Biomass and the dismal science
- September 15, 2006 12:39 PM |
- By Quirks
On this week's program (available Sept 16) you'll hear a piece we've been putting together on biomass energy - using plant materials like straw and wood chips to generate electricity and make liquid fuels. It's a piece that has some surprises. As the producer responsible for assembling it, I learned a lot about the area, and the most surprising thing is how much energy we could be generating from biomass. In North America it could supply close to 20% of our energy needs.
I'll leave most of the explanation of how that could happen to piece on the the radio show (we can't spill all the beans on the blog). There's a big part of the biomass argument that we don't explore very much, and that's the economics. So I'm going to have to ask you to excuse me while I use our science blog for an article about the economics of green energy.
Biomass energy seems to make a lot of sense. There's a vast potential, and the technology for some uses is already there, and for others is nearly there. In this it's a lot like wind energy, but in many ways its a little more attractive than wind because you can still have biomass energy available when the wind isn't blowing. Like wind, it's likely to be more expensive than fossil fuel energy, unless oil prices rise even more. The interesting thing is that very little of this extra cost comes down to the actual fuel being more expensive - in fact biomass fuel is largely going to be free, or close to it. Some of it will be transportation, because biomass is distributed around the countryside and has to be collected. Even there, however, the difference between what it costs to deliver a tonne of coal and a tonne of straw or wood to a power plant aren't that great. And if you start counting the costs of pollution and global warming - what economists call the "externalities" things start looking a lot better for renewables like biomass. Externalities could include everything from the costs of health care because of pollution, to environmental disruption because of global warming. These kinds of costs are indirect, widely distributed, and notoriously hard to put a concrete monetary value on, which is why they're so often ignored.
Some of the biggest costs and the biggest barriers to these new energy sources, however, are the costs of changeover. If we switch to burning biomass in power plants for electricity, for example, we have to build new power plants closer to the sources of biomass to replace the fossil fuel power plants. At the moment, we have lots of these centralized fossil fuel plants. If these plants are new, then electricity producers won't want to shut them down because they haven't paid for themselves - the capital costs would be a dead loss. If these are old plants, then they're producing energy very cheaply, since fuel like coal costs so little, and earning big profits, and so producers don't want to shut them down. So replacing operating fossil fuel plants with new biomass plants is going to cost money, unless you wait for the fossil fuel plants to to come to the end of their natural life-cycle. Those life cycles are long - a coal plant can run for fifty or sixty years.
Then there's the cost of adapting the grid. Unlike fossil fuel plants, biomass energy plants are likely to be away from urban areas where most power is consumed. Because biomass isn't dense and concentrated like fossil fuel, you don't want to transport it far. So biomass plants will likely be in farmland, or close to forestry sites. To transport the power from these sites, you'll need to build power lines, transmission towers, transformers, and you'll have to factor in the electrical losses that come with transporting power long distances. It's another large capital outlay, that building a new fossil fuel plant at the site of an old one doesn't face.
There are lots of ways to pay these costs. Direct subsidy by governments is one -- just pay the power producers for the cost difference between using renewable power and fossil power. Carbon taxes are another. If the government put a tax on power generated from fossil fuels and didn't tax renewable power, it might help even the playing field. Most energy economists, however, favour a modified scheme called "carbon emissions trading," a way of trading permission to produce greenhouse gas for money. The UN has endorsed these, and this kind of system is already operating in Europe, and in a limited way in some parts of North America, but hasn't been officially implemented by Canada or the US.
A lot of the the science of biomass and renewable energy has been done. Now we just have to get the "dismal science" worked out.
— Jim Lebans
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Comments (5)
Where's the gain? Burning biomass will produce CO2 and contribute to global warming. Because of it's low energy density considerably more energy will be involved in collecting it. Government subsidies merely pass the costs to the consumer.
What's wrong with nuclear power. It's safe, highly concentrated, produces no greenhouse gases, and very little waste. The high cost of nuclear power (comparable to coal if you don't count the costs of cleaning up coal and don't copnsider the costs of transporting coal)results purly from the bureaucracy in licensing and assuaging ignorant fears.
