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> He says the plant now uses seven million tonnes of pellets sourced from commercial forests in the US a year and says Drax will phase out coal entirely by March next year. Anyone know more about using ‘compressed wooden pellets sourced from the US’? First time I’ve heard of an easy? transition option for existing coal power plants, achieved by changing the fuel burnt.
It's called "biomass" and it's a massive scam that harms the environment. Michael Moore and Jeff Gibbs released a recent documentary on it [0] that was censored by the "green" industry. As you watch the documentary, do some fact checking on your own [1]. [0] https://vimeo.com/423114384 [1] https://planetofthehumans.com/fact-check-bible/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The carbon is captured when the tree grows and then released when the wood is burned. This is different from fossil fuels where it is underground.
How is that different? Fossil fuels were also captured many years ago. The only difference is the number of years.
This is a good discussion of the accounting of biofuels, with a guy called Tim Searchinger (there is a transcript if you don't want to listen): https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2019/11/manifold-podcast-23-ti... One takeaway is that you should think of farming trees as fuel as a competitor for land use. If it displaces growing food crops, then they will be grown elsewhere, possibly in newly cleared rainforest. Even if no…
The wood pellets are interesting —- if we were growing forests at the same rate as we consume them via the pellets, would it be close enough to a closed loop system?
This is unfortunately not the case. Lots of wood is imported from the third world, potentially the Amazon. Even if it was grown in the country it is consumed in, it would eventually suffer the same issues that industrial farming does. The soil becomes depleted and requires fossil-fuel based fertilizer. Burning the Amazon is now progress, apparently. Something like fusion, or cleaner nuclear, is our only hope. I worry…
If we (USA) hadn't stopped building nuclear in the 80s, and had merely continued building it at the same pace, our grid would be (approximately) carbon-free today. Not twenty years from now, not fifty years from now, today.
But no, we collectively decided that no amount of engineering could possibly make nuclear acceptably safe, and we made the grown-up responsible decision to pump our atmosphere full of CO2 instead.
Facepalm.
Burning wood pellets puts out co2. claiming zero carbon output for this means people could literally burn forests and claim they're being carbon neutral. It's scandalous. The only option would be forests that are managed and burnt for fuel. I'd be interested to know what area of forest you'd need to bring under this sort of management in order to produce say, enough power for a medium sized city. But ultimately this…
The CO2 in wood comes from the atmosphere recently, while the CO2 in coal came from the prehistoric atmosphere. That's an improvement. That's also how biofuels work. Wood is a renewable resource when managed sustainably, and carbon neutral. How practical it is, is another matter entirely.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The carbon is captured when the tree grows and then released when the wood is burned. This is different from fossil fuels where it is underground.
The reason wood is considered neutral is, that most of the wood is used for construction and other stuff. If you burn it and happen to burn fossil fuel as well, nothing is neutral.
Over the life cycle of the tree from planting to burning, it's carbon neutral, though the shape of it for any given tree is 20 years of carbon sequestration followed by 20 minutes of carbon release.
The wood pellets are interesting —- if we were growing forests at the same rate as we consume them via the pellets, would it be close enough to a closed loop system?
I'm not sure that would scale. According to their website ( https://www.draxbiomass.com/ ), each plant produces about 1/2 metric tonne of wood pellets / year. The Drax plant uses 7 million tonnes / year, so you would need 14 equivalent plants to produce enough wood pellets for just one power plant. In the 1980's, old growth logging was shut down in my state (Oregon) for environmental reasons. The new growth forests h…
This is off by a factor of a million, though I think you reached the right conclusion.
Hummm, not sure wood pellets are carbon neutral. I think the UK has just offshored its CO2 emissions to the US. Great video below explaining in more detail. https://youtu.be/6RP-jYDgiMg?t=100
The carbon is captured when the tree grows and then released when the wood is burned. This is different from fossil fuels where it is underground.
2. There is not nearly enough wood waste from construction sites/etc to operate them.
3. They have to be supplemented with wood cut down from forests.
4. There aren't nearly enough forests in the UK to operate these plants sustainably.
5. So, the wood they burn comes from cutting down Canadian forests, trucking them down logging roads, loading them onto barges, and shipping them across the Atlantic ocean to the UK.
By the time you're done with all that, the carbon footprint of your wood pellet plant is greater than that of a coal plant.
The wood pellets are interesting —- if we were growing forests at the same rate as we consume them via the pellets, would it be close enough to a closed loop system?