http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-39053678

I hope you have your fire proof suit on.

Last time some of us tried to point this out it got very heated.

Pointless Drax-bashing rubbish. Bad science, no context and deliberately misleading.

I read the Chatham paper yesterday. The key conclusion is stated without any evidence. At no point does the author show any empirical analysis of co2 sequestration rates of biomass species or sources. Or define the sequestration life cycle he’s using.

I’m not sure curto

replanting trees to ensure carbon neutrality makes quite a lot of assumptions that I suspect don’t hold. I’m not aware of the actual “rules” here, so have a question or two:

1) Do we replace acreage felled or tonnage? (and how long do we wait until tonnage is assessed – “potential tonnage” is a bit of a fiddle, surely)
2) Say I have an area of forest and fell it for fuel, I then replant and get the carbon credits (allowing for the above question of tonnage and waiting for the tonnage to equalise). For the initial felling & burning to be carbon neutral, that area would have to be left permanently undisturbed so as to keep the carbon locked, right? (I mean, I can’t re-harvest in a few years and make the offset claim all over again, can I ?)

20 year cycle for wood IIRC. So if you have 20 acres of trees, burn one acre a year and replant it then you are carbon neutral in terms of the fuel indefinitely. However yo also have to allow for the carbon cost of getting the wood out of the plantation and into the generator.

That upstanding individual Chris Huhne championed this when he was in government and surprise surprise he’s involved with a major American wood pellet supplier. It’s almost always about the money and rarely about the environment.

So if you plant 20 acres

Well if those are additional/new acres planted then you potentially are genuinely storing more carbon, aren’t you? (the tonnage of wood in that area is “new” and (??) far outwieghs any carbon in the grass/shrub cover that may have preceded it). To merely break even I’d say that this 20yr thing would suggest that I might remain neutral if I increased my original mature forest area by 1/20, the mean weight of wood (and hence carbon) in the whole lot might remain stable over time in comparison to the original amount

??

I’m not saying there isn’t a debate to be had about the use of virgin wood, i’m saying this report adds nothing to that debate.

The BBC write up doesn’t help. Take one flawed “scientific” report from someone with an important sounding title but who actually is completely peripheral, embellish it with a headline that goes way beyond what the report even says, and you’ve got a sensationalist and factually incorrect daily mail reader enraging bit of click bait.

Where is the evidence for the central claim that burning virgin wood creates more co2 than coal? He doesn’t offer any: bad science.

What subsidies is it that he thinks should be withdrawn? There are no new ROCs available and biomass will be priced out of Cfds by offshore wind. Unless he wants a retrospective withdrawal of Drax’s Investment Contract and ROC accreditations, which would just about finish off any investor confidence in the U.K. govt, Brexit or not. No context.

“Most wood schemes” in this country are waste wood firing. Drax imports the vast majority of the 7.5m tonnes of imported wood (which by the way is about a fifth of the coal we were importing just a couple of years ago). The Report itself advocates waste wood power generation. So the headline on the article is deliberately misleading.

Look at any photo of northern Britain in the 50s or 60s and the same view now and you’ll be amazed at the amount of woodland that has regrown on road sides, railway lines and waste ground. The reason is that all the trees got cut down, first for building ships and later as pit props. Even the hillside above my cottage in Summerseat when I moved in in 1989, which was bare at that time, is now densely wooded with semi-mature alder, willow and ash.

My conclusion is that there are more trees now, especially in former industrial areas, than even 30 years ago.

The low point for forest area in most of Europe was the Napoleonic wars before wood shortages provoked the move to coal. Since then the forest area in France has increased steadily. As demand for wood increases so does the area planted as it’s a profitable business at a time when farmers are no longer making money on pork or milk.

Shipping pellets around the world isn’t a good idea. The rest of the article is grossly misleading.

I’m not saying there isn’t a debate to be had about the use of virgin wood, i’m saying this report adds nothing to that debate.

