The students at my university thought this kind of power station was a non starter in 1997. School of Forestry, Bangor University, Wales. Use of wood in well made furniture and buildings to remove carbon from the atmosphere is a much better mechanism.
In the context of California and wildfires it would be insane not to do biomass energy if cut in patterns to reduce risk of wildfires. 🤷🏻♀️ If it's gonna burn might as well make energy and ideally combined with waste heat recovery for residential or industrial heating uses doubling its efficiency.
@@bartroberts1514 That's an interesting assertion! Plywood, one of the most common furniture & construction materials peels the entire log, only discarding the bark. Oriented Strand Board uses chipped timber from the entire tree, particle board uses small particles, MDF uses sawdust. Where did you get the 10% from?
As long as people are allowing to have their emotions played on, this will continue. Don't use emotion to deal with environmental concerns. Use your brain.
The wood scraps can be used reasonably if you apply a few rules: 1. Regional use. Every transport reduces the efficiency 2. Air dried. Yeah, a lot of wood is dried with additional energy used. If it dries in the air for a few years, you actually can use it too. That's also 3 more years for new trees 3. To burn it simply for electricity is crazy, when we have many more ways to create electricity, but only a few ways to create a lot of heat! 4. No wood plantations. Seriously: plantations are not forests. You will know once you have seen both... Plantations kill biodiversity and reduce carbon absorption!
@@bartroberts1514 for an example: we burn wood from a nearby forest we process ourselves. The carbon emissions are the saw, the cars for transport and the splitter. And we use it for heating after it dried outside. It is wood of low quality, not good enough for furniture or building. The forests are used extensively with tree species native to the area. Most of them plant themselves and the forest is rich in plants and wildlife.
@@alis49281 Excellent points! And with advances in EVs and electric chainsaws (not just toys or jokes anymore), your entire wood harvest could be fossil free. With a pyrolysis rig, you could get clean char from that wood, as well as home heat (I've seen one rig that generated electricity while making pygas, black liquor, and char, but that's way too complicated). Good on you. You're saving the planet all that methane release.
@@bartroberts1514 we use tools until they break. That's more efficient. And a high tech furnice for a single home is more than slightly exaggerated. Especially when we would've to rebuild a part of this 400 year old house. We already save emissions by renovating without cement and concrete wherever it is possible (99% less cement pretty much)
@@alis49281 Exactly right. Of course, as I design and build tools, I'm in a slightly different boat. If pyrolysis were simpler to make and use, it'd be ideal. Until someone comes up with a design for that, a good Franklin stove is pretty awesome.
I work in sawmilling in AB and worked in Pulp&Paper in BC. I use to say we sell wood chips and wood is a byproduct. Also Drax is shady as hell, aside from the fact that they are making wood pellets in Canada and shipping them to europe to call it green energy... They also got caught in BC chipping good lumber trees for pellets, which is a super waste of our trees. As you point out. There is no Carbon capture on their AB/BC operations, and unless they do in Europe, then they are just burning wood from somewhere else.
the BECCS is to be installed in the stack of the combustion unit, because the CO2% is much higher and easier to be captured and compressed. It will be a similar system to the CHP unit at Copenhagen (aka Copenhill) that was shown to the delegation of UNFCCC. I guess the pellet plants could capture CO2 from the stack of the dryers, but its significantly lower volumen content than a stack of the combustion unit that would be burning the wood pellets (at the CHP unit at Drax or Copenhill).
Is anybody surprised by this revelation? I'm not. It reminds me of the boondoggle in the USA telling us that ethanol from corn is a good deal, economically. It's not.
plus subsidizing farmers to grow corn for ethanol makes a lot of them decide to plant corn wherever they can. that means cutting down any last tree remaining even next to streams which causes erosion and leads to warmer water temperatures which favors invasive species and decreases native trout populations. corn ethanol was a horrible decision. it's also not good for most engines
Brazil has competitive ethanol from sugarcane. Too bad the US decided to heavily tarriff Brazil's ethanol instead of cooperating to increase production to supply bith countrjes
This sort of Bait And Switch Scheme is happening in many sectors. The Hydrogen Economy is almost entirely based on Methane Steam Reforming, producing more emissions while conning the public into thinking they are switching to a clean fuel with pure water as the only emission. The recent uptake of Plug-In Hybrid vehicles instead of BEVs is the result of legacy auto makers convincing the public that they can go green without changing any of their own behaviour. Toyota convinced millions of gullible buyers into believing they were selling "Self-Charging Hybrids" when in fact they were sold vehicles that emit more than the ICE vehicles they were meant to replace.
@@blauw67 You usually only need a large engine for acceleration and going uphill. A small engine (range extender) running at its most efficient speed and torque can produce enough electrical power to keep you going on the flat and charge the battery which can accelerate or take you uphill. Unfortunately, many plug-in hybrids have a small battery and a normal-sized large combustion engine. Also, the combustion engine still has lots of parts which need expensive servicing.
Some other considerations you could add: 1 The energy requirement to reduce the moisture content of the pellet feedstock to an acceptable level. Green wood waste is about 50% water. Feedstock needs to be 20% water or less. 2 The electricity required to run a hammer mill to grind the feedstock to the right size particles for pelletising 3 The electricity required to run the pressing machine to make the pellets. Also, while pellets are being shipped from North America to Europe, some are being shipped from New Zealand to North America !
Pellet mills do not use that much energy for the output. Same with hammer mills. I have both. Second, you dry the wet material in the sun, not by buying energy. Third. Co2 is not a pollutant
What I find very important is that this large scale pellet industry is yet another example of the extraction economy. By cutting and moving the trees and crops, you deplete the soil. The minerals, etc are released in another part of the planet. Also, the land needed for biofuel competes with land for biodiversity and food for a rapidly increasing number of people.
Your claims are frighteningly bogus. So long as there is soil, forest permaculture replenishes minerals and nitrates. True, it does it more completely and efficiently with terra preta soil amendment, but only sterile soil, such as soil poisoned by high nitrate fertilizer applications, loses minerals as you describe. Also, forests in BC are rife with ten times the biodiversity any patch of the UK can boast.
@@bartroberts1514 The ash of the burned wood contains most of the minerals the tree took up while growing. Those minerals are now on the other side of the Atlantic ocean. Inorganic fertilizer is needed to replenish those minerals as rock doesn't grow back. The only plant nutrient that can come back naturally is nitrate (and that's only because nitrogen comprises roughly 80% of our atmosphere). That's very slow if certain conditions aren't met, such as crop rotation with nitrate-capturing plants, which isn't possible if all you grow are trees for burning as fuel, hence why farmers use nitrate-including fertilizer.
@@5467nick You clearly have never done any permaculture. Minerals are made available to plants by soil microbes that break down dirt into digestible parts. So long as there is healthy soil rich in microbes, mineral mobilization is never an issue. Those minerals the tree took up while growing are dead, locked in the wood, until something living breaks that wood down again. If that living thing is aerobic, then the exhaust of that biological process is CO2. If that living thing is anaerobic, then the exhaust is methane, 120 times worse than CO2. Inorganic fertilizer preferentially kills off beneficial aerobic microbes and nitrogen fixers, leaving soil less nutritious once those inorganics are washed away by rain. Crop rotation is obsolete, with proper permaculture practices to encourage healthy soil. Farmers use nitrate-including fertilizer because they've forgot the ancient wisdom: good soil grows good crops, good farmers grow good soils. Using biochar to create terra preta as deep as 3 meters can provide all the nitrogen and other minerals any plants can need. And yes, you can use terra preta to amend forest soils.
Trees grow wild where I live. Twelve thousand years ago, there were few trees growing above and below the 49th parallel due to miles of ice covering the earth. By magic, trees grow there now.
When I first heard Drax had gone 'carbon neutral' my kneejerk reaction was, 'bullsh*t'. In the years since then I've been vindicated and then some.. There was a Guardian article a few years ago about how ancient European woodland was being harvested to feed Drax and the reporters who tried to investigate were threatened with violence. Lovely.
Definitely. I've got a fire pit outside, and I'm only looking to get ethical wood There's a person locally who only sells hard wood that's been given to them by tree surgeons. I figure if it's given by multiple tree surgeons, it's typically cut down due to : The tree being diseased It's causing an issue for neighbours ie: leaning too much to the left or right It's fell down due to a storm It's been trimmed It's already dead due to whatever other reason People also typically give away soft wood from their homes for the same reason. I wouldn't get a wood burning stove due to indoor air quality concerns for instance too That, and I can't see wood burning stoves as being ethical or even sustainable. It the shortest amount of time to grow a tree is 10 years , and that tree is burned in one month, that's inherently unsustainable. It's actually why the UK moved to coal to begin with (environmental destruction and deforestation) FSC is greenwashing.
@@waqasahmed939on a personal level, indoor air quality is most affected by opening the door & getting a puff or even a billow of smoke. With most fires if you open the door a crack for 3 or 4 seconds while the draught pattern re-establishes this puff doesn't happen when you then open the door fully & air quality is unaffected. Air quality near an open fire in the garden is _much_ more of an issue.
@@waqasahmed939"hard wood" & "hardwood" are very different things, one of the softest woods available, balsa, is a hardwood & one of the hardest, redwood, is a softwood. Yep, crazy world.
@@alanhat5252 I am tbf looking to get a smokeless fire pit outside so air quality should be significantly better as there's a secondary (and even a tertiary) burn if you look at the Eastoak table top burner Regardless, I'm looking to get the most ethical wood anyway. It simply isn't sustainable to grow trees for 40 years and use it up in one month.
I did a good number of inspections on the new pellet handling systems, prior to them being installed, to ensure they would meet the legislation for safe operation. I said at the time the whole thing was a great big cluster buck that would come back to bite people. Especially considering the amount of subsidy it was getting. Nice to be proved more than right 10 years on.
Biomass fuel/burning should only ever be waste to energy or disposing of a byproduct in a useful manner. We shouldn't be growing trees just to be burnt.
You are wrong. This use of biomass is exactly what is needed. They plant trees & as they grow, it takes co2 out the atmosphere. Then you burn them to create power, which release that co2, that co2 is then absorbed by the next crop of trees. They are literally recycling the co2 in the atmosphere with the aim of reducing it with carbon capture
The Stupid Greens and MONEY that's why. Drax was built over Selby Coal field and only had a few miles to transport the coal. Shell was going to install carbon capture equipment at Drax then pump it down old oil wells in the North Sea. BC wood ship to Immingham, tranship to trains, barges and coaster, tranship again into Drax Power Station. Your still ahead on figures using good hot coal. Much the same as the Maui Gas field near New Plymouth New Zealand and the Power Station built there for the gas. Must have been a pretty clean operation. Now its closed down all that machinery scrapped and Coal is stored there now? Politicians !!!!
I remember when that idea cropped up and I remember thinking, that replacing coal with a less energy dense fuel that you'd have to get from all over the world, sounded like a particularly stupid idea. I'm as always disappointed to be right.
I worked on the unit where the new furnaces were being assembled , I was just providing electrical supplies to the various work stations . But taking to the people who were running the show , they all knew it wasn’t carbon neutral . But obviously vast profits were to be made , so what’s not to like . But let’s face it this sums up the whole zero fiasco , totally pointless but what great way to make jobs and money . 😂
@@jamesphillips2285 Yes, that, plus, forest soil isn´t all that rich in carbon, forests tend to leach out the soil. all the carbon is mostly in the living layler, kind of in a short-circuit. The forest does not really deposit much long-term. Dead trees decay rapidly, and the carbon gets released again, or taken up into new biomass. Swamps on the other hand build huge deposits of peat and/or carbon-rich, anoxic mud, and carbon trapped there will be out of the cycle for a long time.
My canton has invested heavily into Biomass. I am not happy, since they have been fighting my decades long battle to promote renewables. Our capital city has 14 chargers for EV. It is 2024. And ojr cantonal hospital has zero chargers for EV, public and staff. Zero. It is still 2024.
EVs are not carbon neutral, some can argue even the opposite. Mining and transporting lithium from Bolivia plateaous and then into refinement just to make the battery can amount to more carbon than your car would spend in it's lifetime if it went on gasoline, which requires much less energy after the drills have done the work (and with less energy intensive refinement later on). And we didn't even consider that most of electricity you will use is not produced in carbon neutral ways. If you are not charging from solar, nuclear or wind power you basically worsen the carbon situation with just that, even if the battery production if taken out of the equation. EVs are in essence just shifting the carbon emission responsibility elsewhere at this moment in hidden ways, just as in the topic of this video. Hopefully in the future this changes with sodium batteries and more carbon neutral energy grids.
@@marsovacnever will a burning technology be better from an environment standpoint than something that gets built once and then just reuse. See heat pumps vs wood burning central systems for example. Or coal powered power plants vs nuclear or renewables like solar/windmills.
@@1981therealfury it is far from baseless. The second part regarding the production of electric energy is pure fact, and the first one are still only research papers not yet translated into facts. Since I can't put links here on youtube, it is on you as the plaintiff to inform yourself regarding it. Anyhow the first part is less relevant. If your energy doesn't come from carbon neutral sources, then the electric car doesn't do zero carbon emissions, it just shifts them away from you, similarly to what this video explains.
The real reason why wood as a fuel has zero net CO2 impact is that wood is ephemeral. An old growth forest is typically at a balance between growth and decay. Burning the wood releases the CO2 the tree bound temporarily through photosynthesis. Nature would have released the CO2 again, albeit at a slower rate, than burning it did. A longterm real cost of pellet fuel, though, is the energy needed to process and distribute it, which is mainly from fossil fuels.
The Bulk Carriers shipping the pellets from BC to Drax may burn 50 ton /day of High Viscosity Fuel oil, a voyage may take 14 days or more, then they go back empty, 40 ton /day as we don't produce anything to be exported in bulk like that to BC, well we don't produce anything period apart from hot air from politicians and the greens banging on about global warming. Its all wealth creation and nothing more. That's 1260 tons of fuel oil that has already come from the Middle East and could have been burnt in an oil fired station.
But you can't deny the basic science that burning so called 'biomass' emits 4 times the amount of even coal fired power so really do not need to be burning it or even subsidising it...
@@Jagger-Tyr_13It is a generally accepted rule in statistics that study funded by a vested interest is more likely to be biased. That said, the other rules are much more important. If you have one study funded by a vested interest that follows the rules of double-blind, simple random sample and the like, then this is more to be trusted than one funded by a contrary interest which follows none of those rules.
