One potato, two potato
Following the all-but-certain defeat of a renewal of the ethanol tax credit, left-wing environmental activists, confederated into the National Anti-Biomass Incineration and Forest Protection Campaign, are making a move to destabilize support for biomass-based power generation.
At issue: is burning biomass carbon-neutral, and are there other emissions associated with it that make biomass an unappealing alternative to the burning of fossil fuels.
“Biomass incinerators, wrongfully promoted as clean and green under various proposed energy and climate bills, will make Americans sick, destroy our forests, dry up our rivers, and pollute the air,” writes Patricia Charles, who also acts as a public relations consultant to biofuel companies such as Qteros.
According to the Campaign, “Recent science has destroyed the myth that biomass burning is “carbon neutral” – the erroneous assumption that lets biomass get the same subsidies as clean energy sources that don’t have smokestacks belching pollution 24/7/365.”
At issue: carbon debt
The problem of carbon neutrality, and the theory of carbon debt are simply explained: when harvesting biomass, the biomass process releases stored carbon in the form of direct emissions (through burning), and also releases emissions in the form of energy applied to grow and harvest biomass. Though re-growth will eventually re-absorb the direct emissions in the form of new growth, there is a time lag, and that lag is presented as a “carbon debt”.
And, how is carbon counted?
For example, if we count carbon storage first and carbon release afterwards, then direct emissions are simply returning carbon to the atmosphere that have already been sequestered. By this method, we have a carbon surplus during the period that biomass is growing, and the balance returns to zero when the biomass is burned.
Here’s the other way to count.
We can count the biomass emissions first, and then consider that the biomass re-growth is restoring the stored carbon that was emitted when it was burned. By this method, we have a carbon debt during the period when the biomass is growing, and the balance returns to zero when the biomass is fully grown.
It’s a semantic point, and feels like a wonky debate. But this distinction has been used by the green left-wing to derail biomass legislation in Massachusetts. According to the Campaign, “Massachusetts is changing its laws, and the activists urged Congress to use Massachusetts law as a template and require proper accounting of the massive CO2 emissions generated from biomass incineration.”
So it’s a material issue. Broadly, there would be agreement that first growth forest or prairie would represent a stored carbon resource where emissions would be counted first, regrowth second, and a carbon debt would be incurred.
But, with second growth forest or cultivated land, which comes first, the chicken or the egg. On the green right-wing, the argument is that biomass growth should be counted first, and emissions second – so that the burning of biomass is working down a cyclical surplus, not creating a debt.
Crisis in the Evergreen State
Ironically, the front lines appeared to be manned in Washington state, the “Evergreen state”, and at Evergreen State College, one of the most liberal colleges in the country. A president of the institution, back in the 1970s, Dan Evans, was the founder (when Washington state governor) of the first state-level Department of Ecology, and that Department served as a blueprint for the original design of the Environmental Protection Agency. Ironies abound.
On the green left, the No Biomass Burn group, led by Seattle environmental activist and occasional gubernatorial candidate, Duff Badgley, who in recent years has been often spotted protesting against biodiesel at Propel Biofuels stations around the city. According to a report in the Seattle Times, the group contends that “the college biomass project would emit twice as much carbon dioxide as the gas-fired plant, and 20 percent more of other pollutants such as nitrogen oxides, particulate matter and carbon monoxide.
On the green right, professor Rob Cole told the Times that “As long as the wood waste used by Evergreen is replenished in the forest, the net effect is that carbon released in the atmosphere is equal to the carbon stored in the trees.” College facilitiess director Paul Smith also told the Times that the No Biomass Group had not waited for the feasibility report to come out before protesting against the project, and predicted that the scientific assessment would show that biomass non-carbon emissions would be less harmful than those from natural gas.
What is a material carbon debt?
No matter in which order the various critics and proponents of biomass incineration count the emissions, there is the problem of defining what a material carbon debt, in fact, is, and how to model long term carbon-storing strategies.
As the Digest reported in “Fuzzy Math: 6th Most Overlooked Biofuels Story of 2010“: “The lesson for policymakers,” we quoted an Iowa State research team in Chicken Little, Corn Little, Jatropha Little: Is the Sky Really Falling? , “is that results from economic models depend heavily on assumptions, and because we are trying to predict long-run human behavior, there can be legitimate differences in these assumptions.” In its February article, the Digest revealed that simply assuming a one percent increase in corn yields per decade, reduced a projected carbon debt by 80 percent, and increasing yields by one percent per year (as they are currently increasing now), the carbon debt is virtually wiped out.
Meanwhile, the National Anti-Biomass Incineration and Forest Protection Campaign contends that “that the Senate and House energy and farm bills, and proposed federal Renewable Electricity Standards, include dirty energy made from incinerators that burn trees and garbage for falsely labeled “clean energy.” They also told Congress that Senator Wyden’s forest bill and others promoting more logging of our nation’s forests for fuel for these incinerators will destroy our carbon-absorbing forests, leading to more global warming.”
One potato, two potato
Who’s right? The central issue is the counting order of emissions and re-growth. As any child or grow-up veteran of schoolyard counting games like “one potato, two potato” will tell you, it all comes down to a question of where the counts starts.
If the count starts where you like it, you’re in. If it starts where you don’t, you’re out. Though biomass producers often busy themselves with the business of renewables, it may be time to not only stand up and be counted, but to ensure that the counting is done in an appropriate order.
Free Subscription to the Daily Biofuels Digest e-newsletter
Subscribe FREE to the world's most-widely read biofuels daily. Enter your email in the box below,
Related Stories
No related posts
Hot Topics
The Hottest 50 Companies in Bioenergy
Latest algae-to-energy news
Latest jatropha news
Latest Waste-to-energy news
Entry Information
Filed Under: Featured • Producer News
Comments: 3 | Post a Comment | Trackback URL
Trackbacks: 1 | Trackback URL
- From Advanced BioFuels USA » One Potato, Two Potato: the Counting of Biomass Emissions on Jul 30, 2010
Carol H | Jul 29, 2010 | Reply
Reply to Mr J Lane.