I agree. There are some significant problems with wood burning, but this report seems to take no account of how wood fuel is grown and harvested.

There are some significant problems with wood burning, but this report seems to take no account of how wood fuel is grown and harvested.

Yes it does, it says the problem is we import 7.5 million tonnes of wood chips from America where they cutting down forest to meet our needs.

“Forests in our region, the southeast US, are being clear cut to provide wood pellets for UK power plants. The process takes the carbon stored in the forest and puts it directly into the atmosphere via the smokestack at a time when carbon pollution reductions are sorely needed.”

my googling suggests that this is correct. I’ll ask some one who knows and get back to you

I found this

https://www.foe.co.uk/sites/default/files/downloads/felled-fuel-46611.pdf

Yes it does, it says the problem is we import 7.5 million tonnes of wood chips from America where they cutting down forest to meet our needs.

The point is that wood fuel is mostly harvested and re-grown on a short-rotation basis. The paper is cherry-picking egregious examples IMO.

7.5 million tonnes sounds like a lot of cherries, but I know sod all about these sort of figures, is 7.5Mt just a drop in the ocean/a bovine fart in the atmosphere?

Its bovine burping that’s the problem.

I think there is a lot of misunderstanding about this report. It has no pretensions to being a scientific report, it is a report by Chatham House, which is an independent policy institute. The author should be relatively well informed on how UK policy was designed as he was the Special Adviser to Chris Huhne at the time he introduced the policy. All he is doing is questioning whether the assumptions made are valid and whether the CO2 accounting system is giving a true reflection of the situation.

As far as I’ve seen, biomass has always lived or died on being able to find a local source. A long distance supply chain automatically blunts any sustainability advantage, even regardless of how the product is grown/produced.

The other issue is reliability: Every project I’m worked on where a biomass boiler has been installed has also had back-up gas boilers installed, which end up running most of the time.

The point is that wood fuel is mostly harvested and re-grown on a short-rotation basis. The paper is cherry-picking egregious examples IMO

So why did friends of the earth right a report saying they were worried. Even more worrying in 2014 why did the American Environment secretary person contact our government to say they were concerned by the negative environmental impact of this policy

I feel quite let down by this. I naively assumed that we were growing wood to burn, which is fine. It appears that this is not the case. We are paying American to chop down mature trees.

TBH the article just seems to be a STW-ish straw man

Yes when you cut a grown tree, you replace it with a new tree- that tree is smaller and is sequestering less carbon. Duh. The author states that like it’s news, because that’s what you do if you’re a big hitter, you say obvious things people already know and pretend they didn’t so you can pretend they’re stupid.

But that’s just a misrepresentation of the cycle, you’re not really replacing an individual 20 year old tree with a 1 day old tree, you’re cycling huge numbers of trees constantly. Your 1 day old tree replaces last year’s 1 day old tree, and your 19 year old tree is replacing the 20 year old tree. (all assuming a sustainable planting scheme). The 20 year old tree didn’t start out big either.

You do need to take into account die-off, transportation, the carbon footprint of planting, but again that’s already well understood and is incorporated into any meaningful model. Meanwhile, planting more trees increases the amount of carbon sequestered at any given time (providing you’re not doing it in a really stupid way like draining a peat bog)

The comment late in the artucle about CCS is probably the most valid part of the article- theoretically biofuels can be carbon positive, if you capture carbon emissions. But people already seem to be planning for this as a solution when in reality it’s not well proven and the sequestration process is still a work in progress. That’s bad juju, if we assume CCS is just round the corner it takes the pressure off cutting emissions today.

ampthill – Member

I feel quite let down by this. I naively assumed that we were growing wood to burn, which is fine. It appears that this is not the case. We are paying American to chop down mature trees.

We are growing wood to burn, but we’re also importing it from other places that grow wood to burn. It doesn’t really matter, provided they’re managing the forest appropriately. Obviously that’s a big if but that’s the issue, not importing itself.