The cost of electricity is pegged to the wholesale price of natrual gas, if it was pegged to renewables, which is now the majority generation source in the UK, the per kWh price would fall for everyone.
@@rogerbarton1790 Who gives a f**** about the fiscal efficacy of your solar panels? If they are reducing your carbon footprint then that is good. Did you install them to make money or to reduce your devastating impact on the planet?
Is there an imbalance? yes: chainsaws, logging trucks, etc etc, but timber related co2 is an entirely closed carbon cycle. Surely the least of most evils in the field of energy production!
Biomass power generation works on a limited basis here in the Western US. Forest fire suppression has our previously over harvested and now overgrown woods a gigantic wildfire hazard. Wildfire burned trees are now feeding biomass plants, but it’d be better to thin the woods before they burn in wildfires. Wildfire smoke has become a health and quality of life problem even in cities, along with its devastating effects on our wild-lands. It does seem crazy to use biomass power generation, on a large scale, in a location with such limited feed stock as Western Europe! Shipping wood from North America to burn across an ocean is ludicrous! If it needs to be burned, build a plant and burn it near its source.
The issue is a lot of organizations and corporations don't want to take a break when demand is low, so they require concrete sources. If we found a use for bottle tops, companies would start out just taking bottle tops that people discarded, but as soon as there is a bottle top shortage, companies would start opening millions of soda bottles and throwing away the bottle and drink just for the tops, and never go back to taking waste bottle tops.
4:00 Who uses these accounting gimmicks as the basis of their zero-emissions argument? Obviously the real argument is that carbon is re-absorbed by young growing trees. 5:20 Deciduous trees absorb carbon every Spring when they grow new leaves, and evergreen trees grow much faster. 5:50 Providing energy for new life = getting released into the atmosphere again. The only reasonable arguments I can see so far are: 1. There isn't enough reserved forest area to absorb the amount of carbon being released. 2. Atmospheric carbon has to be more concentrated in industrial areas in order to make its way to forests on other continents. 3. It sounds like pellets don't burn as hot as coal or gas.
In Canada we just don’t do forest management by removing deadfall so that when the forests burn caused mostly by humans,the government can attribute it to the climate emergency!
I always miss taking into account the total amount of carbon which is emitted by planting, growing (fertilizers! - Co2 equvalent) harvesting and transport as such. This needs to be added to the carbon emitted while burning biomass.
Life Cycle Assessments (LCA’s) are DEFINED a must, and this “Cradle to Grave” scale is pretty standard/best practices in most good LCA papers. Granted what is right and what is selected for profitability/political reasons doesn’t always line up! To play devil’s advocate though there is the issue of how big you want the scope to be, and then also the sustainability of biomass can vary SUBSTANTIALLY based on Supplier/Practices etc but all that requires certification. Wood pellets from a local Controlled Burn Alternative/Forest Management etc with Biochar and/or Biomass Orgin Ash Return etc can be great!, but telling those pellets from visually identical pellets made from deforestation overseas can complicate things. I do think videos on these certifications would be neat!
@@ericlotze7724 These certifications and LCA in general would be amazing themes. They could easily feed way more than the twelve minutes videos we know and love tough. But I'm ready to have a quite big think !
@@ericlotze7724 Also, there's a continuum from "okay" forest practices like BC's that manage forests with some eye to afforestation and clearing fuel from forests to reduce fire risk, to the best possible practices, pursued nowhere today.
This is all thanks to Diederik Samsom, working under Frans Timmermans. He is mostly responsible for the European policy on biomass. I hope he lies awake at night thinking about his stupid decisions. In the Netherlands I don't foresee any decline in biomass usage in the coming years. Not with our current government. A very sad future for forests all around the world. We should have more trees, not less.
I recall flying over the Amazon on my way to Tepui El Diablo and the reservations near it, Canaima and Kavac. Below us, the rainforest was burning from horizon to horizon. An American on the same plane commented on how very sad for the future it was to see it all burning. Keep in mind, we were flying in a plane, burning an immensity of fossil fuels. He didn't know that burning was cultural burning, and had happened in the Amazon -- as it happens in Congo and elsewhere -- every few years, in different places. It cleared out fuel that would have fed hotter fires, and let seeds sprout that needed fire to germinate. What's bad is when that land is disturbed by plantations and ranches, development, and mining. People blasting the tops off mountains for coal, or using vast spans for bitumen, segmenting habitats for pipelines, and the like. Forest, even forest harvest in moderation and well-regulated, is good and gives forests some measure of protection. Not everything is as it seems.
@@bartroberts1514 you KNOW that even though the Amazon burns naturally, a lot of those fires are started intentionally as a way to clear space for farming, right ? it's a huge problem on the edges of the rainforest, and it's the primary reason for the loss of rainforest.
Burning wood for heat makes sense in rural places where there aren't other options (no gas, power grid unreliable, not much sunlight in winter, etc) and where you have lots of windfall to burn that's coming down anyway. Cutting healthy trees to burn for electricity, on the other hand, is asinine. Here in BC we are getting our heads cracked by the cops for trying to stop logging for pellet production, it's a national embarrassment. Our so-called "forests" that are actually just monoculture tree plantations are a net SOURCE of carbon emissions now, not a sink, and this pellet nonsense is part of why that is. Thanks for putting some light on this, international pressure on the BC government is going to be crucial to stopping this atrociously stupid practice.
Yeah, I have access to a historic family cabin, and the ranch it is on with a bunch of other cabins is in a forest, it naturally produces several times the firewood than everyone can use.
Wood heating only makes sense if you don’t place any value on your or your neighbors’ health. It’s also been found by some researchers to be the least climate-friendly option for heating a home.
@@d-katz But if you live off any grid, how should you heat your home? Many houses in S. Europe aren't particularly remote but there's often no electricity grid and if there is, it costs around €60K to get a connection. No gas either, other than propane. Pellet stoves require little electricity so OK for off-grid power and they emit very little smoke, unlike regular wood burners.
The problem is that trees are used as fuel. Instead, bamboo should be used for that, as it is thr fastest growing plant in the world. Trees should only be used for construction, furniture and other things that lasts for many years so a new tree has time to grow back. Bamboo also uses very little space thanks to it's fast grow rate so it won't replace forrests on the contrary, it will preserve forrests, thanks to it being a more efficient product.
Yes but the whole point of Drax is that is a fossil fuel model of plunder and extraction of existing resources, paid for by subsidies. They don't concern themselves with regrowing anything, only stripping the ancient forests and burning them for very inefficient energy (most of which is waste heat)
@@gman-norman coal and oil will ultimately be replaced though just in a much longer timeframe. But forests will also take decades to hundreds of years to replace, so in the timeframes we need to reduce carbon on the atmosphere and sequester carbon (which biomass does the opposite) it makes zero sense. Especially for green "renewable" subsidies.
I live near a straw burning peaker plant. I believe that it was thought up to burn the waste product from grain production on the rich farmland near Ely however in the years since its conception the weather has become more unpredictable thanks to climate change and this directly impacts the value of straw so this power plant is now competing with local livestock owners who need the straw for bedding and feed for animals. I'm sure complications on shipping agricultural materials since Brexit hasn't helped. I'm not sure how long it'll remain economically viable. Thankfully sunnica - a massive solar farm, has just been approved locally 😅
Good for the solar farm and this again shows the human-focused idea about “waste”, like we burn waste this, waste that. The climate simply does not care. Anything that burns adds to the climate burden, whether it was chopped down ten or a hundred or a thousand years ago. The next scam to go up in flames will be biogas, which is the same idea as biomass (turn waste into an organic fuel to burn) and the same arrant nonsense.
If the goal of this video was to spew the anti-IPCC rhetoric on how land use change and forestry is calculated, it succeeded. Where I was hoping it could discuss, was the developments in the impacts of forest biodiversity, or the conclusion of the discussion on "old growth" vs "newer" forests. So this is just the same video in 2021, but in the lens that we should still burn coal instead of burning forest residues from areas where forest management is done properly.
Thanks for this thought. About 25 years ago in Germany people where get excited to switch home heating to wood pellets. Nobody ever could answer my question of how it could be sustainable without imports. Wish folks were as excited about heat pumps which are actually amazing.
The trouble with this insanity is that people who know nothing are changing thigs they don't really understand. We can see sense and go back to a more rational time, or we can all starve.
Ok so the next time you’re sitting in your car at a red light, and you’re on your way to pick up an inhaler for your child who has asthma, you know longer need to wonder why this is !!!! Maybe I missed it but I’m pretty sure Monty Python would have done a segment about this long ago! Wake up we’ve been had ! Is this not as clear as the azure blue sky!!! D.S.B.
@@manoo422 pumping excessive greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, releasing micro plastics into the wider environment, irradiating areas of the earth, driving some species to extinction, ect.
A related fact: the energy required to harvest, grind, pelletise, bag and ship forest wood offsets any efficiency gotten from the pellet stoves in homes. It's no better than just burning firewood in your home. This, from a U.S. study about 10 years ago.
Wood chips are not fantastic but one thing you have to take into account is when was the CO2 that you are releasing captured. Coal several million years ago, wood chips a few years ago. So wood chip CO2 can be thought of as a current cycle, a closed loop, sort of. Coal is just new CO2 added to the total.
@@TheJon2442cause nuclear is expensive. And another Ressource that is running out especially when everyone uses it in great quantities. Further nuclear can Not Support the fast changing demand, Changes in Output take a Lot of time.
There is a fallacy here: the carbon contained within the emissions of biomass belongs to the CURRENT carbon cycle, whereas the carbon contained in the emissions from fossil fuels is EXTERNAL to said current cycle, therefore it increases the carbon content of TODAY's biosphere.
@@EdwardEngines Yes, it is. I think my main comment makes it clear. Burning biomass DOES NOT alter the current carbon cycle. Burning fossil fuels does.
@@perfesser944 am I correct in thinking though, that if all the timber burnt as biomass was, for example used in sustainable construction, that the CO2 levels in the atmosphere would be less? Surely felling forests, and also burning them must increase levels, even if that carbon is part of the ‘current’ cycle? I’m kind of curious re the ‘current cycle’ - I get fossil fuels are releasing carbon from pre-history, ‘extra’ carbon so to speak…. But surely for several thousand years mankind has been felling trees and burning them - which must’ve lead to an increase - disregarding fossil fuels?
@@EdwardEngines Whether burnt or used in construction, that wood's carbon will eventually return to the cycle. By current I mean within the recordable past, not only today's. Of course, depleting the world's forests also interferes with the carbon cycle, preventing its being fixed and taken out of the atmosphere.
Nuclear is the way to go. As long as renewables have a long life then sure. Battery tech is nowhere near where we need it. Don’t get me wrong electric motors are incredible but battery tech is poison for our earth. Which tech is better? No bs, no lobbying of politicians to sway facts, which tech causes more pollution? Ice vs full ev vs hybrid(direct ice vs charging ice). Realistic not pie in the sky bs. I would love to know.
The co2 in wood comes from the carbon cycle and does not add co2 to the system. The co2 from coal comes from outside the carbon cycle and does add co2 to the system.
Scientific examinations of forests found out a while ago that forest regrowth after cutting down large areas need several decades before the areas turn into carbon sinks again. All the time these forests, although replanted on paper and in practice, are carbon emitters because more sunlight reaches the ground. PBS talked about that a while ago in the "Should we focus on young trees or old as the climate warms?" video.
But, it would only be Zero emission if the trees mass was acounted for by a new tree... & even then, the total difference in CO2 depends on the health of the soil, which clearly degrades when monocultured. But they didn't bother to define it by that headachingly obvious metric & instead let them pull a fast 1 with a dumb loophole Humans man, fork me.
But typically (at least in north america) commercial logging replants trees so for a given unit of land you can get numerous capture-release cycles over time. I don't think the analysis that says wood burning causes more emissions actually factors this in. Indeed, fossil fuels represent the only form of actual long-long term carbon sequestration currently, everything else (even forests) are part of a living loop/ecological system and adding in more cycles to that loop in the form of plant-harvest-burn is not permanently introducing NEW c02 into the environment, unlike harvesting fossil fuels
I've been stamping my feet about this for years. The idea that the burning of biomass for electrical generation can be claimed to be "renewable" or "green" is maddening. Thank you for making this video.
Wildfires are laying waste to Brazil’s Pantanal, the world’s largest tropical wetland and one of the most important biodiversity sanctuaries on the planet. The blazes, the worst on record since Brazil started tracking fires in 1998, are taking a deadly toll on wild animals, including at-risk species that scientists have been working for decades to protect. “We’re watching the biodiversity of the Pantanal disappear into ash,” said Gustavo Figueirôa, a biologist working for SOS Pantanal, a conservation nonprofit. “It’s being burned to a crisp.” The Pantanal is a maze of rivers, forests and marshlands that sprawl over 68,000 square miles, an area 20 times the size of the Everglades. About 80 percent lies within Brazil, with the rest in Bolivia and Paraguay. Usually flooded for much of the year, the Pantanal in recent years has been parched by a string of severe droughts that scientists have linked to deforestation and CLIMATE CHANGE. Since the start of the year, wildfires have burned over 7,000 square miles, an area the size of New Jersey, in Brazil’s share of the Pantanal. The wetlands, parts of which are on UNESCO’s list of heritage sites because of their rich biodiversity, are home to the world’s biggest parrot, the highest concentration of caimans and threatened wildlife like the giant otter. They also harbor animals that have evolved in ways distinctive from others in their species, like larger jaguars that dive into flooded plains to fish for food. The wildfires, fanned by strong winds and searing temperatures, are WIPING OUT this natural laboratory, killing or injuring giant anteaters, lowland tapirs, marsh deer, hyacinth macaws and caimans.
I work in a business that is directly dependent on pellet fuel combustion. Since the first day I have been skeptical of the claims being made. Adding the costs usually said to be zero and subtracting the lost oxygen production when the forests are cut down really makes it all seem silly if CO2 reduction is the goal.
Except we need people to stop protesting offshore wind, solar, nuclear and electric train lines (because of overhead electric lines are ugly) protest the NIMBYs that make low-energy infrastructure impossible (ie bike lanes)
Personally I feel that biomass is a good use of agricultural solid waste. Having said that meaning biomass shouldn't be farmed like ethanol and biodiesel. In my opinion those land could be better used to farm food, carbon sink or even function as water catchment area which is a much more precious resource.