Your article or report invokes much rhetoric.
We think the grammatical inference is wrong and you compound it with the full colon. Thus we get the fundamentals wrong by saying
”At issue:”
which forces the predication of the second part of the discussion, but denies it as being a question (which it surely must be.)
”is burning biomass carbon-neutral, and are there other emissions associated with it that make biomass an unappealing alternative to the burning of fossil fuels.”
None the less as we do understand the issue fairly well we could and perhaps should remind ourselves of the words from our fore fathers. Whilst Anton Chekhov in his story ”Uncle Vanya” gives an equal statement to the background issues about trees we think the better two statements from the American Indians are better. Here we then recall the time-honoured statement in the comments from ~ Cree Prophecy ~
”When all the trees have been cut down,
when all the animals have been hunted,
when all the waters are polluted,
when all the air is unsafe to breathe,
only then will you discover you cannot eat money.”
and remember the parallel statement from the same sources
“In our every deliberation
we must consider the impact of our decisions
on the next seven generations.”
We have sympathy with the thoughts behind the statements of Carbon Counting for there are untold examples of how We as Mankind have denied the existence of a natural balance here. Easter Island is perhaps just one example, but there are others. At one stage the whole of China was a forest, and even our own country has been despoiled by cutting down trees to make the Wooden Ships used by the British and Colonialists to foster war.
Now though there is a different driver in that we have the impetus to seek alternative sources of energy from ‘’so-called renewable” areas in order to meet legislation on balancing up to 20% of our energy from renewable sources. So her again we repeat the folly of trying to start up an industry from (almost) scratch (just as we did in mandating for biofuels where the first and quick fix solution was to use food crops) and we are going for the parallel quick fix solution of using trees and forests. That would be alright had we just concentrated on the debris and forest clearing spoils. However here again there are concerns over whether these may affect the ecological balance of the forests for like everything else fallen trees and natural debris within forests have their part to play. Alas this does not appear to be the case for making electricity from wood based biomass is big business and is lucrative in terms of subsidies. In this therefore you should be aware that in the EU (European Union) huge amounts of money is being made from the Premium Rates for Electricity Generation in this area. In the UK there are facilities being built that will reap over £300 million a year in subsidies to produce renewable sourced electricity and that within 2 years these subsidies will pay for the building of the power plants. (Is it any wonder that these power plants are springing up all over the country, and then being sold onwards even before they are built?) Now is the crunch time for the demand for the wood biomass is projected to be so large (over 8 million tonnes per year by 2018) that the prices of the wood has already gone up by 50% in two years and it is likely to increase even further – possibly by as much as 200% by 2018 – so that the subsidies given to generate electricity will always be needed. Is it any wonder therefore that serious questions have been raised by the EU Commission and the Public at Large over the issue since the costs for this will as always be borne by the Public through higher energy costs. Now the USA has fallen in to the trap and the principal beneficiaries will be big businesses.
We see nothing wrong with attempting to assess the impact of the burning of Biomass and accounting for its carbon statement. The fundamentals (of the issue) seem relatively straightforward. There is a balance needed between the cutting down of the forests for burning to make energy (electricity and heat) that has to be equated to the time required to replenish the quantity of material used in the process. If a reasonably mature tree takes 20 years to reach the point at which is mature enough to be cut down for a biomass to energy facility, and we then cut down 50,000 trees and burn them all in six months then in theory the balancing mechanism to replace the carbon absorbing option of planting more trees is 20 years. However since the tree growth pattern is somewhat at variance to the notion that it absorbs carbon equally over its 20 year growth cycle then the need – up front – is to have a ready source of mature trees that were planted at least 20 years before the current programme was envisaged to cut down the trees. This out-of-balance theory is in part being addressed in other countries by legislation that forces the biomass to energy companies to plant anywhere between 7 and 30 times as many sapling trees as it cuts down mature trees within the same time frame of tree-cutting activity. Unfortunately we do not see this being included within the current legislation in the USA…unless you can point it out and avail us of where we may read it. To us it would make sense to have that additional clause added.
AD Cherson | Aug 1, 2010 | Reply
Whichever way you count, feedstock biomass emissions are carbon neutral since no ‘virgin’ carbon is in the feedstock that was extracted from the Earth and is being combusted for the first time. This accounts only for the carbon contents of the biomass and not for the secondary emissions from related activities such as growing, harvesting, preparing, transporting, building infrastructure, losses from soil degradation, and disposing of waste. So actually the counting debate is really about all the secondary emissions and looked at this way there could be situations where biofuels release more carbon than other types of generation.
pinbalwyz | Sep 8, 2010 | Reply
I’ve heard much about the so called ‘carbon neutrality’ of burning our forests to offset our burning of coal. But to claim that somehow improves or reduces CO2 in the atmosphere is insane. CO2 has no memory of how it got there. And to suppose future forests are going to increase/resequester the instantly released CO2 from bio-incinerators is so ridiculous a child would know better. Globally, the trend is the elimination of forests, not the reverse. North America once had forests from ocean to ocean. Look at it now! And burning what forests remain isn’t going to improve it. The better use of the underbrush, slash, and ’rounds’ (young/non-commercial trees) is to allow them to enrich and maintain the forest soils rather than exposing bare soils to winter elements, leaching, erosion, compaction, and reduction of bio-diversity. Bio-incineration is a boondoggle much like corn ethanol was. We can’t get out of the hole we’re in by digging it deeper. We can’t eliminate climate change by burning our forests!