Hello Bob
I just read your BLOG entitled BIOMASS AND THE DISMAL SCIENCE and I thought you might be interested to read the FEW PARAGRAPHS (below) of a historical synopsis that I crafted recently about the relationship between soil nutrient depletion by human activity and carrying capacity -- in which I make a link to the new 'forest biomass for energy' craze.
With regard to the gargantuan amounts of energy we have become accustomed to using, David Layzell (in a talk entitled 'CANADA'S BIOENERGY OPPORTUNITY' presented at the 2006 ForestLeadership Conference, March 1-2 in Toronto)stated that Canada's total annual energy utilization is about 10 EXAJOULES while the energy contained in Canada's total annual forest harvest is 2 EXAJOULES. Given that we have a use for ALL of that harvest now (mostly for export), and that almost all of the waste bark, sawdust and other wood rejects from the forest manufacturing industry is ALREADY spoken for and used currently -- then harvesting residues ( high nutrient leaves, needles, and fine branches with high bark:wood ratios )are the only source of forest biomass that could be used for energy.
I hope you will have time to read the FEW PARAGRAPHS (below) wherin I attempt to relate the soil nutrient depletion and forest growth declines that would be produced by removing and burning high nutrient harvesting residues (slash) to the 10,000 years of soil nutrient depletion that has been the result of our move from hunter gathering to agriculture.
Peter Salonius
Research Scientist
Natural Resources Canada - Canadian Forest Service
http://www.atl.cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/index-e/who-e/people-e/salonius_peter-e.html
---------------
A FEW PARAGRAPHS BEGIN ::::::::::
10,000 year progressive erosion of sustainability
Impending energy scarcity is influencing Canada's forest industry to look at high nutrient slash ( foliage, and fine branches with large bark/wood ratios) from stem harvesting operations as a source of biomass energy. This will mine the nutrient capital of forest soils and degrade their productive capacity.
Canadians should decide in what proportions they wish to use the STEM WOOD harvest -- for pulp and paper, lumber or biomass for energy and as a source of industrial chemicals. Wood is becoming the new petroleum. Wood can be a renewable resource, if harvested responsibly. We can only use each unit of wood once, so that we will have to decide whether we continue to produce wealth by exporting most of our forest products OR whether some of the harvest, that historically has been directed to commodity markets, is to be used in Canada for the production of biofuels and energy cogeneration. We can not have our cake and eat it too.
As I see it the carrying capacity of the Earth's ecosystems is hinged, in the long term, on the supply of nutrients for plant growth. Of all the natural resource exploitative industries, forest harvesting and ocean fisheries offered the best possibility for long term sustainability. Currently, as we have fished down the marine food chain and mined the ability of the oceans to absorb our pollutants, marine productivity of food that is useful to humans has been at least temporarily diminished.
With the exception of a period of forest litter raking in Europe to augment depleted fertility levels on agricultural lands -- in the period before mining, chemical synthesis and long distance transport of fertilizers made raking unnecessary -- most forest harvesting has been confined to the removal of stems with slash being left behind. This forest harvesting appears to have been fairly sustainable, at least as concerns the maintenance of soil nutrients for plant growth -- although biodiversity and ecosystem stability appear to have been compromised in many cases.
As the momentum and impetus to remove smaller tree parts (nutrient rich branches and foliage) increases in response to the demand for forest biomass energy --- EVEN FOREST HARVESTING is becoming a soil nutrient mining endevour. The following argument traces human history in the context of the depletion of soil nutrients and the consequent erosion of long term carrying capacity:--
Human population growth has been due to the absence of effective top predators as well as to cultural changes that resulted in ever more abundant food supplies. Ecologists have shown that, without effective top predators, all animal populations overshoot the carrying capacity of their ecosystems and then they experience population collapse in repeating cycles that degrade the very carrying capacity and biological productivity of their environments. This carrying capacity degradation is more serious as the amplitude of overshoot cycles is more extreme.
Hunter-gatherers, before the advent of agriculture, were mainly controlled by starvation when their numbers overshot the carrying capacity of the ecosystems they inhabited. The populations of these ancient people and the animals they hunted behaved in a classic manner -- experiencing die-offs to levels below equilibrium levels when their numbers exceeded the food supply and then expanding above equilibrium levels as food supplies recovered in a repeating cycle. This dynamic served to maintain balance between humans and other species.