Sugar mills usually power themselves with their own waste bagasse (the stalks of the sugar cane). That's the ideal. A lot of other agricultural solid waste already has other uses that are more valuable than fuel, e.g. animal bedding, soil improvement, etc.
Thanks for scrutinizing this subject properly. Danmark converted most their facilities from coal to Wood 20 years ago - Denmark paid on average 2-3 times more for electricity than in Sweden and Norway - to be green - and the ironic thing - sad really - is that Danish wood is cut and shipped to Finland for making print paper and toilet paper (fast growing wood has more cellulose) and Finnish wood was cut and shipped to Denmark for burning - None of this maniac thinking would ever had happened without the government subsidies …. It’s such a shame engineers don’t speak truth to power.. they just collect their monthly salary and built shit knowingly it’s a scam (#li-ion-batteries-can’t-be-recycled)
I just became the highest co2 emitter in my neighbourhood by mounting a hula hoop on my roof. Now any time the wind blows I emit tons of co2 from the downwind side of the hoop! All jokes aside, it is incredibly misleading to rank co2 emissions of biomass next to fossil fuel plants without doing any accounting for net emissions which will necessarily trend towards zero in the long run for biomass.
Except the fossil fuels used to cut down, dry, and mash up whole trees, and ship them from one side of the planet to the other, are not trending towards zero. Nor is there any consideration that plantation trees are normally used in housing construction where the timber and its carbon would be locked up for decades or centuries to come, and native forest trees could have been left growing and being part of an ecosystem and rainwater catchment if somebody hadn't bought them to mash up and burn. Instead, all that carbon is dumped in the atmosphere within minutes.
I cannot get people to understand that cutting trees in America and shipping them to the Netherlands to burn is far worse than us using our own available gas….. Somehow the overseas cutting and shipping on diesel fueled engines gives no pollution?
Except it's blackwashing. Trees harvested and afforested drawdown all that carbon again in 20-80 years. Trees left in the ground decay, largely into CH4, 120 times worse than CO2. Coal generates three times the CO2 per GWh as wood. Drax is the best deal the environment of the UK has ever had, aside from wind farms.
When a local pellet plant spontaneously combusted a few years ago... It burned for weeks causing huge mushroom clouds of smoke and haze to settle over the Edmonton region... This is how I know it's worse than our now closed coal-fired plants that ironically lay within eyesight of this dumpster fire of a facility that reopened like 3 years later... BTW, those coal plants have been converted to natural gas, but cancelled the CCS aspect for economic reasons... Typical! Though I suspect it's because SMR's will be built on the site in the next 5-10 years anyway since Alberta is going all in on nuclear while stupidly curtailing renewables... 8 GW's of new renewable projects were just cancelled in the last 6 months thanks to the Fossil Fool Premier Marlaina "Danielle" Smith...
There are 2 million plus fracking mines in Canada. Alberta is full of them. Go to Google Maps and it doesn't take long to find the mosaic of mine sites. And the recent big forest fires in Canada all started right next to these mines and their access roads. Obviously, global warming is making the forests drier but the ignition source just adds injury to insult and the mine owners haven't paid a dime in compensation.
I agree with you, although Coal Combustion Byproducts are an *especially* nasty bit that is barely mentioned compared to GHG emissions and particulate matter/hydrocarbons/co/sulfur etc Piles of Radioactive Ash sitting in a Glorified Percolator is *bad*.
Same happened here in Denmark in 2022, damn pellet silos burned for near a month(29d) 58000 TONS of pellets went up in smoke at the Skudstrup powerplant. Ironically the pellets were likely of Canadian/NA origin too 🙄Though i can't really fault you guys for that 😅
That's the wrong conclusion. "Green" and "sustainable" are always relative claims. It's possible and essential to compare the overall lifecycle CO2 emissions from different kinds of power generation. Wind and solar come out very low, gas and coal come out very high, and burning wood pellets is only somewhat low-carbon over decades of replanting an existing commercial forest. If you're concerned over the sustainability of the best choices, then by all means use less energy.
@@orionbetelgeuse1937 A large part of the video's point was also that the wood pellets themselves are only carbon-neutral if the trees grow back as quickly as they're cut down, which isn't happening.
@@orionbetelgeuse1937 Most trees don't grow back after being cut down and most tree seeds don't spread far from existing trees. It can take many decades for trees to even sprout far into cleared areas and decades more to grow to appreciable size. Forests can't recover naturally as quickly as we cut them down. Agriculture is normally like that with any plant, harvesting goes a lot quicker than growing so if you don't want to run out you need to actively plant more.
Yes but coal is locked up carbon usually stored deep underground. Pellets made from biomass are carbon neutral since after the plant dies and biodegrades the gases are released to the atmosphere anyways. So just have a think about it all
Biomass is good at small scale, like heating a house from locally grown wood. The problem, like in everything else, is globalization, the idea that we can do anything at large scale and it not having a negative impact on the environment is asinine.
Except: burning wood, biomass, adds no 'new' CO2 to the air. The CO2 that is in the wood was sucked out of the athmosphere during the time the tree lived... Also, if we don't burn the wood, it will rot and release that CO2 anyway!
This was addressed in the video. Your statement is like a dieter telling their doctor, "Well, I knew I was going to eat three boxes of cereal this month, so I ate them all this morning in one sitting. It's the same calories either way, right?" There may be no "new CO2" per se but that's just shorthand for "CO2 exceeding the environmental absorption capacity." Let's say a tree stands 100 years (absorbing CO2) then dies and takes 20 years to decay (releasing the same CO2). That's decades and decades of being a CO2 "battery" with a slow release that can be absorbed by new growth _versus_ chopping down "renewable" trees after 2 or 3 years and burning them, dumping ALL their CO2 into the atmosphere in (what?) minutes/hours. "Carbon neutral" doesn't mean "releases no carbon" that would have been released eventually anyway but "releases no more carbon in a given period of time than the environment can absorb in the same amount of time."
You're forgetting the whole load of energy required to collect the wood, turn it into pellets and then transport it from rural America to the power plant in the North of England. That's where all the extra CO2 emissions come in.
And the UK Drax family were huge slave/plantation owners for centuries and still living on the backs of that inheritance. Whichever way you look Drax == Evil
we here in portugal did a documentary about this issue, the drax plant and pellets from forests ruclips.net/video/BqEojlj7_bY/видео.htmlsi=Ji1l41SbLPdFCofq
@@JanBruunAndersen What? I've got two alternatives for you. Biochar and biogas. Both generate much cleaner energy from biomass while also building the soil in ways that last.
@@angusbartlett9270 I work with Biochar and Biogas folks every day and it just seems like an extra layer of hand waving and odd claims to justify the effort and outcome. I don't begrudge any of them the opportunity to make a living, humans have always bought and sold the stupidest things for the stupidest reasons, but the level of self-aggrandizement and the ongoing patting themselves on the back for what great people they are for making CHARCOAL! --- it is just grating. Shut up and get busy, why are you bragging about it to me?
@@brightmal Biochar (a trendy name for charcoal) just means you only partially burn the biomass instead of fully burning it. Biogas just means you let biomass rot anaerobically and burn the gas coming off it instead of burning the whole biomass. Said gas is very toxic as it is contains dangerous amounts of sulfur compounds (which become acidic when burned if not purified out before burning) and has low energy density compared to natural gas due to being roughly half CO2 before you burn it. Biogas is in some ways similar to natural gas that has yet to be refined. Both biochar and biogas waste a substantial portion of the original energy content of the biomass fuel. There are advantages to be gained from doing so as charcoal can be cheaper to transport and will burn more cleanly when burned as the dirtiest effluent was already given off in the initial burn that made the charcoal. Biogas is, obviously, a gas, which can be advantageous versus solid fuel for many uses. Neither is inherently cleaner in the long run than burning biomass directly in the context of wood burning for grid power.
You do know there have been Ice Ages since the dawn of time here on Earth? Humans weren't even here prior to the last one. The Earth has been completely Ice Free (no polar ice-caps) more than 60% of the time. We are in an interstadial. Each previous interstadial was 4 degrees hotter than it is today - with more CO2 than today. This is a relatively cool interstadial but a 4 degree raise would take us to the mean average - and non of the previous interstadial temperatures had anything to do with humans. Think about it
Dave, it isn't the first time corporations have lied to get fat taxpayer issued welfare checks and sadly, it won't be the last. Capitalists have figured out that it is much easier, and more profitable, to milk the public treasury than to actually invest and earn a return on their money by creating anything new.
not just new but useful!!! Capitalism can be used for good - if we have sound ideas as to how it's done - and so I do believe in rewarding good behavior with subsidies and punishing the offenders. What's your problem with that? It's not perfect, but hey - it does help tremendoursly the 95% we get right.
@@extropiantranshuman It's also about who gets to decide what is "good behaviour". If I was the Judge - then the way DRAX claims it is Carbon Neutral would get bounced Out of Court. They need to account for ALL the CO2 that is involved in getting the pellets to the Power Station and would not be allowed to make the case that the trees can be "Back Dated" in terms of CO2 consumption. CO2 accounting should be from only be taken into account from the time the tree is cut down. Time is a far more Critical Element in the CO2 equation than is currently taken into account. If the average Temp of the earth is going to increase by +3degC in the next 50-100 years - I'ts no good claiming that all will be OK by the time the trees that are going to be planted (if they are) will sock up the CO2 in 100 or more years time.
If you burn wood that has grown by sucking up Carbon then you're just putting that carbon back in the air. If you dig up coal and burn it you're putting carbon in the air that's from millions of years ago.
No. We're in this mess because fossil trade became a pillar of Defense policy to the extent it overrode good sense and took on a life of its own even after it made no sense. Fossil trade even of the unburned portion, fugitive emissions of CH4, NOx, and SOx, and the eventual breakdown of plastics into CO2, of releases of GHGs made for refrigeration and the like, is the mess. The cure is to stop that as soon as possible. Biomass, properly used, helps.
Thought this was a bad idea right from the start. The processing of the wood , shipment to here and the huge amount required should have raised a red flag but was ignored. Now the true mess that its becoming known means we should think more carefully before another disaster is made
It has been known for years that burning biomass produces more CO2 than any other fuel...The Idea is that the trees grow back and recapture carbon. The issue where I live is that the hardwood being cut takes 30-100 or more years to grow back. This is the real issue....
I'm an Englishman living in Germany. Please Dave, can you start shouting about balcony solar. Here in Ze Fazerland, for less than 300 of Napoleans Euro, I can buy and 800 watts of solar power and an inverter and install it, completely legally, myself - simply by plugging it into an electric socket. Thousands are being installed everyday in Germany. For some nutty reason, it is not allowed in the UK. For the proposed subsidy for the Drax power station next year, the government could provide 800w of solar for every single household in the UK. Why is no-one shouting about this? I despair.
In the US this isn't allowed because of the risk of back feed into the grid during a power outage. If a line is downed is should be dead, but solar backend could energize it. I have grid tied solar with rapid shut down for when the grid fails but I still needed $1m liablity insurance.
@@phhowe17 The interesting thing here is it should be allowed. The system comes with a grid tie inverter that only transmits when it detects a AC current is present. The moment it detects the current is not there, it switches off. Now, one might ask "how safe is that?" - well, I would answer what better Proof of Concept would you need than tens of thousands of installations across Germany with not a single incident of injury.
@@justincase9471 I have 2 x 440 watt panels from Renogy, but that isn't important, any panels will do. I have two grid tie inverters I have tried, 1 from Solarman and 1 from Ecoflow, both worked fine - the EcoFlow one has a nicer App experience and some extra features that I like.
But how much other pollutants are produced by burning wood pellets vs. coals ? Can we start thinking holistically in light of all environmental damage and not just CO2 emission ?
That is exactly the right point. PM2.5 is the main problem with burning biomass. Coal is a lot worse in that regard along with PM10 NOx and Sulfur Dioxide. Plus the carbon molecules from pellets were sequestered at most a few decades ago whereas coal can come from the carboniferous 66 million years ago. As long as the reforestation matches combustion it is infinitely better. Also those other pollutants causing ground level ozone are arguably far more serious than CO2 as the latter per say does not reduce bio capacity by itself.
NO, there can only be one thing at a time it seems. And of course, I have my doubts about this video, sensing there is some numerical shenanigans going on.
@@amizuki If it took 20 years to burn a tree's worth of energy it would make sense, instead it takes minutes, hours at most. Furthermore, wood DOES produce toxic chemicals when burned, more even than coal because it's a much much less pure carbon source so you end up with a lot more VOCs on top of all the particulate and other oxides. Also, animals are pretty important and animals live in forests they don't live in coal mines (canaries aside).
@@Dysiode Yes, biomass produce more VOCs than burning coal, but it is more biodegradable and less toxic than the VOCs that come from burning coal (which are still very substantial). I am not saying this is a great idea, but less horrible than burning coal. All solutions are horrible environmentally and this is the art of picking the less bad option. That's why as some others have mentioned, bamboo is a good option and I also mentioned Eucalyptus and Sugar cane.
@@Dysiode You seem to be imagining a huge skyscraper-sized lawnmower clearcutting every forest in BC and paving over the stumps with concrete. 0.5%-1% of BC forests are forested. It takes decades to timber a forest allowance. Afforestation of that allowance is obligatory. Those important animals are conserved because forestry keeps the land valuable, and forest lands are healthiest when they have biodiversity. Can BC do better? Absolutely. It's a shame we don't do more. But the little we do right includes using waste wood, deadfall, diseased trees, beetle-killed timber, and debris to displace coal burning instead of generating methane 120 times worse than CO2 when the cellulose and lignin decay. Is pyrolysis to collect VOCs from wood for use as pygas and black liquor feedstock for liquid fuels, leaving solid biochar for some five dozen commercial uses, most of which displace fossil trade, better? Yes. But until you have pyrolysis plants operating, pellets suppressing coal is smart: coal produces three times as much CO2 per GWh as wood, besides all the other benefits of removing fuel for forest fires from the midst of living healthy trees.
Madness, it's good to find a use for mill waste but burning it is madness why not make building blocks (bricks) out of it thus locking that carbon up for maybe hundreds of years.
