Is burning wood for power carbon-neutral? Not a chance
https://news.yahoo.com/op-ed-burning-wo ... 35561.htmlThe mammoth pandemic stimulus and spending bill Congress passed last week includes billions of dollars to expand solar, and wind energy. These are good measures to address greenhouse gas emissions. But the bill also contains a rider that would undercut those efforts.
A provision added to the bill, pushed for by Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), declares that cutting down trees and burning them for energy is carbon-neutral. This, of course, makes no sense. Burning wood will add to global warming — even if the wood replaces coal or natural gas, as scientific organizations and hundreds of scientists have long argued.
For decades, the wood industry has generated electricity and heat by burning wood wastes from harvesting and turning wood into paper and timber. Doing that makes sense because using the waste does not require cutting down more trees.
In recent years, however, there has been a bizarre but dangerous push to retrofit power plants and factories to burn wood. The European Union has spurred this effort by adopting laws to require more low-carbon renewable energy (which by themselves are good), but then simultaneously allowing wood to count as a carbon-free, renewable fuel. Countries in the EU responded by subsidizing power plants to burn wood. Utilities lobbied for this shift after realizing that their coal-fired power plants could stay in business if modified at public expense to mix in some use of wood.
But the process of burning wood results in more carbon being released into the atmosphere than burning coal. This happens in two ways. Trees in a forest store carbon and keep it out of the atmosphere. When trees are cut down, more than half the wood is left to rot or burned in producing a usable form of fuel (usually wood pellets), which releases carbon into the air. The wood fuel that is ultimately burned in power plants generates still more carbon. Overall, using wood produces two to three times as much carbon per kilowatt hour as burning coal or natural gas.