Mikey74 +1

Plenty of sites I have worked on where biomass boilers were being installed and the either not being used or being taken out, new build bexhill high school was installed 100% biomass & subsequently converted to 100% gas due to problems experienced

Where it does seem to work is small scale & making use of local wood that would otherwise be disposed of, I don’t think it should be used as a cover to being green but still being okay to burn stuff.

I am seeing far less biomass installations than we were a few years ago, so it must be filtering through how generally problematic it can be.

Obviously that’s a big if

Which is what he is saying.

mefty – Member

Which is what he is saying.

It’s certainly not what the article is saying.

“Most wood energy schemes are a ‘disaster’ for climate change”

Not “We nee to make sure the forestry management is right”, which is obvious, but “most are a disaster”.

And then

The fact that forests have grown over the previous 20 or 100 years means they are storing large amounts of carbon, you can’t pretend it doesn’t make an impact on the atmosphere if you cut them down and burn them.”

That’s just confrontational and deceptive- nobody pretends there’s no impact from cutting and burning wood, literally nobody. The entire logic is based on regeneration and replacement to counter that.

So why did friends of the earth right a report saying they were worried.

Because some forestry is badly managed, and there are other concerns such as habitat degradation.

It’s certainly not what the article is saying.

Didn’t bother with article, went straight to report. BBC environmental reporting tends to be pretty shallow.

We are growing wood to burn, but we’re also importing it from other places that grow wood to burn. It doesn’t really matter, provided they’re managing the forest appropriately. Obviously that’s a big if but that’s the issue, not importing itself.

I’m sorry that is not what the friends of the earth report says is happening. I don’t think you’ve read it. Cutting wetland forests is nothing like what you describe

The bottom line would appear to be that whatever you cut down & burn needs to be replaced with some more trees that are going to replicate the job of whatever it is you’ve just burnt….& in a fairly short space of time.

Burning ancient woodland for example & replacing it with like won’t work due to timescale.

Burning something grown fir the purpose of burning & then replacing with similar does?

I need to read about this, it’s bothering me.

Saw a bit of an interview on news last night about it, some horrendous science errors, carbon from wood seems to bend physics and not release as much thermal energy when oxidised as carbon from fossil fuels apparently! Hopefully it was TV nerves rather than another post truth “fact”. There was another howler but I can’t remember it now.

ampthill – Member

I’m sorry that is not what the friends of the earth report says is happening. I don’t think you’ve read it. Cutting wetland forests is nothing like what you describe

I’m not sure you really understood my post tbh. We do import managed wood- we also import unsustainable wood. But the problem isn’t burning wood, the problem’s doing it wrong. It’s like saying NO NUCLEAR BECAUSE CHERNOBYL.

I’m not sure you really understood my post tbh. We do import managed wood- we also import unsustainable wood. But the problem isn’t burning wood, the problem’s doing it wrong. It’s like saying NO NUCLEAR BECAUSE CHERNOBYL.

If that is your point then of course I agree.

Saw a bit of an interview on news last night about it, some horrendous science errors, carbon from wood seems to bend physics and not release as much thermal energy when oxidised as carbon from fossil fuels apparently!

Wood contains more water so more energy is wasted evaporating water when using wood as a fuel as compared to Coal

Everything I’ve burned in my stove has come from tree surgery or felling trees in neighbours gardens. It’s been transported in a wheel barrow. It’ll grow back again. The carbon footprint amounts to a chain for the electric saw and hydraulic splinter and the CO2 from making those tools and the stove itself of course. I generally work on nice sunny days when the solar panels are providing power for the tools.

There’s an important point missed, and that is the rate of carbon release.

You cannot make or destroy carbon. The carbon that we are burning as fossil fuels has been sequestered over hundreds of thousands of years, and effectively be removed from the carbon cycle. Because mother nature had all that time to sequester that carbon before humans appeared on the planet, there is plenty of it, and it’s easily accessable. Hence, over the last 150 years we have been able to release a lot of carbon over a very short (in geological time) period.