Becouse it is inefficient overcomplicated and does not scale up. Sawdust is flamable and needs binding agent to be turned into bricks. To be turned into brics it need to be bind with agent that gives it enough strenght to be used as building material, inhibits water retention, secures it from mould and other fungus, is non flamable, is non toxic for humans to live in, is stable long enought to last decades, is weather proof. And when You get it, it needs to be in price range of bricks... It would be cheaper just to dump said wood into oceans dead zones to be stored indefinetly.
At least, wood has carbon from a shorter recycle source than fossil fuels. Tree carbon capture is dated in tens, to at most a hundred years. Oil and gas are tens of thousands to millions of years old carbon.
Very provocative and I'll think a bit about the issue of pushing carbon savings into the future while being carbon positive now. I dispute, however, the carte blanche statement that using corn in the US is an example of carbon saving since it replaces petro fuels within a year. It is well established that (owing to the need for ammonia fertilizers in growing corn) costs more in fossil fuels than contributes to ethanol replacements in US automotive fuels. I bet the wasted carbon in the misplaced US subsidy of corn-ethanol dwarfs the issue of the UK's (misguided?) subsidy of biofuels because of the time shift argument. Could be worth an episode of JHAT?
The big push to switch to wood pellets in the US was not to be carbon neutral. The goal was to switch from particulate emission heavy traditional firewood to a fuel that was much cleaner in areas that lacked natural gas delivery systems.
burning wood for heat might be 100% efficiency, but burning wood for electricity then using that electricity in a 400-600% efficient heat exchanger is more than 100% efficient
Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Burning wood for heat definitely is viable, as I do that every winter. I use trees that have been removed or dead anyway. This saves on having to run heaters on electricity, and thus prevents CO2 emissions. I agree with the *specific* premise of this video, though I think the CO2 emissions are *less than* 4X higher than coal in the long run. And power from fairly *local* wood waste that is *not* processed into pellets, which uses more CO2, is much better. Yes, other power sources such as nuclear, solar, hydropower, and wind are better, but there could be a niche case for using an already existing coal power plant to make power from biomass. Especially if using the existing coal power plant prevents CO2 emissions that would be necessary to build a new power plant, of any kind. And burning waste biomass usually also prevents *methane emissions* that can occur when biomass is left to rot, in landfills for example.
My MP has just been sent a letter with a link to your succinct video. Keep up the good work. And typical of many of these things, my 'O' level Maths and Physics was enough education for me to smell a rat in the Drax proposals. It is one thing to burn a few tons of waste and another to have 2,000 tons of pellets travelling by train from ports connected to the world!
What a relief! It has always been obvious to me that burning pellets and wood chips, even stemming from sustainable forestry, contributes to accelerating the rise in CO2 concentration. Secondly, since local sustainable forestry operates within a market system of interconnected vessels, the consumer of such sustainable pellets is also indirectly responsible -to a not really lesser degree- for the exploitation of global forests. You should make use of the new possibilities offered by AI as soon as possible to provide your excellent contributions in many popular languages. Many people, like me-here in Germany-use your content to raise awareness about sustainability issues. I would, therefore, like to share it with a local audience in the German language (for now, with a smaller audience in English). THANKS!!!
Why does it matter, for carbon neutrality, whether you have one big plot of land getting corn planted and harvested each year on the whole thing, or whether you have twenty little plots of land with twenty-year-old trees being harvested and replanted each year on one plot? Either way, it's a bunch of monoculture cropland that could have been used for something else. But either way, the carbon comes out of the air when the plants grow and goes back into the air when the fuel is burned. I don't see a meaningful difference. To actually sequester biomass carbon, what you would do would be to grow it, heat it to 300°C or so, burn the gas that comes off, and use the biochar to improve the soil somewhere.
Biomass is net zero because it is carbon already in the carbon cycle. However there would be economic costs associated with biofuel that you would not get with zero emissions. Biomass would warm the planet but instead of warming it into the indefinite future, like with geologic sources, it would warm the planet for as long as it would take for the biomass to grow back and then for however long for the temperature to exponentially decay back to where it would be had it not been burned. There would also be the risk that the climate is unstable and the warming from biofuels could trigger some positive feedback loop which would have otherwise been avoided.
"Biomass is net zero because it is carbon already in the carbon cycle" only holds if it is being sequestered as fast as it is being released. Which is not the case.
@@jaapfolmer7791 Yes it is net zero. Theoretically if is being released faster than it is being sequestered, eventually you would run out of trees and you'd have to wait for them to sequester the carbon and grow back. It is net zero when you don't just look at the instant but look at the entire carbon cycle.
I agree. I live where waste biomass from logging is used for pellets and see where it is not used decomposes in a couple years. The carbon burned from waste biomass is that much carbon not added to the carbon cycle from fossil fuels.
I'd get the whole wood burning for carbon neutrality thing if they grew the trees first like crops instead of cutting down forests that form ecosystems unlike farming.
A waste to energy plant would make more sense than biomass, as burning waste is certainly better than letting it turn to methane in a landfill. But burning forests for power does not make a lick of sense.
5:48 rotting wood doesn't put "a good chunk of its carbon" into the ground. Do you really know where the carbon in a tree comes from and then where it returns to? The energy for carbon sequestration in wood comes from photosynthesis. Not the ground. A few nutrients come from the ground. When you burn wood, you're left with a tiny bit of ash. The ashes are the nutrients that the tree took from the ground. All of the carbon came from the air.
UK does not need less biomass burning, UK need more energy storage with more renewables charging it. Then the thermal plants Biomass, Coal, Natural Gas, and Nuclear) can be idled one by one. If you shut Biomass you are only trading to Coal, Natural Gas, or Nuclear otherwise. Change the biomass laws if they are not right. It only effect the order of shutting down thermal planets. They all need shut down. Biomass leaves less waste at the site than coal or nuclear. But we have little time to get to less carbon.
@@rcpmac According to the latest data from NOAA's Global Monitoring Laboratory, the global average atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration was 419.3 parts per million (ppm) in 2023. This represents an increase of 2.8 ppm compared to 2022 and is the 12th consecutive year where the annual increase exceeded 2 ppm.
I remember green campaigning groups relating 100% renewables reports/plans about a decade ago, and when I read them I found they relied on significant amounts of biomass to achieve their goal. It was clear to me then that their goal was not low carbon, but being anti-fossil fuel and (perhaps even more so) anti-nuclear was. If they had been interested in low carbon electricity production, they would have advocated for clean renewables + nuclear as the solution, like ecomodernists do. This is starting to change however, for example, Finland's Green Party now supports nuclear energy.
What is a clean renewable these days? New hydro has been found to be worse than coal, wind farms and solar are replaceable but only if coal and diesel continue, Green parties now supporting nuclear and sea level rise of over a metre in grandchildren's lifetimes might mean they should have been supporting it in the 70's, 80''s, 90's 00's, when they were probably controlled opposition, now is too late globally.
Which campaign groups were they, because environmental scientists knew biomass was a bs way to achieve renewable energy targets long before that.
3 месяца назад+1
And you're forgetting geothermal energy too. There's progress in this field but they need more support and money. This is the real solution but nobody talks about it.
Although there is some interesting work going on (i.e. Quaise), the depth of hot rock in the UK means geothermal doesn't play any role here at the moment. I put it in the clean renewables group, though its CO2eq emissions are higher than wind and solar.
Hot Dry Rock Geothermal is Soooooo underrated! Granted minor hazards of seismic risks etc to be considered but yeah. Also production of low grade heat and/or low temp electricity generation processes like Organic Rankine Cycle etc
We use wood pellets to heat our home. There is a vast difference between this and operating the power stations you describe. They should not be described the same way.
I'm sorry to admit that I worked on the Drax biomass project. On the first day we were given a talk about how much cleaner it was than coal and that it came from tree bark and peanut husks
@@WilliamLeigh-cl9bq It's a shock the first few times you find out authorities have been lying through their back teeth. Eventually you get used to it.
Wait a minute. They're cutting down trees here, so they can be burned as "zero carbon energy" in Britain? That's crazy! For one thing, our forests are burning _themselves_ down quite rapidly these days, and don't need any additional human help. But also, this is only "zero carbon" thanks to an accounting trick? Outrageous. Just think of all the dirty bunker fuel they use shipping those pellets halfway across the world. Even the name of the power station belongs to a James Bond villain. Hugo Drax tried to destroy the world in "Moonraker."
Giant redwoods are dying because we are stopping the fires. Big trees can survive fires, without fires they gey crowded and choked out, some even need fire to germinate. Clearing underbrush and putting wildfires out isn't natural either.
What about using the hardwood pellets to grow lion's mane and oyster mushrooms? They eat sawdust and hardwood pellets is like the main method that's used ... that's how I grow mine. Instead of burning them, they get turned into food ... and as the mycelium digests the wood to make this food (which is a healthy superfood that's not ultra processed with medicinal properties, esp the lion's mane) ... as the mycelium digests the wood ... it makes it so that the spent fuiting block (after you harvest the mushrooms) can be mulched into the garden to enhance soil without the need for synthetic fertilizer. Mushrooms are primary decomposers. Growing them creates soil. Esp these gourmet species like lion's mane that grow on sawdust and wood waste. Better than burning em, eh? Feed em to mushrooms to do bioalchemy into food. I heard that its a decent carbon sink to use these pellets to grow mushrooms. What are your thoughts?
We would have done if not for protesting from environmental groups ironically. Merckel's ending of German nuclear power because of an accident at a stupidly designed facility in Japan was witless. We should now be investing in small modular nuclear systems instead of environmentally harmful wind farms.
Turns out chopping down forests and burning them is not environmentally friendly. I also really hate the argument "But a felled tree will just emit it's carbon". Yeah over decades and be home to all sorts of life in the mean time.
But a felled tree will just emit its carbon AS METHANE. Yeah, over as much as a decade, in a healthy ecosystem. If it takes decades, your ecosystem health is poor. Methane's 120 times more GHE-intensive as CO2. In the past, this would be fine; it was always so. But now, we can't afford that methane warming.
The students at my university thought this kind of power station was a non starter in 1997. School of Forestry, Bangor University, Wales. Use of wood in well made furniture and buildings to remove carbon from the atmosphere is a much better mechanism.
This. 🙏🏽🏆💐
In the context of California and wildfires it would be insane not to do biomass energy if cut in patterns to reduce risk of wildfires. 🤷🏻♀️ If it's gonna burn might as well make energy and ideally combined with waste heat recovery for residential or industrial heating uses doubling its efficiency.
Only about 10% of harvested and deadfall wood mass can be made into furniture and structures.
What do you suggest happens to the other 90%?
@@bartroberts1514 The Carbon cycle seems to suggest that most of it stays in the wood.
@@bartroberts1514 That's an interesting assertion! Plywood, one of the most common furniture & construction materials peels the entire log, only discarding the bark. Oriented Strand Board uses chipped timber from the entire tree, particle board uses small particles, MDF uses sawdust. Where did you get the 10% from?
Whatever we do, it seems that corruption and abysmal judgment waits around the corner for us with a brick.
Because government is run by the worst of the worst. It's Hollywood for ugly people.
As long as people are allowing to have their emotions played on, this will continue. Don't use emotion to deal with environmental concerns. Use your brain.
@@marlan5470 If we have to rely on people using their brains we are truly doomed.
@@jimdunleavypiano Why? Something useful and beneficial may come out of it?
@@marlan5470 I meant that the chances of people using their brains instead of their emotions is remote. It was sarcasm.
The wood scraps can be used reasonably if you apply a few rules:
1. Regional use. Every transport reduces the efficiency
2. Air dried. Yeah, a lot of wood is dried with additional energy used. If it dries in the air for a few years, you actually can use it too. That's also 3 more years for new trees
3. To burn it simply for electricity is crazy, when we have many more ways to create electricity, but only a few ways to create a lot of heat!
4. No wood plantations. Seriously: plantations are not forests. You will know once you have seen both... Plantations kill biodiversity and reduce carbon absorption!
Unburned wood decays mostly to methane, 120 times more potent a GHG than CO2.
Plantations bad, yes. Afforestation good, though.
@@bartroberts1514 for an example: we burn wood from a nearby forest we process ourselves. The carbon emissions are the saw, the cars for transport and the splitter. And we use it for heating after it dried outside.
It is wood of low quality, not good enough for furniture or building. The forests are used extensively with tree species native to the area. Most of them plant themselves and the forest is rich in plants and wildlife.
@@alis49281 Excellent points! And with advances in EVs and electric chainsaws (not just toys or jokes anymore), your entire wood harvest could be fossil free.
With a pyrolysis rig, you could get clean char from that wood, as well as home heat (I've seen one rig that generated electricity while making pygas, black liquor, and char, but that's way too complicated).
Good on you. You're saving the planet all that methane release.
@@bartroberts1514 we use tools until they break. That's more efficient.
And a high tech furnice for a single home is more than slightly exaggerated. Especially when we would've to rebuild a part of this 400 year old house. We already save emissions by renovating without cement and concrete wherever it is possible (99% less cement pretty much)
@@alis49281 Exactly right.
Of course, as I design and build tools, I'm in a slightly different boat. If pyrolysis were simpler to make and use, it'd be ideal. Until someone comes up with a design for that, a good Franklin stove is pretty awesome.
I work in sawmilling in AB and worked in Pulp&Paper in BC. I use to say we sell wood chips and wood is a byproduct. Also Drax is shady as hell, aside from the fact that they are making wood pellets in Canada and shipping them to europe to call it green energy... They also got caught in BC chipping good lumber trees for pellets, which is a super waste of our trees. As you point out.
There is no Carbon capture on their AB/BC operations, and unless they do in Europe, then they are just burning wood from somewhere else.
"Carbon capture" is such a scam
the BECCS is to be installed in the stack of the combustion unit, because the CO2% is much higher and easier to be captured and compressed. It will be a similar system to the CHP unit at Copenhagen (aka Copenhill) that was shown to the delegation of UNFCCC. I guess the pellet plants could capture CO2 from the stack of the dryers, but its significantly lower volumen content than a stack of the combustion unit that would be burning the wood pellets (at the CHP unit at Drax or Copenhill).
Is anybody surprised by this revelation? I'm not. It reminds me of the boondoggle in the USA telling us that ethanol from corn is a good deal, economically. It's not.
