2015)

woodgeek said:


> The key difference with Methane, Doug, is that (i) if you release it today it will be GONE by 2100 and (ii) it does not acidify the ocean.


I just released a little methane myself...


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## jatoxico (Oct 24, 2015)

Interestingly the Drax power plant only brought it's first unit online with wood in about June 2013 and has converted others since. The primary motivation was to avoid emission penalties due to how wood C is calculated vs coal. So this play has only been in motion for a short period of time.

Originally intended to move forward as a mixed fuel operation additional govt incentives resulted in full conversion of the Drax plant. I would guess this was only possible if contracts securing pellets were in place. These supplies are coming primarily from North Amer and may explain why your pellets cost so much.


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## georgepds (Oct 27, 2015)

mass_burner said:


> We're going to do what we do until we can't do it anymore. That's the human way. Everything else is just blah...blah...blah.


 
Oh that's not true

Back in the 70's, up here in Boston,  if you fell in the Charles you got discharges that resembled the clap. If you swam in Boston harbor, you swam with the brown carp. Now both river and harbor are cleaned up.. thanks to an activist judge enforcing the law

Back in my hometown, the local pond was a cesspool, now a dozen breeds of ducks make there living in clean water.. thanks to the local officials clamping down on polluters upstream

Near where I live, a couple of eagles make their nest.. thanks to getting DDT out of the waste stream ( I remember when they used to spray DDT  on us kids in the street)

Remember the ozone hole, it's almost gone now.. thanks to banning CFCs

Things have changed for the better; we have the enviromental movement and the EPA to thank for it.  It may be Blah Blah Blah to you, but to me its the voice of the community saying we don't S**t where we sleep, and backing it up with action and law


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## dougstove (Oct 27, 2015)

Well said.
It seems difficult for us to get the concept of not pooping in our bed.
Maybe because we evolved in trees.


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## mass_burner (Oct 27, 2015)

georgepds said:


> Oh that's not true
> 
> Back in the 70's, up here in Boston,  if you fell in the Charles you got discharges that resembled the clap. If you swam in Boston harbor, you swam with the brown carp. Now both river and harbor are cleaned up.. thanks to an activist judge enforcing the law
> 
> ...


ction and law[/QUOTE]

I meant we as humans, across the world. I'm not familiar with the local politics one of the most left Ieaning cities in the country, but what happens in the Charles river doesn't have much of an impact globally, or nationally for that matter. 

If there's so much goodwill around, why isn't China/India/Indonesia etc on board? Or nationally, why are there dozens of super fund sites still uncleaned. Or BP, why were they allowed to write off most of their fines from their taxes, whete was the EPA on that one?


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## begreen (Oct 27, 2015)

woodgeek said:


> The key difference with Methane, Doug, is that (i) if you release it today it will be GONE by 2100 and (ii) it does not acidify the ocean.


If the methane being released is from the deep ocean then acidification can be a byproduct. The Univ. of Washington has been studying this off the coast of WA. We don't have a handle on the scale of this yet. It could be large. 
_"If methane bubbles rise all the way to the surface, they enter the atmosphere and act as a powerful greenhouse gas. But most of the deep-sea methane seems to get consumed during the journey up. Marine microbes convert the methane into carbon dioxide, producing lower-oxygen, more-acidic conditions in the deeper offshore water, which eventually wells up along the coast and surges into coastal waterways."_
http://www.science20.com/news_artic..._ocean_may_be_releasing_frozen_methane-157603


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## woodgeek (Oct 28, 2015)

begreen said:


> If the methane being released is from the deep ocean then acidification can be a byproduct. The Univ. of Washington has been studying this off the coast of WA. We don't have a handle on the scale of this yet. It could be large.
> _"If methane bubbles rise all the way to the surface, they enter the atmosphere and act as a powerful greenhouse gas. But most of the deep-sea methane seems to get consumed during the journey up. Marine microbes convert the methane into carbon dioxide, producing lower-oxygen, more-acidic conditions in the deeper offshore water, which eventually wells up along the coast and surges into coastal waterways."_
> http://www.science20.com/news_artic..._ocean_may_be_releasing_frozen_methane-157603



Makes sense, but most AGW-related acidification is in the top 50m of the ocean, which had a few decade mixing time.  CO2 dumped below that would be less of a concern.  The ocean, not surprisingly, has a huge potential for buffering heat and CO2, but as I understand it, on human timescales it is not well mixed.


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## spirilis (Oct 28, 2015)

iamlucky13 said:


> I don't think they actually made that specific claim, and if they did, it's false. US timber growth is outpacing the harvest rate and has been for a decade or two. Currently, net growth is about 18% higher than the harvest rate, according to the Forest Service, and has been trending upwards lately, in part due to better forest management.
> 
> Page 23 here:
> http://www.fia.fs.fed.us/library/brochures/docs/2012/ForestFacts_1952-2012_English.pdf


Thanks for that link.  That paints a much rosier picture of our forestlands here in the US.


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## Highbeam (Oct 30, 2015)

I was checking out windhager's site and a couple of others too about wood burners and they are quite certain that burning wood is carbon neutral. Sure, it's marketing but believing it is not a large leap.


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## DBoon (Nov 1, 2015)

My wood lot has downed trees that if not cut for burning would decompose and release carbon dioxide anyways.  I would guess that this is mostly true for small-scale users and scroungers of firewood for heat, but not true for industrial-scale pellet fuel and wood chipping operations.


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