But, if we are are going to start using renewable sources of carbon, then we sinply can’t burn it at the current rate, because it takes time to be sequestered (as wood or other bio-mass)

Hence there is just no way we can continue to release such huge volumes of CO2!

In fact, pretty much any wood we can burn has grown in the last 20 years, but once we’ve burn all that (and it’s a minimal mass commpared to the trillions of tonnes of sequestered fuel) we are limited to burning what we can grow!

I think the author is probably partially right, in that cutting down swathes of forestry, transporting it, chipping it, drying it then burning it to make electricity isn’t efficient or environmentally friendly.

Small scale, yes, huge industrial scale pellets and chip , no.

Lots of farmers are on CPH (combined heat and power) systems now, burning chip, heating and running poultry sheds and selling excess back to grid. Payment is capped though, monthly or quarterly I think, and once they reach that they stop burning chip, switching back to buying electricity and gas as without the subsidy on the chip being paid it’s cheaper.

When wood as a fuel for power stations suddenly creates a market and value for poorly managed and otherwise pretty low value wood, we shouldn’t be surprised people cash in, fell and sell. Nor should we be surprised that many owners of these forests don’t suddenly become great foresters, and start to manage the forest afresh.
Where Drax and the like can do well though is surely in reclaimed energy from what would otherwise be waste. Ie all the stuff that gets thrown away, arb waste to broken furniture. Trouble then is the logistics and fuel used to gather enough fuel from lots of small supplies. This tends to then make small and local energy reclaimation more attractive but to make it clean is costly I suspect, and pushes the balance back to bigger plants. It’s not easy to solve.

A follow up.

Academic criticism of the Chatham House paper.
Admittedly there’s going to be bias in the signatory list
http://www.ieabioenergy.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/List-of-supporters-for-the-IEA-Bioenergy-response-to-Chatham-house-report-2.pdf

but there’s some Imperial College and Oxford Uni professors in there.

http://www.ieabioenergy.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Chatham_House_response_3pager.pdf

Paper by the International Energy Agency Bioenergy Technology Collaboration Programme (IEA Bioenergy)

Key criticisms:

Concerning climate effects and carbon neutrality, we identify several flaws in the report:
• Misplaced focus on emissions at the point of combustion
It is critical to distinguish between release of CO2 that has been locked up for millions of years and the cycling of carbon between the atmosphere and the biosphere. The report blurs this distinction between fossil carbon and biogenic carbon, which is misleading.
• Inaccurate interpretation of impact of harvest on forest carbon stock. The large fluctuations observed at the stand level, from net carbon sequestration to net carbon emissions at harvest, are not observed at the landscape level due to staggered harvest, which delivers a constant supply of timber while maintaining or increasing wood volume in the forest. Impacts of bioenergy on forest carbon stock should be assessed as impact on long-term average forest carbon stocks at a landscape scale.
• Unrealistic counterfactual scenario. When the impacts of bioenergy are quantified by comparing with a reference “nobioenergy”
scenario that describes the fate of residues and forests in the absence of the bioenergy market, the definition of this reference scenario has a strong influence on the outcome. In most cases, it is implausible to suggest that the forest would remain unharvested and continue to grow if no biomass was used for bioenergy.
• Misguided focus on short-term carbon balances. It is the cumulative emissions of CO2 that largely determine global warming by the late
21st century and beyond. The critical question is whether increasing use of forest biomass for energy leads to systematic decreases or increases in the forest carbon stocks.
• Overstated climate change mitigation value of unharvested forests
The climate change mitigation value of forests sustainably managed for production of timber and bioenergy is greater than the mitigation value of unharvested forests, which have declining mitigation value over time because carbon sequestration rate diminishes as forests approach maturity

IEA Bioenergy Response to Chatham House report “Woody Biomass for Power and Heat: Impacts on the Global Climate