Ethanol from corn is a massive environmental catastrophe and stupid, as it's the most processed garbage of the whole lot.
Sure it is, for gasohol gamblers (investors).
plus subsidizing farmers to grow corn for ethanol makes a lot of them decide to plant corn wherever they can. that means cutting down any last tree remaining even next to streams which causes erosion and leads to warmer water temperatures which favors invasive species and decreases native trout populations. corn ethanol was a horrible decision. it's also not good for most engines
@@JesseDahirKanehl Ethanol very bad, yes.
Pyrolysis very good, done right, though.
Brazil has competitive ethanol from sugarcane. Too bad the US decided to heavily tarriff Brazil's ethanol instead of cooperating to increase production to supply bith countrjes
A perfect example of a sunk cost fallacy and uninformed politicians.
You are very kind to politicians!
Corruption and stupidity. It's always corruption and stupidity.
strongly in favour of a technocracy
You think politicians making more money for big business is them uninformed?
politicians are experts in political power, and total zeros in accounting, engineering, or any physical reality based topics.
This sort of Bait And Switch Scheme is happening in many sectors.
The Hydrogen Economy is almost entirely based on Methane Steam Reforming, producing more emissions while conning the public into thinking they are switching to a clean fuel with pure water as the only emission.
The recent uptake of Plug-In Hybrid vehicles instead of BEVs is the result of legacy auto makers convincing the public that they can go green without changing any of their own behaviour. Toyota convinced millions of gullible buyers into believing they were selling "Self-Charging Hybrids" when in fact they were sold vehicles that emit more than the ICE vehicles they were meant to replace.
There is merit to the diesel electric driveline, at least for trains.
Wait tell me why a plug-in hybrid should be bad? If you charge at home isn't that fine for small trips? Assume that I am an average consumer
@@blauw67 You usually only need a large engine for acceleration and going uphill. A small engine (range extender) running at its most efficient speed and torque can produce enough electrical power to keep you going on the flat and charge the battery which can accelerate or take you uphill. Unfortunately, many plug-in hybrids have a small battery and a normal-sized large combustion engine. Also, the combustion engine still has lots of parts which need expensive servicing.
@@blauw67 You still have a heavy ICE to lug around on top of the heavy electrical equipment.
@@clivemitchell3229 thank you, yeah that makes sense
Some other considerations you could add:
1 The energy requirement to reduce the moisture content of the pellet feedstock to an acceptable level. Green wood waste is about 50% water. Feedstock needs to be 20% water or less.
2 The electricity required to run a hammer mill to grind the feedstock to the right size particles for pelletising
3 The electricity required to run the pressing machine to make the pellets.
Also, while pellets are being shipped from North America to Europe, some are being shipped from New Zealand to North America !
Pellet mills do not use that much energy for the output. Same with hammer mills. I have both. Second, you dry the wet material in the sun, not by buying energy. Third. Co2 is not a pollutant
What I find very important is that this large scale pellet industry is yet another example of the extraction economy. By cutting and moving the trees and crops, you deplete the soil. The minerals, etc are released in another part of the planet. Also, the land needed for biofuel competes with land for biodiversity and food for a rapidly increasing number of people.
Your claims are frighteningly bogus.
So long as there is soil, forest permaculture replenishes minerals and nitrates.
True, it does it more completely and efficiently with terra preta soil amendment, but only sterile soil, such as soil poisoned by high nitrate fertilizer applications, loses minerals as you describe.
Also, forests in BC are rife with ten times the biodiversity any patch of the UK can boast.
@@bartroberts1514 The ash of the burned wood contains most of the minerals the tree took up while growing. Those minerals are now on the other side of the Atlantic ocean. Inorganic fertilizer is needed to replenish those minerals as rock doesn't grow back. The only plant nutrient that can come back naturally is nitrate (and that's only because nitrogen comprises roughly 80% of our atmosphere). That's very slow if certain conditions aren't met, such as crop rotation with nitrate-capturing plants, which isn't possible if all you grow are trees for burning as fuel, hence why farmers use nitrate-including fertilizer.
@@5467nick You clearly have never done any permaculture. Minerals are made available to plants by soil microbes that break down dirt into digestible parts. So long as there is healthy soil rich in microbes, mineral mobilization is never an issue.
Those minerals the tree took up while growing are dead, locked in the wood, until something living breaks that wood down again. If that living thing is aerobic, then the exhaust of that biological process is CO2. If that living thing is anaerobic, then the exhaust is methane, 120 times worse than CO2.
Inorganic fertilizer preferentially kills off beneficial aerobic microbes and nitrogen fixers, leaving soil less nutritious once those inorganics are washed away by rain.
Crop rotation is obsolete, with proper permaculture practices to encourage healthy soil.
Farmers use nitrate-including fertilizer because they've forgot the ancient wisdom: good soil grows good crops, good farmers grow good soils.
Using biochar to create terra preta as deep as 3 meters can provide all the nitrogen and other minerals any plants can need. And yes, you can use terra preta to amend forest soils.
Trees grow wild where I live. Twelve thousand years ago, there were few trees growing above and below the 49th parallel due to miles of ice covering the earth. By magic, trees grow there now.
@@tango_uniform Did you have a point about how climate sensitivity makes us vulnerable to forces beyond our ability to adapt to?
When I first heard Drax had gone 'carbon neutral' my kneejerk reaction was, 'bullsh*t'. In the years since then I've been vindicated and then some.. There was a Guardian article a few years ago about how ancient European woodland was being harvested to feed Drax and the reporters who tried to investigate were threatened with violence. Lovely.
Shameful. They should be shut down yesterday.
Definitely. I've got a fire pit outside, and I'm only looking to get ethical wood
There's a person locally who only sells hard wood that's been given to them by tree surgeons. I figure if it's given by multiple tree surgeons, it's typically cut down due to :
The tree being diseased
It's causing an issue for neighbours ie: leaning too much to the left or right
It's fell down due to a storm
It's been trimmed
It's already dead due to whatever other reason
People also typically give away soft wood from their homes for the same reason. I wouldn't get a wood burning stove due to indoor air quality concerns for instance too
That, and I can't see wood burning stoves as being ethical or even sustainable. It the shortest amount of time to grow a tree is 10 years , and that tree is burned in one month, that's inherently unsustainable. It's actually why the UK moved to coal to begin with (environmental destruction and deforestation)
FSC is greenwashing.
@@waqasahmed939on a personal level, indoor air quality is most affected by opening the door & getting a puff or even a billow of smoke.
With most fires if you open the door a crack for 3 or 4 seconds while the draught pattern re-establishes this puff doesn't happen when you then open the door fully & air quality is unaffected.
Air quality near an open fire in the garden is _much_ more of an issue.
@@waqasahmed939"hard wood" & "hardwood" are very different things, one of the softest woods available, balsa, is a hardwood & one of the hardest, redwood, is a softwood.
Yep, crazy world.
@@alanhat5252 I am tbf looking to get a smokeless fire pit outside so air quality should be significantly better as there's a secondary (and even a tertiary) burn if you look at the Eastoak table top burner
Regardless, I'm looking to get the most ethical wood anyway. It simply isn't sustainable to grow trees for 40 years and use it up in one month.
I did a good number of inspections on the new pellet handling systems, prior to them being installed, to ensure they would meet the legislation for safe operation. I said at the time the whole thing was a great big cluster buck that would come back to bite people. Especially considering the amount of subsidy it was getting. Nice to be proved more than right 10 years on.
what was proven? it's still a debate between scientists if the LULUCF calculations by IPCC is accepted by the environmentalist.
@@terrencesauve Did you watch the video?
Biomass fuel/burning should only ever be waste to energy or disposing of a byproduct in a useful manner. We shouldn't be growing trees just to be burnt.
even in the paper industry, that pulp can be used in a myriad of ways without burning it - such as ocean booms, etc.
You are wrong. This use of biomass is exactly what is needed.
They plant trees & as they grow, it takes co2 out the atmosphere. Then you burn them to create power, which release that co2, that co2 is then absorbed by the next crop of trees.
They are literally recycling the co2 in the atmosphere with the aim of reducing it with carbon capture
Thanks for all you do, Dave! ❤
How the heck did we end up here , burning imported wood instead of lower emission UK coal..? 🤦
The Stupid Greens and MONEY that's why. Drax was built over Selby Coal field and only had a few miles to transport the coal. Shell was going to install carbon capture equipment at Drax then pump it down old oil wells in the North Sea. BC wood ship to Immingham, tranship to trains, barges and coaster, tranship again into Drax Power Station. Your still ahead on figures using good hot coal.
Much the same as the Maui Gas field near New Plymouth New Zealand and the Power Station built there for the gas. Must have been a pretty clean operation. Now its closed down all that machinery scrapped and Coal is stored there now? Politicians !!!!
I remember when that idea cropped up and I remember thinking, that replacing coal with a less energy dense fuel that you'd have to get from all over the world, sounded like a particularly stupid idea. I'm as always disappointed to be right.
Unf*king believable
Fun fact, this kind of usage is one of English's only examples of infixing, typically written *un-f**king-believable*
That'd be because it's false.
But not surprising.
I worked on the unit where the new furnaces were being assembled , I was just providing electrical supplies to the various work stations . But taking to the people who were running the show , they all knew it wasn’t carbon neutral . But obviously vast profits were to be made , so what’s not to like . But let’s face it this sums up the whole zero fiasco , totally pointless but what great way to make jobs and money . 😂
Entirely believable tbh. Wood burning isn't sustainable even if it is theoretically renewable
Carbon capture and storage works. It's called trees.
Not nearly as well as you would think, and especially not when using gigantic monoculture forests.
swamps, more like
@@paavobergmann4920 Good point. Trees have a habit of burning as the climate warms.
@@jamesphillips2285 Yes, that, plus, forest soil isn´t all that rich in carbon, forests tend to leach out the soil. all the carbon is mostly in the living layler, kind of in a short-circuit. The forest does not really deposit much long-term. Dead trees decay rapidly, and the carbon gets released again, or taken up into new biomass. Swamps on the other hand build huge deposits of peat and/or carbon-rich, anoxic mud, and carbon trapped there will be out of the cycle for a long time.
actually it's endomycorrhizal fungi
My canton has invested heavily into Biomass. I am not happy, since they have been fighting my decades long battle to promote renewables. Our capital city has 14 chargers for EV. It is 2024.
And ojr cantonal hospital has zero chargers for EV, public and staff. Zero. It is still 2024.
EVs are not carbon neutral, some can argue even the opposite. Mining and transporting lithium from Bolivia plateaous and then into refinement just to make the battery can amount to more carbon than your car would spend in it's lifetime if it went on gasoline, which requires much less energy after the drills have done the work (and with less energy intensive refinement later on). And we didn't even consider that most of electricity you will use is not produced in carbon neutral ways. If you are not charging from solar, nuclear or wind power you basically worsen the carbon situation with just that, even if the battery production if taken out of the equation. EVs are in essence just shifting the carbon emission responsibility elsewhere at this moment in hidden ways, just as in the topic of this video. Hopefully in the future this changes with sodium batteries and more carbon neutral energy grids.
@@marsovac Do you have a source for these assertions?
@@marsovacnever will a burning technology be better from an environment standpoint than something that gets built once and then just reuse. See heat pumps vs wood burning central systems for example. Or coal powered power plants vs nuclear or renewables like solar/windmills.
@@marsovac Careful, you might just qualify for Exxon Mobil employee of the year with a baseless statement like that one.
@@1981therealfury it is far from baseless. The second part regarding the production of electric energy is pure fact, and the first one are still only research papers not yet translated into facts. Since I can't put links here on youtube, it is on you as the plaintiff to inform yourself regarding it. Anyhow the first part is less relevant. If your energy doesn't come from carbon neutral sources, then the electric car doesn't do zero carbon emissions, it just shifts them away from you, similarly to what this video explains.
The real reason why wood as a fuel has zero net CO2 impact is that wood is ephemeral. An old growth forest is typically at a balance between growth and decay. Burning the wood releases the CO2 the tree bound temporarily through photosynthesis. Nature would have released the CO2 again, albeit at a slower rate, than burning it did. A longterm real cost of pellet fuel, though, is the energy needed to process and distribute it, which is mainly from fossil fuels.
The Bulk Carriers shipping the pellets from BC to Drax may burn 50 ton /day of High Viscosity Fuel oil, a voyage may take 14 days or more, then they go back empty, 40 ton /day as we don't produce anything to be exported in bulk like that to BC, well we don't produce anything period apart from hot air from politicians and the greens banging on about global warming.
Its all wealth creation and nothing more. That's 1260 tons of fuel oil that has already come from the Middle East and could have been burnt in an oil fired station.
Scientists studies show that the data always agrees with whoever is funding them.
But you can't deny the basic science that burning so called 'biomass' emits 4 times the amount of even coal fired power so really do not need to be burning it or even subsidising it...
That's not how science works.
I'd lay off the Joe Rogan podcasts if I were you.
💯
@@Jagger-Tyr_13It is a generally accepted rule in statistics that study funded by a vested interest is more likely to be biased. That said, the other rules are much more important. If you have one study funded by a vested interest that follows the rules of double-blind, simple random sample and the like, then this is more to be trusted than one funded by a contrary interest which follows none of those rules.
Yes, I was once told, that with the right Layout and the Careful positioning of Numbers you could make a Graph say exactly what you want to see.
With the cost of electricity in the UK at the moment people are starting to clock on that home generation makes more sense
I've just had my unit charge decreased and my standing charge increased. This reduces the fiscal efficacy of my solar panels.
The cost of electricity is pegged to the wholesale price of natrual gas, if it was pegged to renewables, which is now the majority generation source in the UK, the per kWh price would fall for everyone.
@@rogerbarton1790 Who gives a f**** about the fiscal efficacy of your solar panels? If they are reducing your carbon footprint then that is good. Did you install them to make money or to reduce your devastating impact on the planet?
Not by as much as it would fall if 30% of our bills wasn't for subsidies to mega corporations to use so-called 'renewables'! You have been had
oh yeah - my off grid solar is working out quite lovely as the years go by
Is there an imbalance? yes: chainsaws, logging trucks, etc etc, but timber related co2 is an entirely closed carbon cycle. Surely the least of most evils in the field of energy production!
