The European Union uses biomass for 60% of its ‘renewable’ energy and claims that this is ‘carbon neutral’. This is an outrageous lie.
Browsing around the European Commission website, as one does of a Sunday evening, I was astonished to discover that it burns tons of ‘biomass’.
‘Biomass for energy (bioenergy) continues to be the main source of renewable energy in the EU’, it says, ‘with a share of almost 60%. The heating and cooling sector is the largest end-user, using about 75% of all bioenergy.’
I knew they used biomass, but it always shows up as a minor contributor to electricity generation, on a par with solar, far behind wind and hydro.
It is a much larger contributor to the overall energy budget, however.
I mention the EU because it claims to lead the world in reducing carbon dioxide emission. If biomass is the means of achieving this, however, it is not making progress; it is regressing.
Energy crisis
Five centuries ago, Europe used primarily wood as fuel. Heating, cooking, primitive industry, all were reliant on wood.
Then, they ran into trouble. While demand for wood increased throughout the 16th century, because of growing populations and more intensive industry, the supply was rapidly diminishing, as old-growth forests were cleared for cultivation.
The wood species best suited to burning or making charcoal in temperate climates grow slowly, sometimes taking many decades, or even a century or two, to mature. Besides, wood was increasingly needed to build vast navies, and much else besides.
This shortage of wood drove up prices. By 1580, wood was four times more expensive than in 1540. By 1620, it was ten times more expensive. This affected prices throughout the economy, and created enormous pressure on especially industry to find alternative fuels.
Energy density
The alternative that proved abundant, coal, also proved to be far superior to wood. It provided more energy than wood by weight and far more by volume.
And off to the industrial revolution Europe went, merrily burning coal. Other fossil fuels eventually followed, with petroleum oil replacing whale oil (largely ending the slaughter of these ocean mammals), and piped natural gas replacing candles.
Transitioning from a fuel with a lower energy density to one with a higher energy density is called progress. It makes industrial processes, as well as domestic applications, of fuel more efficient.
Ships, once powered by wind, which like solar offers very little energy per unit area, climbed the energy density ladder, first to coal, then to fuel oil, and in some cases, all the way to nuclear propulsion.
This is also why we ended up with petrol- and diesel-fueled vehicles: these fuels have very good energy density, both by weight and by volume. Natural gas is a poor competitor by volume, even when compressed, and hydrogen is even worse: excellent in terms of energy per kilogram, but a kilogram takes up so much space that it is one of the worst fuels by volume, even in its liquid state.
Batteries and nuclear
Lithium-ion batteries have a very low energy density, which is why electric vehicles are far heavier than those with internal combustion engines, and use a great deal of the vehicle’s volume just to pack in batteries.
Lithium borohydride has a spectacular energy density, outperforming almost everything, but it is very complex to recycle. This makes recharging lithium borohydride batteries impractical, which is why despite great research and advocacy efforts, it has never proved practical as an energy storage medium.
Nuclear energy had to be omitted from the chart above. Nuclear fuels pack billions of megajoules of energy per kg and per litre, so they would have reduced the entire plot above to a small point at the chart’s origin, had they been included.
It really is astonishing that there isn’t a great public clamour demanding an immediate transition to nuclear energy, for as many applications as practically possible, from electricity generation and industrial heating to vehicle propulsion.
Back to wood
But back to wood. Literally. The EU is actively encouraging the expansion of biomass as an energy source, to diversify its energy mix and to back up unreliable sources like solar and wind energy.
Biomass refers to a wide range of mostly plant-based waste, including crop residues, logging and wood-processing by-products, crops grown specifically for biofuel, wood grown especially for fuel, plus other biological waste such as animal dung, food waste and human excrement.
Almost all of these have lower energy densities than actual hardwoods, so they first need to be processed and compressed into ‘pellets’ which look like, but are certainly not, animal feed.
Upon burning these pellets, a lot of pollution is emitted. The same is true for people burning wood in their fireplaces: it creates smoke, and if not properly controlled, indoor air pollution. In poor countries, indoor air pollution is a greater risk than outdoor air pollution, exactly because people use dung, wood and sometimes coal to cook and heat their homes.
Sleight-of-hand
The way to claim wood or biomass is ‘carbon neutral’ is to ignore the production process, ignore transport, ignore the land-use changes required to grow biomass for fuel, and then claim that when burned, it produces no more carbon dioxide than the plants it is derived from would have sequestered while growing.
This is sleight-of-hand, of course. Not growing biomass only to burn it produces less carbon dioxide than doing so.
Crops might grow quickly, but they have the worst energy density of all. Wood has far better energy density, but trees take a long time to grow. Even fast-growing trees typically only mature after 30 years, while hardwoods can easily take a century to grow.
It is true that burning biomass only uses carbon from a century-scale cycle, and not a geological-scale cycle, as fossil fuels do. However, taking all that carbon, sequestered over decades or centuries, and putting it in the air in a few minutes hardly seems like a process one could honestly call carbon dioxide emission reduction.
It may, in fact, be a reasonable use of waste products to burn them for process heat or even electricity production, but biomass cannot compete with fossil fuels, while nothing can compete with nuclear power.
Dirty and inefficient
Biomass is dirty and smoke produced by indoor fires is hazardous to our health. And I am not the only one saying so. The US EPA frowns on burning wood. Energy industry trade publications call it worse than coal. Even the elitist, left-wing, pro-renewable Guardian has fallen out of love with wood fireplaces and biomass energy generation.
Burning biomass is inefficient, requiring far greater volumes to produce the same energy as cleaner-burning fuels like gas, oil or even coal. Other than gas, which is pretty benign for a fossil fuel, those aren’t great either, which is why there really ought to be a massive push for nuclear energy.
If 16th century Europe ran out of wood for fuel with only 90 million people, how much worse will it be today, when 750 million people need far more energy per capita?
Humanity spent centuries trying to get away from wood, and in many developing countries, that battle is not yet over. Now the European elites think it’s a good idea to turn the clock back on five centuries of environmental and industrial progress.
It’s a romantic notion, perhaps, but it’s quite insane.
[Photo: Biomass fuel plant – Science in the News, Harvard University.]
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