Humans have far outstripped any equilibrium levels as they have usurped the living space of almost all of the other species on earth, and completely eliminated many of them. We have degraded the productive capacity of most of the earth's ecosystems and are now proceeding to make more alterations to the earth's atmosphere, by our use of fossil fuels and forest clearing, than have been experienced naturally in the last 600,000 years.
The advent of agriculture allowed the human carrying capacity of the earth to increase by increasing the access to and consistency of supply of food by storage, as Abernethy, Bartlett, Hopfenberg, Pimentel and others have pointed out-- however as most agriculture is a soil-nutrient-depleting practice, even this carrying capacity increase would prove to be unsustainable. In the very long term, on most of the surface of the earth, only the hunter-gatherer human culture appears to be sustainable because human numbers are controlled by the productivity of self-managed, NUTRIENT- CONSERVATIVE forest and grassland ecosystems.
When soil productivity was seriously diminished by unsustainable soil-nutrient-depleting agriculture in a particular area and/or population numbers became excessive, the propensity of humans to migrate came into play as new lands were colonized and put under the plow.
Just about the time that the whole earth had been submitted to human patch disturbance and the practice of farming -- finite fossil fuels allowed geological energy to replace draft animal power and to facilitate the mining, chemical synthesis and long distance transport of fertilizers to replace those removed by soil-nutrient-depleting agriculture.
The completely unsustainable six-fold population growth from 1750 to the present was facilitated by displacing solar energy dependence with massive amounts temporarily available, geologically stored non renewable fossil and nuclear fuels. As these fuel sources are exhausted, in the future, we can anticipate the replacement of unsustainable population growth with energy-depletion-orchestrated economic and population collapse.
Albert Bartlett has said that "modern agriculture is the use of land to convert petroleum into food".
A glance at any population graph demonstrates that human populations, since the advent of agriculture 10,000 years ago, have not been oscillating around any equilibrium level. Global human numbers have increased steadily. Nothing has arrested the steady increase in human numbers, although the elimination of 1/3 of the people between India and Iceland in the 1300s, as a result of Bubonic Plague='black death', did make a very small dip in the curve before its inexorable increase resumed within a century.
Since 1750, when temporary supplies of exhaustible geological energy began to be used, the population graph has increasingly moved toward a 'straight up' trace with no impression having been made on it by such devastating events as World War II that removed 20,000,000 from the Soviet Union alone.
Humanity has been repeatedly warned, by Malthus in the 1700s and many others since that, in the absence of effective natural controls on human numbers, societal population controls must be established by mutual consent. Homo sapiens, the species with the large brain, and the capacity to foresee future consequences, has not (collectively) understood the need for the control of human numbers. People in affluent countries that are free of war confine their thinking to short term issues, while people in countries beset by food shortages and warfare concentrate on surviving day to day.
Peter Salonius
Scientists for Population Reduction
http://www.scientists4pr.org
I have always liked the idea of society using re-newable, alternative fuels.
The simple fact is, while governments and the oil companies rake in the profits from fossil fuels, we will not see the full potential for re-newables, for a very long time. Governments are not likely to spend to much money on R&D until they figure out a way to tax it as heavily as the energy it will replace.
Oh to live in a perfect world!.
This is the kind of thing I long to do! I want to be part of developing and implementing safe, clean sources of energy to enable the change of our society to a green, sustainable future. Unfortunately, even with my science degree, there seems to be little place for me to get into the biofuels/green energy business. Does anyone have any clues on where to get this information?
Further to Peter Salonius' comments above:
This passage is about England in the early 1600's, which was being deforested due to the manufacture of iron and glass.
"Standish discovered another consequence of deforestation that no one had recognized: in the countryside, where firewood "is scant," Standish observed, farmers "are constrained to burn straw[ i.e. the stalks of harvested crops], and weeds and manure." Because these were used as fuel instead of being employed to enrich the soil, the earth lost it's fertility. "The want [of such fertilizing agents] is the utter undoing of many a husbandmen," continued Standish, "Who tilleth much land, soweth much seed, and reapeth much loss." Therefore, Standish brilliantly concluded, "The want of wood is a great decay to tillage." A Forest Journey, The Role of Wood in the Development of Civilization, John Perlin.