Biomass power generation works on a limited basis here in the Western US. Forest fire suppression has our previously over harvested and now overgrown woods a gigantic wildfire hazard. Wildfire burned trees are now feeding biomass plants, but it’d be better to thin the woods before they burn in wildfires. Wildfire smoke has become a health and quality of life problem even in cities, along with its devastating effects on our wild-lands.
It does seem crazy to use biomass power generation, on a large scale, in a location with such limited feed stock as Western Europe! Shipping wood from North America to burn across an ocean is ludicrous! If it needs to be burned, build a plant and burn it near its source.
The issue is a lot of organizations and corporations don't want to take a break when demand is low, so they require concrete sources. If we found a use for bottle tops, companies would start out just taking bottle tops that people discarded, but as soon as there is a bottle top shortage, companies would start opening millions of soda bottles and throwing away the bottle and drink just for the tops, and never go back to taking waste bottle tops.
well they can find a use for the bottle and drink before doing that
4:00 Who uses these accounting gimmicks as the basis of their zero-emissions argument? Obviously the real argument is that carbon is re-absorbed by young growing trees.
5:20 Deciduous trees absorb carbon every Spring when they grow new leaves, and evergreen trees grow much faster.
5:50 Providing energy for new life = getting released into the atmosphere again.
The only reasonable arguments I can see so far are:
1. There isn't enough reserved forest area to absorb the amount of carbon being released.
2. Atmospheric carbon has to be more concentrated in industrial areas in order to make its way to forests on other continents.
3. It sounds like pellets don't burn as hot as coal or gas.
In Canada we just don’t do forest management by removing deadfall so that when the forests burn caused mostly by humans,the government can attribute it to the climate emergency!
Our CO2 emissions do not matter at all.
I always miss taking into account the total amount of carbon which is emitted by planting, growing (fertilizers! - Co2 equvalent) harvesting and transport as such. This needs to be added to the carbon emitted while burning biomass.
Life Cycle Assessments (LCA’s) are DEFINED a must, and this “Cradle to Grave” scale is pretty standard/best practices in most good LCA papers. Granted what is right and what is selected for profitability/political reasons doesn’t always line up!
To play devil’s advocate though there is the issue of how big you want the scope to be, and then also the sustainability of biomass can vary SUBSTANTIALLY based on Supplier/Practices etc but all that requires certification.
Wood pellets from a local Controlled Burn Alternative/Forest Management etc with Biochar and/or Biomass Orgin Ash Return etc can be great!, but telling those pellets from visually identical pellets made from deforestation overseas can complicate things.
I do think videos on these certifications would be neat!
@@ericlotze7724 These certifications and LCA in general would be amazing themes.
They could easily feed way more than the twelve minutes videos we know and love tough.
But I'm ready to have a quite big think !
@@ericlotze7724 Also, there's a continuum from "okay" forest practices like BC's that manage forests with some eye to afforestation and clearing fuel from forests to reduce fire risk, to the best possible practices, pursued nowhere today.
This is all thanks to Diederik Samsom, working under Frans Timmermans. He is mostly responsible for the European policy on biomass.
I hope he lies awake at night thinking about his stupid decisions.
In the Netherlands I don't foresee any decline in biomass usage in the coming years. Not with our current government.
A very sad future for forests all around the world.
We should have more trees, not less.
Nobody here including the "thinker" apparently knows the difference between fossil and biomass carbon. What a dumb bunch
they don't lose sleep. they sleep very comfortably and die fat, rich, and happy.
I recall flying over the Amazon on my way to Tepui El Diablo and the reservations near it, Canaima and Kavac.
Below us, the rainforest was burning from horizon to horizon. An American on the same plane commented on how very sad for the future it was to see it all burning.
Keep in mind, we were flying in a plane, burning an immensity of fossil fuels.
He didn't know that burning was cultural burning, and had happened in the Amazon -- as it happens in Congo and elsewhere -- every few years, in different places. It cleared out fuel that would have fed hotter fires, and let seeds sprout that needed fire to germinate.
What's bad is when that land is disturbed by plantations and ranches, development, and mining. People blasting the tops off mountains for coal, or using vast spans for bitumen, segmenting habitats for pipelines, and the like.
Forest, even forest harvest in moderation and well-regulated, is good and gives forests some measure of protection.
Not everything is as it seems.
@@bartroberts1514 you KNOW that even though the Amazon burns naturally, a lot of those fires are started intentionally as a way to clear space for farming, right ? it's a huge problem on the edges of the rainforest, and it's the primary reason for the loss of rainforest.
@@rcpmacwould you care to explain for the rest of us. Or are you using the same accounting methods.
Well done, as always. A heinous crime against the people of Earth.
Burning wood for heat makes sense in rural places where there aren't other options (no gas, power grid unreliable, not much sunlight in winter, etc) and where you have lots of windfall to burn that's coming down anyway. Cutting healthy trees to burn for electricity, on the other hand, is asinine. Here in BC we are getting our heads cracked by the cops for trying to stop logging for pellet production, it's a national embarrassment. Our so-called "forests" that are actually just monoculture tree plantations are a net SOURCE of carbon emissions now, not a sink, and this pellet nonsense is part of why that is. Thanks for putting some light on this, international pressure on the BC government is going to be crucial to stopping this atrociously stupid practice.
Yeah, I have access to a historic family cabin, and the ranch it is on with a bunch of other cabins is in a forest, it naturally produces several times the firewood than everyone can use.
Wood heating only makes sense if you don’t place any value on your or your neighbors’ health. It’s also been found by some researchers to be the least climate-friendly option for heating a home.
@@d-katz But if you live off any grid, how should you heat your home? Many houses in S. Europe aren't particularly remote but there's often no electricity grid and if there is, it costs around €60K to get a connection. No gas either, other than propane. Pellet stoves require little electricity so OK for off-grid power and they emit very little smoke, unlike regular wood burners.
Maybe burn coal in your fireplace to reduce emissions.
@@Loanshark753 Seriously, use a /sarc tag. Some in this audience may believe you mean it; worse, they may think it's right.
Thanks!
Thanks again for your support Lawrence. Much appreciated :-)
Thanks
Thanks for your support. Much appreciated :-)
The problem is that trees are used as fuel. Instead, bamboo should be used for that, as it is thr fastest growing plant in the world. Trees should only be used for construction, furniture and other things that lasts for many years so a new tree has time to grow back. Bamboo also uses very little space thanks to it's fast grow rate so it won't replace forrests on the contrary, it will preserve forrests, thanks to it being a more efficient product.
Yes but the whole point of Drax is that is a fossil fuel model of plunder and extraction of existing resources, paid for by subsidies. They don't concern themselves with regrowing anything, only stripping the ancient forests and burning them for very inefficient energy (most of which is waste heat)
Whilst agreeing with many points here it is still the case that wood will be replaced with growth whereas coal and oil will not !!
@@gman-norman coal and oil will ultimately be replaced though just in a much longer timeframe. But forests will also take decades to hundreds of years to replace, so in the timeframes we need to reduce carbon on the atmosphere and sequester carbon (which biomass does the opposite) it makes zero sense. Especially for green "renewable" subsidies.
Algae is even faster growing than bamboo, and all it needs is sunlight and a small amount of water - you can set up algae farms on desert coasts.
Except bamboo only grow a few places - where trees grow almost everywhere.
What a waste of money
can't make money without burning carbon
I live near a straw burning peaker plant. I believe that it was thought up to burn the waste product from grain production on the rich farmland near Ely however in the years since its conception the weather has become more unpredictable thanks to climate change and this directly impacts the value of straw so this power plant is now competing with local livestock owners who need the straw for bedding and feed for animals. I'm sure complications on shipping agricultural materials since Brexit hasn't helped. I'm not sure how long it'll remain economically viable. Thankfully sunnica - a massive solar farm, has just been approved locally 😅
Good for the solar farm and this again shows the human-focused idea about “waste”, like we burn waste this, waste that. The climate simply does not care. Anything that burns adds to the climate burden, whether it was chopped down ten or a hundred or a thousand years ago. The next scam to go up in flames will be biogas, which is the same idea as biomass (turn waste into an organic fuel to burn) and the same arrant nonsense.
If the goal of this video was to spew the anti-IPCC rhetoric on how land use change and forestry is calculated, it succeeded. Where I was hoping it could discuss, was the developments in the impacts of forest biodiversity, or the conclusion of the discussion on "old growth" vs "newer" forests. So this is just the same video in 2021, but in the lens that we should still burn coal instead of burning forest residues from areas where forest management is done properly.
Thanks for this thought. About 25 years ago in Germany people where get excited to switch home heating to wood pellets. Nobody ever could answer my question of how it could be sustainable without imports. Wish folks were as excited about heat pumps which are actually amazing.
The trouble with this insanity is that people who know nothing are changing thigs they don't really understand. We can see sense and go back to a more rational time, or we can all starve.
How criminal is this?
We use oil other people have been killed over, daily how criminal should this be?
Very!!!!!!
So the next time your sitting at. R
Not in the slightest...
Ok so the next time you’re sitting in your car at a red light, and you’re on your way to pick up an inhaler for your child who has asthma, you know longer need to wonder why this is !!!! Maybe I missed it but I’m pretty sure Monty Python would have done a segment about this long ago! Wake up we’ve been had ! Is this not as clear as the azure blue sky!!! D.S.B.
It's so depressing how we (humanity) abuse the environment.
In what way...??!!
We're environment
@@manoo422 pumping excessive greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, releasing micro plastics into the wider environment, irradiating areas of the earth, driving some species to extinction, ect.
@@manoo422
@@alex.velasco 🐑🐑🐑 are so depressingly stupid...
A related fact: the energy required to harvest, grind, pelletise, bag and ship forest wood offsets any efficiency gotten from the pellet stoves in homes. It's no better than just burning firewood in your home. This, from a U.S. study about 10 years ago.
Wood chips are not fantastic but one thing you have to take into account is when was the CO2 that you are releasing captured. Coal several million years ago, wood chips a few years ago. So wood chip CO2 can be thought of as a current cycle, a closed loop, sort of. Coal is just new CO2 added to the total.
Instead of subsidising biomass, why don't we build more electricity storage facilities?
Or just stop subsiding stuff all together because government is always wrong or the subside plans are corrupt from the get go.
Or just go for a green, sustainable reliable secure source, nuclear!
@@TheJon2442cause nuclear is expensive. And another Ressource that is running out especially when everyone uses it in great quantities. Further nuclear can Not Support the fast changing demand, Changes in Output take a Lot of time.
that would take common sense and brain cells ....
@@TheJon2442 yeah that went well for .... Chernobyl and Fukushima
There is a fallacy here: the carbon contained within the emissions of biomass belongs to the CURRENT carbon cycle, whereas the carbon contained in the emissions from fossil fuels is EXTERNAL to said current cycle, therefore it increases the carbon content of TODAY's biosphere.
Exactly! Not saying there aren’t serious issues with biomass use - but a direct comparison with a fossil fuel is inappropriate?!
@@EdwardEngines Yes, it is. I think my main comment makes it clear. Burning biomass DOES NOT alter the current carbon cycle. Burning fossil fuels does.
@@perfesser944 am I correct in thinking though, that if all the timber burnt as biomass was, for example used in sustainable construction, that the CO2 levels in the atmosphere would be less?
Surely felling forests, and also burning them must increase levels, even if that carbon is part of the ‘current’ cycle?
I’m kind of curious re the ‘current cycle’ - I get fossil fuels are releasing carbon from pre-history, ‘extra’ carbon so to speak…. But surely for several thousand years mankind has been felling trees and burning them - which must’ve lead to an increase - disregarding fossil fuels?
@@EdwardEngines Whether burnt or used in construction, that wood's carbon will eventually return to the cycle. By current I mean within the recordable past, not only today's. Of course, depleting the world's forests also interferes with the carbon cycle, preventing its being fixed and taken out of the atmosphere.
We should be investing in renewables, not burning stuff. Great video
Nuclear is the way to go. As long as renewables have a long life then sure. Battery tech is nowhere near where we need it. Don’t get me wrong electric motors are incredible but battery tech is poison for our earth. Which tech is better? No bs, no lobbying of politicians to sway facts, which tech causes more pollution? Ice vs full ev vs hybrid(direct ice vs charging ice). Realistic not pie in the sky bs. I would love to know.
The co2 in wood comes from the carbon cycle and does not add co2 to the system. The co2 from coal comes from outside the carbon cycle and does add co2 to the system.
Scientific examinations of forests found out a while ago that forest regrowth after cutting down large areas need several decades before the areas turn into carbon sinks again. All the time these forests, although replanted on paper and in practice, are carbon emitters because more sunlight reaches the ground. PBS talked about that a while ago in the "Should we focus on young trees or old as the climate warms?" video.
But, it would only be Zero emission if the trees mass was acounted for by a new tree...
& even then, the total difference in CO2 depends on the health of the soil, which clearly degrades when monocultured.
But they didn't bother to define it by that headachingly obvious metric & instead let them pull a fast 1 with a dumb loophole
Humans man, fork me.
Basically the only way for biomass to be carbon-neutral is to grow a fast growing weed like hemp.
But typically (at least in north america) commercial logging replants trees so for a given unit of land you can get numerous capture-release cycles over time. I don't think the analysis that says wood burning causes more emissions actually factors this in. Indeed, fossil fuels represent the only form of actual long-long term carbon sequestration currently, everything else (even forests) are part of a living loop/ecological system and adding in more cycles to that loop in the form of plant-harvest-burn is not permanently introducing NEW c02 into the environment, unlike harvesting fossil fuels
I've been stamping my feet about this for years. The idea that the burning of biomass for electrical generation can be claimed to be "renewable" or "green" is maddening. Thank you for making this video.
Nobody here including the "thinker" apparently knows the difference between fossil and biomass carbon. What a dumb bunch
Wildfires are laying waste to Brazil’s Pantanal, the world’s largest tropical wetland and one of the most important biodiversity sanctuaries on the planet. The blazes, the worst on record since Brazil started tracking fires in 1998, are taking a deadly toll on wild animals, including at-risk species that scientists have been working for decades to protect. “We’re watching the biodiversity of the Pantanal disappear into ash,” said Gustavo Figueirôa, a biologist working for SOS Pantanal, a conservation nonprofit. “It’s being burned to a crisp.” The Pantanal is a maze of rivers, forests and marshlands that sprawl over 68,000 square miles, an area 20 times the size of the Everglades. About 80 percent lies within Brazil, with the rest in Bolivia and Paraguay. Usually flooded for much of the year, the Pantanal in recent years has been parched by a string of severe droughts that scientists have linked to deforestation and CLIMATE CHANGE. Since the start of the year, wildfires have burned over 7,000 square miles, an area the size of New Jersey, in Brazil’s share of the Pantanal. The wetlands, parts of which are on UNESCO’s list of heritage sites because of their rich biodiversity, are home to the world’s biggest parrot, the highest concentration of caimans and threatened wildlife like the giant otter. They also harbor animals that have evolved in ways distinctive from others in their species, like larger jaguars that dive into flooded plains to fish for food. The wildfires, fanned by strong winds and searing temperatures, are WIPING OUT this natural laboratory, killing or injuring giant anteaters, lowland tapirs, marsh deer, hyacinth macaws and caimans.
yes I wrote an article on this about Cargill. see Stop Cargill’s destruction of the Amazon By Drew Hempel June 29, 2006
I will refer to this video everytime somebody is claiming that burning wood pallets is carbon neutral! Good work Dave!
I work in a business that is directly dependent on pellet fuel combustion. Since the first day I have been skeptical of the claims being made. Adding the costs usually said to be zero and subtracting the lost oxygen production when the forests are cut down really makes it all seem silly if CO2 reduction is the goal.
That power plant should be shut down, I would totally go to protest
Why don't you go protest outside the EU department that said Biomass was better than coal? Drax done what the EU asked for.
Except we need people to stop protesting offshore wind, solar, nuclear and electric train lines (because of overhead electric lines are ugly) protest the NIMBYs that make low-energy infrastructure impossible (ie bike lanes)
And instant power black-outs. Great idea - not!
So Drax should go back to burning coal, just like happens in China!
To replace with what a fossil fuel burning one ?
Personally I feel that biomass is a good use of agricultural solid waste. Having said that meaning biomass shouldn't be farmed like ethanol and biodiesel. In my opinion those land could be better used to farm food, carbon sink or even function as water catchment area which is a much more precious resource.
Sugar mills usually power themselves with their own waste bagasse (the stalks of the sugar cane). That's the ideal. A lot of other agricultural solid waste already has other uses that are more valuable than fuel, e.g. animal bedding, soil improvement, etc.
Combining plant waste biomass and animal waste biomass as compost to create humus and build the soil is better than any other use for either material.
Thanks for scrutinizing this subject properly. Danmark converted most their facilities from coal to
Wood 20 years ago - Denmark paid on average 2-3 times more for electricity than in Sweden and Norway - to be green - and the ironic thing - sad really - is that Danish wood is cut and shipped to
Finland for making print paper and toilet paper (fast growing wood has more cellulose) and Finnish wood was cut and shipped to Denmark for burning - None of this maniac thinking would ever had happened without the government subsidies …. It’s such a shame engineers don’t speak truth to power.. they just collect their monthly salary and built shit knowingly it’s a scam (#li-ion-batteries-can’t-be-recycled)
I just became the highest co2 emitter in my neighbourhood by mounting a hula hoop on my roof. Now any time the wind blows I emit tons of co2 from the downwind side of the hoop! All jokes aside, it is incredibly misleading to rank co2 emissions of biomass next to fossil fuel plants without doing any accounting for net emissions which will necessarily trend towards zero in the long run for biomass.
Except the fossil fuels used to cut down, dry, and mash up whole trees, and ship them from one side of the planet to the other, are not trending towards zero. Nor is there any consideration that plantation trees are normally used in housing construction where the timber and its carbon would be locked up for decades or centuries to come, and native forest trees could have been left growing and being part of an ecosystem and rainwater catchment if somebody hadn't bought them to mash up and burn. Instead, all that carbon is dumped in the atmosphere within minutes.
I cannot get people to understand that cutting trees in America and shipping them to the Netherlands to burn is far worse than us using our own available gas…..
Somehow the overseas cutting and shipping on diesel fueled engines gives no pollution?
Oh great another avoidable dumpster fire for the planet. Thanks for the vid.
Except it's blackwashing.
Trees harvested and afforested drawdown all that carbon again in 20-80 years. Trees left in the ground decay, largely into CH4, 120 times worse than CO2.
Coal generates three times the CO2 per GWh as wood.
Drax is the best deal the environment of the UK has ever had, aside from wind farms.
When a local pellet plant spontaneously combusted a few years ago... It burned for weeks causing huge mushroom clouds of smoke and haze to settle over the Edmonton region... This is how I know it's worse than our now closed coal-fired plants that ironically lay within eyesight of this dumpster fire of a facility that reopened like 3 years later... BTW, those coal plants have been converted to natural gas, but cancelled the CCS aspect for economic reasons... Typical! Though I suspect it's because SMR's will be built on the site in the next 5-10 years anyway since Alberta is going all in on nuclear while stupidly curtailing renewables... 8 GW's of new renewable projects were just cancelled in the last 6 months thanks to the Fossil Fool Premier Marlaina "Danielle" Smith...
They'll spend billions and billions to build a plant and just like everywhere else, nothing will ever get completed or running.
pellets made of trees from natura 2000 reserve in portugal, and old forests from canada ruclips.net/video/BqEojlj7_bY/видео.htmlsi=Ji1l41SbLPdFCofq
There are 2 million plus fracking mines in Canada. Alberta is full of them. Go to Google Maps and it doesn't take long to find the mosaic of mine sites. And the recent big forest fires in Canada all started right next to these mines and their access roads. Obviously, global warming is making the forests drier but the ignition source just adds injury to insult and the mine owners haven't paid a dime in compensation.
I agree with you, although Coal Combustion Byproducts are an *especially* nasty bit that is barely mentioned compared to GHG emissions and particulate matter/hydrocarbons/co/sulfur etc
Piles of Radioactive Ash sitting in a Glorified Percolator is *bad*.
Same happened here in Denmark in 2022, damn pellet silos burned for near a month(29d) 58000 TONS of pellets went up in smoke at the Skudstrup powerplant.
Ironically the pellets were likely of Canadian/NA origin too 🙄Though i can't really fault you guys for that 😅
Almost as if doing anything on an industrial scale is unsustainable
That's the wrong conclusion. "Green" and "sustainable" are always relative claims. It's possible and essential to compare the overall lifecycle CO2 emissions from different kinds of power generation. Wind and solar come out very low, gas and coal come out very high, and burning wood pellets is only somewhat low-carbon over decades of replanting an existing commercial forest.
If you're concerned over the sustainability of the best choices, then by all means use less energy.
@@orionbetelgeuse1937 A large part of the video's point was also that the wood pellets themselves are only carbon-neutral if the trees grow back as quickly as they're cut down, which isn't happening.
@@orionbetelgeuse1937 Most trees don't grow back after being cut down and most tree seeds don't spread far from existing trees. It can take many decades for trees to even sprout far into cleared areas and decades more to grow to appreciable size. Forests can't recover naturally as quickly as we cut them down. Agriculture is normally like that with any plant, harvesting goes a lot quicker than growing so if you don't want to run out you need to actively plant more.
Yes but coal is locked up carbon usually stored deep underground. Pellets made from biomass are carbon neutral since after the plant dies and biodegrades the gases are released to the atmosphere anyways. So just have a think about it all
Biomass is good at small scale, like heating a house from locally grown wood. The problem, like in everything else, is globalization, the idea that we can do anything at large scale and it not having a negative impact on the environment is asinine.
Except: burning wood, biomass, adds no 'new' CO2 to the air. The CO2 that is in the wood was sucked out of the athmosphere during the time the tree lived... Also, if we don't burn the wood, it will rot and release that CO2 anyway!
This was addressed in the video. Your statement is like a dieter telling their doctor, "Well, I knew I was going to eat three boxes of cereal this month, so I ate them all this morning in one sitting. It's the same calories either way, right?"
There may be no "new CO2" per se but that's just shorthand for "CO2 exceeding the environmental absorption capacity." Let's say a tree stands 100 years (absorbing CO2) then dies and takes 20 years to decay (releasing the same CO2). That's decades and decades of being a CO2 "battery" with a slow release that can be absorbed by new growth _versus_ chopping down "renewable" trees after 2 or 3 years and burning them, dumping ALL their CO2 into the atmosphere in (what?) minutes/hours.
"Carbon neutral" doesn't mean "releases no carbon" that would have been released eventually anyway but "releases no more carbon in a given period of time than the environment can absorb in the same amount of time."
You're forgetting the whole load of energy required to collect the wood, turn it into pellets and then transport it from rural America to the power plant in the North of England. That's where all the extra CO2 emissions come in.
no, rotten things decomposes and become soil
DRAX... Evil bond villain.... Evil source of pollution and CO2 despite what good PR people say..
And the UK Drax family were huge slave/plantation owners for centuries and still living on the backs of that inheritance.
Whichever way you look Drax == Evil
we here in portugal did a documentary about this issue, the drax plant and pellets from forests ruclips.net/video/BqEojlj7_bY/видео.htmlsi=Ji1l41SbLPdFCofq
😂
Incinerating biomass is probably the single stupidest way to derive energy from it.
It is also the most clever way to derive energy from it since it is the only way to do so.
@@JanBruunAndersen What? I've got two alternatives for you. Biochar and biogas. Both generate much cleaner energy from biomass while also building the soil in ways that last.
@@brightmal biochar is made via combustion...
@@angusbartlett9270 I work with Biochar and Biogas folks every day and it just seems like an extra layer of hand waving and odd claims to justify the effort and outcome. I don't begrudge any of them the opportunity to make a living, humans have always bought and sold the stupidest things for the stupidest reasons, but the level of self-aggrandizement and the ongoing patting themselves on the back for what great people they are for making CHARCOAL! --- it is just grating. Shut up and get busy, why are you bragging about it to me?
@@brightmal Biochar (a trendy name for charcoal) just means you only partially burn the biomass instead of fully burning it. Biogas just means you let biomass rot anaerobically and burn the gas coming off it instead of burning the whole biomass. Said gas is very toxic as it is contains dangerous amounts of sulfur compounds (which become acidic when burned if not purified out before burning) and has low energy density compared to natural gas due to being roughly half CO2 before you burn it. Biogas is in some ways similar to natural gas that has yet to be refined.
Both biochar and biogas waste a substantial portion of the original energy content of the biomass fuel. There are advantages to be gained from doing so as charcoal can be cheaper to transport and will burn more cleanly when burned as the dirtiest effluent was already given off in the initial burn that made the charcoal. Biogas is, obviously, a gas, which can be advantageous versus solid fuel for many uses. Neither is inherently cleaner in the long run than burning biomass directly in the context of wood burning for grid power.
Thank you for finally getting on this!
It is vital to always just have a think! Thank you, Dave, for yet another most enlightening video! Cheers! 🎉😊
Wait till the permafrost really starts melting...too late!
Already is and methane gas from fracking will totally do us in... Thank Canada for that.
looking forward to this rollercoaster in the next 30 years
@@trif55 No need to look forward - it's already here.
You do know there have been Ice Ages since the dawn of time here on Earth? Humans weren't even here prior to the last one. The Earth has been completely Ice Free (no polar ice-caps) more than 60% of the time. We are in an interstadial. Each previous interstadial was 4 degrees hotter than it is today - with more CO2 than today. This is a relatively cool interstadial but a 4 degree raise would take us to the mean average - and non of the previous interstadial temperatures had anything to do with humans. Think about it
Dave, it isn't the first time corporations have lied to get fat taxpayer issued welfare checks and sadly, it won't be the last. Capitalists have figured out that it is much easier, and more profitable, to milk the public treasury than to actually invest and earn a return on their money by creating anything new.
Amen to that b
not just new but useful!!! Capitalism can be used for good - if we have sound ideas as to how it's done - and so I do believe in rewarding good behavior with subsidies and punishing the offenders. What's your problem with that? It's not perfect, but hey - it does help tremendoursly the 95% we get right.
@@extropiantranshuman It's also about who gets to decide what is "good behaviour". If I was the Judge - then the way DRAX claims it is Carbon Neutral would get bounced Out of Court. They need to account for ALL the CO2 that is involved in getting the pellets to the Power Station and would not be allowed to make the case that the trees can be "Back Dated" in terms of CO2 consumption. CO2 accounting should be from only be taken into account from the time the tree is cut down. Time is a far more Critical Element in the CO2 equation than is currently taken into account. If the average Temp of the earth is going to increase by +3degC in the next 50-100 years - I'ts no good claiming that all will be OK by the time the trees that are going to be planted (if they are) will sock up the CO2 in 100 or more years time.
Aren’t we in this mess because we are burning stuff ?
If you burn wood that has grown by sucking up Carbon then you're just putting that carbon back in the air. If you dig up coal and burn it you're putting carbon in the air that's from millions of years ago.
No. We're in this mess because fossil trade became a pillar of Defense policy to the extent it overrode good sense and took on a life of its own even after it made no sense.
Fossil trade even of the unburned portion, fugitive emissions of CH4, NOx, and SOx, and the eventual breakdown of plastics into CO2, of releases of GHGs made for refrigeration and the like, is the mess.
The cure is to stop that as soon as possible.
Biomass, properly used, helps.
Thought this was a bad idea right from the start. The processing of the wood , shipment to here and the huge amount required should have raised a red flag but was ignored. Now the true mess that its becoming known means we should think more carefully before another disaster is made
It has been known for years that burning biomass produces more CO2 than any other fuel...The Idea is that the trees grow back and recapture carbon. The issue where I live is that the hardwood being cut takes 30-100 or more years to grow back. This is the real issue....
I'm an Englishman living in Germany. Please Dave, can you start shouting about balcony solar. Here in Ze Fazerland, for less than 300 of Napoleans Euro, I can buy and 800 watts of solar power and an inverter and install it, completely legally, myself - simply by plugging it into an electric socket. Thousands are being installed everyday in Germany. For some nutty reason, it is not allowed in the UK. For the proposed subsidy for the Drax power station next year, the government could provide 800w of solar for every single household in the UK. Why is no-one shouting about this? I despair.
That sounds pretty good! Any solar panels that you would recommend?
In the US this isn't allowed because of the risk of back feed into the grid during a power outage. If a line is downed is should be dead, but solar backend could energize it.
I have grid tied solar with rapid shut down for when the grid fails but I still needed $1m liablity insurance.
@@phhowe17 The interesting thing here is it should be allowed. The system comes with a grid tie inverter that only transmits when it detects a AC current is present. The moment it detects the current is not there, it switches off. Now, one might ask "how safe is that?" - well, I would answer what better Proof of Concept would you need than tens of thousands of installations across Germany with not a single incident of injury.
@@justincase9471 I have 2 x 440 watt panels from Renogy, but that isn't important, any panels will do. I have two grid tie inverters I have tried, 1 from Solarman and 1 from Ecoflow, both worked fine - the EcoFlow one has a nicer App experience and some extra features that I like.
Hi, I like in Spain and I think the 800 watt allowance is the same in Spain. Did you have to get local town hall permission before you install.
Thanks
But how much other pollutants are produced by burning wood pellets vs. coals ? Can we start thinking holistically in light of all environmental damage and not just CO2 emission ?
That is exactly the right point. PM2.5 is the main problem with burning biomass. Coal is a lot worse in that regard along with PM10 NOx and Sulfur Dioxide. Plus the carbon molecules from pellets were sequestered at most a few decades ago whereas coal can come from the carboniferous 66 million years ago. As long as the reforestation matches combustion it is infinitely better. Also those other pollutants causing ground level ozone are arguably far more serious than CO2 as the latter per say does not reduce bio capacity by itself.
NO, there can only be one thing at a time it seems. And of course, I have my doubts about this video, sensing there is some numerical shenanigans going on.
@@amizuki If it took 20 years to burn a tree's worth of energy it would make sense, instead it takes minutes, hours at most. Furthermore, wood DOES produce toxic chemicals when burned, more even than coal because it's a much much less pure carbon source so you end up with a lot more VOCs on top of all the particulate and other oxides. Also, animals are pretty important and animals live in forests they don't live in coal mines (canaries aside).
@@Dysiode Yes, biomass produce more VOCs than burning coal, but it is more biodegradable and less toxic than the VOCs that come from burning coal (which are still very substantial). I am not saying this is a great idea, but less horrible than burning coal. All solutions are horrible environmentally and this is the art of picking the less bad option. That's why as some others have mentioned, bamboo is a good option and I also mentioned Eucalyptus and Sugar cane.
@@Dysiode You seem to be imagining a huge skyscraper-sized lawnmower clearcutting every forest in BC and paving over the stumps with concrete.
0.5%-1% of BC forests are forested. It takes decades to timber a forest allowance. Afforestation of that allowance is obligatory. Those important animals are conserved because forestry keeps the land valuable, and forest lands are healthiest when they have biodiversity.
Can BC do better? Absolutely. It's a shame we don't do more. But the little we do right includes using waste wood, deadfall, diseased trees, beetle-killed timber, and debris to displace coal burning instead of generating methane 120 times worse than CO2 when the cellulose and lignin decay.
Is pyrolysis to collect VOCs from wood for use as pygas and black liquor feedstock for liquid fuels, leaving solid biochar for some five dozen commercial uses, most of which displace fossil trade, better?
Yes.
But until you have pyrolysis plants operating, pellets suppressing coal is smart: coal produces three times as much CO2 per GWh as wood, besides all the other benefits of removing fuel for forest fires from the midst of living healthy trees.
Madness, it's good to find a use for mill waste but burning it is madness why not make building blocks (bricks) out of it thus locking that carbon up for maybe hundreds of years.
Becouse it is inefficient overcomplicated and does not scale up. Sawdust is flamable and needs binding agent to be turned into bricks. To be turned into brics it need to be bind with agent that gives it enough strenght to be used as building material, inhibits water retention, secures it from mould and other fungus, is non flamable, is non toxic for humans to live in, is stable long enought to last decades, is weather proof.
And when You get it, it needs to be in price range of bricks...
It would be cheaper just to dump said wood into oceans dead zones to be stored indefinetly.
At least, wood has carbon from a shorter recycle source than fossil fuels. Tree carbon capture is dated in tens, to at most a hundred years. Oil and gas are tens of thousands to millions of years old carbon.
Very provocative and I'll think a bit about the issue of pushing carbon savings into the future while being carbon positive now.
I dispute, however, the carte blanche statement that using corn in the US is an example of carbon saving since it replaces petro fuels within a year. It is well established that (owing to the need for ammonia fertilizers in growing corn) costs more in fossil fuels than contributes to ethanol replacements in US automotive fuels. I bet the wasted carbon in the misplaced US subsidy of corn-ethanol dwarfs the issue of the UK's (misguided?) subsidy of biofuels because of the time shift argument. Could be worth an episode of JHAT?
After this one, I'll just have a drink!
When Dave's videos are are downer, Just Have a Drink is a good option.
Burning wood for heat could be viable, but burning it for electricity would never be.
The big push to switch to wood pellets in the US was not to be carbon neutral. The goal was to switch from particulate emission heavy traditional firewood to a fuel that was much cleaner in areas that lacked natural gas delivery systems.
If an air conditioner is 3-600% efficient because of the gas exchange component, why not?
burning wood for heat might be 100% efficiency, but burning wood for electricity then using that electricity in a 400-600% efficient heat exchanger is more than 100% efficient
Wood is carbon neutral😊@@gerardwall5847
Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Burning wood for heat definitely is viable, as I do that every winter. I use trees that have been removed or dead anyway. This saves on having to run heaters on electricity, and thus prevents CO2 emissions.
I agree with the *specific* premise of this video, though I think the CO2 emissions are *less than* 4X higher than coal in the long run. And power from fairly *local* wood waste that is *not* processed into pellets, which uses more CO2, is much better. Yes, other power sources such as nuclear, solar, hydropower, and wind are better, but there could be a niche case for using an already existing coal power plant to make power from biomass. Especially if using the existing coal power plant prevents CO2 emissions that would be necessary to build a new power plant, of any kind. And burning waste biomass usually also prevents *methane emissions* that can occur when biomass is left to rot, in landfills for example.
My MP has just been sent a letter with a link to your succinct video. Keep up the good work. And typical of many of these things, my 'O' level Maths and Physics was enough education for me to smell a rat in the Drax proposals. It is one thing to burn a few tons of waste and another to have 2,000 tons of pellets travelling by train from ports connected to the world!
Great, the blind leading the blind and dumb
What a relief! It has always been obvious to me that burning pellets and wood chips, even stemming from sustainable forestry, contributes to accelerating the rise in CO2 concentration. Secondly, since local sustainable forestry operates within a market system of interconnected vessels, the consumer of such sustainable pellets is also indirectly responsible -to a not really lesser degree- for the exploitation of global forests.
You should make use of the new possibilities offered by AI as soon as possible to provide your excellent contributions in many popular languages. Many people, like me-here in Germany-use your content to raise awareness about sustainability issues. I would, therefore, like to share it with a local audience in the German language (for now, with a smaller audience in English).
THANKS!!!
Why does it matter, for carbon neutrality, whether you have one big plot of land getting corn planted and harvested each year on the whole thing, or whether you have twenty little plots of land with twenty-year-old trees being harvested and replanted each year on one plot? Either way, it's a bunch of monoculture cropland that could have been used for something else. But either way, the carbon comes out of the air when the plants grow and goes back into the air when the fuel is burned. I don't see a meaningful difference.
To actually sequester biomass carbon, what you would do would be to grow it, heat it to 300°C or so, burn the gas that comes off, and use the biochar to improve the soil somewhere.
whichever way you slice it, high energy addiction is the problem. its all fkn horrible. Hi Dave.
Biomass is net zero because it is carbon already in the carbon cycle. However there would be economic costs associated with biofuel that you would not get with zero emissions. Biomass would warm the planet but instead of warming it into the indefinite future, like with geologic sources, it would warm the planet for as long as it would take for the biomass to grow back and then for however long for the temperature to exponentially decay back to where it would be had it not been burned. There would also be the risk that the climate is unstable and the warming from biofuels could trigger some positive feedback loop which would have otherwise been avoided.
"Biomass is net zero because it is carbon already in the carbon cycle" only holds if it is being sequestered as fast as it is being released. Which is not the case.
@@jaapfolmer7791 Yes it is net zero. Theoretically if is being released faster than it is being sequestered, eventually you would run out of trees and you'd have to wait for them to sequester the carbon and grow back. It is net zero when you don't just look at the instant but look at the entire carbon cycle.
I agree. I live where waste biomass from logging is used for pellets and see where it is not used decomposes in a couple years. The carbon burned from waste biomass is that much carbon not added to the carbon cycle from fossil fuels.
I'd get the whole wood burning for carbon neutrality thing if they grew the trees first like crops instead of cutting down forests that form ecosystems unlike farming.
A waste to energy plant would make more sense than biomass, as burning waste is certainly better than letting it turn to methane in a landfill. But burning forests for power does not make a lick of sense.
5:48 rotting wood doesn't put "a good chunk of its carbon" into the ground. Do you really know where the carbon in a tree comes from and then where it returns to? The energy for carbon sequestration in wood comes from photosynthesis. Not the ground. A few nutrients come from the ground. When you burn wood, you're left with a tiny bit of ash. The ashes are the nutrients that the tree took from the ground. All of the carbon came from the air.
UK does not need less biomass burning, UK need more energy storage with more renewables charging it. Then the thermal plants Biomass, Coal, Natural Gas, and Nuclear) can be idled one by one.
If you shut Biomass you are only trading to Coal, Natural Gas, or Nuclear otherwise. Change the biomass laws if they are not right. It only effect the order of shutting down thermal planets. They all need shut down. Biomass leaves less waste at the site than coal or nuclear. But we have little time to get to less carbon.
Until we seen the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere begin to decline you can be sure our current policies are not working.
Atmospheric CO2 has declined in the last year by 4 PPM
@@rcpmac According to the latest data from NOAA's Global Monitoring Laboratory, the global average atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration was 419.3 parts per million (ppm) in 2023. This represents an increase of 2.8 ppm compared to 2022 and is the 12th consecutive year where the annual increase exceeded 2 ppm.
I remember green campaigning groups relating 100% renewables reports/plans about a decade ago, and when I read them I found they relied on significant amounts of biomass to achieve their goal. It was clear to me then that their goal was not low carbon, but being anti-fossil fuel and (perhaps even more so) anti-nuclear was.
If they had been interested in low carbon electricity production, they would have advocated for clean renewables + nuclear as the solution, like ecomodernists do. This is starting to change however, for example, Finland's Green Party now supports nuclear energy.
What is a clean renewable these days? New hydro has been found to be worse than coal, wind farms and solar are replaceable but only if coal and diesel continue, Green parties now supporting nuclear and sea level rise of over a metre in grandchildren's lifetimes might mean they should have been supporting it in the 70's, 80''s, 90's 00's, when they were probably controlled opposition, now is too late globally.
Which campaign groups were they, because environmental scientists knew biomass was a bs way to achieve renewable energy targets long before that.
And you're forgetting geothermal energy too. There's progress in this field but they need more support and money. This is the real solution but nobody talks about it.
Although there is some interesting work going on (i.e. Quaise), the depth of hot rock in the UK means geothermal doesn't play any role here at the moment. I put it in the clean renewables group, though its CO2eq emissions are higher than wind and solar.
Hot Dry Rock Geothermal is Soooooo underrated!
Granted minor hazards of seismic risks etc to be considered but yeah. Also production of low grade heat and/or low temp electricity generation processes like Organic Rankine Cycle etc
We use wood pellets to heat our home. There is a vast difference between this and operating the power stations you describe. They should not be described the same way.
Thanks for the update 🙂
I'm sorry to admit that I worked on the Drax biomass project. On the first day we were given a talk about how much cleaner it was than coal and that it came from tree bark and peanut husks
what did ou think about that?
@@extropiantranshuman at the time I had no reason to doubt what they were saying.
@@WilliamLeigh-cl9bq It's a shock the first few times you find out authorities have been lying through their back teeth. Eventually you get used to it.
Wait a minute. They're cutting down trees here, so they can be burned as "zero carbon energy" in Britain? That's crazy! For one thing, our forests are burning _themselves_ down quite rapidly these days, and don't need any additional human help. But also, this is only "zero carbon" thanks to an accounting trick? Outrageous. Just think of all the dirty bunker fuel they use shipping those pellets halfway across the world. Even the name of the power station belongs to a James Bond villain. Hugo Drax tried to destroy the world in "Moonraker."
Giant redwoods are dying because we are stopping the fires. Big trees can survive fires, without fires they gey crowded and choked out, some even need fire to germinate.
Clearing underbrush and putting wildfires out isn't natural either.
Oh Drax!
The truth finally rears its UGLY head!
What about using the hardwood pellets to grow lion's mane and oyster mushrooms? They eat sawdust and hardwood pellets is like the main method that's used ... that's how I grow mine. Instead of burning them, they get turned into food ... and as the mycelium digests the wood to make this food (which is a healthy superfood that's not ultra processed with medicinal properties, esp the lion's mane) ... as the mycelium digests the wood ... it makes it so that the spent fuiting block (after you harvest the mushrooms) can be mulched into the garden to enhance soil without the need for synthetic fertilizer. Mushrooms are primary decomposers. Growing them creates soil. Esp these gourmet species like lion's mane that grow on sawdust and wood waste. Better than burning em, eh? Feed em to mushrooms to do bioalchemy into food. I heard that its a decent carbon sink to use these pellets to grow mushrooms. What are your thoughts?
Excellent summery - many thanks
we could have built a ton of nuclear decades ago and never encounter such silliness as literally buring wood being labeled "carbon neutral"
We would have done if not for protesting from environmental groups ironically. Merckel's ending of German nuclear power because of an accident at a stupidly designed facility in Japan was witless.
We should now be investing in small modular nuclear systems instead of environmentally harmful wind farms.
Turns out chopping down forests and burning them is not environmentally friendly. I also really hate the argument "But a felled tree will just emit it's carbon". Yeah over decades and be home to all sorts of life in the mean time.
But a felled tree will just emit its carbon AS METHANE. Yeah, over as much as a decade, in a healthy ecosystem. If it takes decades, your ecosystem health is poor. Methane's 120 times more GHE-intensive as CO2. In the past, this would be fine; it was always so. But now, we can't afford that methane warming.
What’s wrong with carbon dioxide, without it surely we’ll all die because plants have nothing to convert back to oxygen, idyouths and more-ons.