As we slowly wean ourselves away from our centuries-long love affair with fossil fuels in an attempt to reduce CO2 emissions and combat global warming, there has been a rapid expansion across a broad range of clean energy technologies. Whether it’s a set of solar panels on your roof, a wind farm stretching across the horizon, or even a nuclear plant, it’s clear that we’ll be seeing more green power installations springing up.
One of the green power options is biomass, the burning of waste plant matter as a fuel to generate power. It releases CO2 into the atmosphere, but its carbon neutral green credentials come from that CO2 being re-absorbed by new plants being grown. It’s an attractive idea in infrastructure terms, because existing coal-fired plants can be converted to the new fuel. Where this is being written in the UK we have a particularly large plant doing this, when I toured Drax power station as a spotty young engineering student in the early 1990s it was our largest coal plant; now it runs on imported wood pellets.
Wood Ain’t What You Think It Is
The coal-to-wood story has a very rosy swords-into-ploughshares spin to it, but sadly all isn’t as well as it seems with wood biomass power generation. Nature has a feature expressing concerns about it, both over its effect on the areas from which the wood is harvested, and over the CO2 emissions it creates. The problem is that it produces so much CO2 with such a long renewal time of regrowing all those trees, that over the next century it’s likely to make the CO2 problem worse rather than better. The article has provoked a storm of criticism of the biomass industry from environmentalists, but in doing so do they risk tarnishing the whole biomass sector unfairly?
A millennia-old sustainable farming practice is that of coppicing. This is the repeated harvesting of wood from the same tree in a continuous cycle of cutting and regrowth of the same trees, and a typical coppiced woodland will contain trees at all stages of the cycle. This is a very practical example of carbon neutral biomass production, but the problem is that for a power-station scale operation it becomes one of replacing older trees with hew ones. While a coppiced tree will take in the order of a decade to replace its growth, a new full-sized forest tree takes many decades to do the same. The establishment of a coppiced forest is a slow process meanwhile, so there’s little prospect of their soon achieving the scale to replace the traditional forests harvested by the power industry.
The Answer Lies Down On The Farm
Fortunately, wood represents only one sector of the biomass industry. There’s an alternative model to that of the enormous former coal plant burning wood pellets, and it comes in the form of much smaller local plants running on biomass crops or crop waste from farms, usually in the form of straw. It’s worth looking at these plants in order to remind anyone tempted to dismiss biomass as a whole based on the wood pellet plants that there is a more sustainable alternative.
A feature of growing up in rural England before the end of the 1980s was that at this time of year the land would be enveloped in a curious smog. We produced much more straw than we could use as a country, and the surplus used to be burned where it lay in the fields. The resulting ash would return what nutrients it contained to the soil, and the land being blanketed by smoke was just part of life.
When the practice was banned it became the norm for combine harvesters to chop the straw and distribute it across the field, where it would be ploughed in to break down naturally. Naturally this represented a significant biomass crop going to waste, so as the demand for green energy rose there appeared local plants all across the country. These typically have a capacity in the tens of MW, and buy their straw under contract from farms within an easy transport radius. This is usually surplus straw from feed crops, but is sometimes also ones specifically grown for biomass such as rye or elephant grass. It’s something of a mark of the season, when the contractors turn up with their huge high-speed baler to process the crop.
In the second half of the 20th century we concentrated on the economies of scale offered by very large coal-burning plants because it was relatively cheap to move a trainload of coal from the colliery to the power station. It’s unlikely that we’d now build similar plants to burn wood unless we already had them left over from the coal era, so it’s important to remind anyone put off biomass power by concerns similar to those in the Nature article that it doesn’t need to be done that way. There is an alternative, it relies on biomass that grows back on a yearly cycle with the harvest, and it could be coming to your county if it hasn’t already.
“Drax power station cooling towers” by [Andrew Whale], CC BY-SA 2.0.
The worst issue with nuclear is it actually solves the problem and then you wouldn’t be able to generate jobs and salaries in a giant interconnected NGO network for generations, a climate-academic-industrial complex fiddling with widgets that work terribly and always need some missing piece that isn’t invented yet
There are three main problems with nuclear:
1. Nuclear waste, the risk of accidents and the risks of abusing the plant for military purposes (a risk that is real but overhyped and with good regulation, neglegible)
2. Nuclear plants are very bad at quickly switching off and on, needing in the order of weeks to significantly change their output, which makes them completely unusable in today’s mixed-source energy world. There is no need for the often-cited “base load”. This makes nuclear plants extremely uneconomical for their operators.
3. In the current, western democratic world, fearmongering about problem 1 and regulations means procedures + construction of a nuclear plant will easily take 20 years from idea to being operational, time we don’t have. Small-scale nuclear plants are very much feasible, but juridically untested and still have problems 1 and 2.
Fairly easily manageable, as we can see non-nuclear wastes have been orders of magnitude greater harm per kw/hr thus far. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. This would be an easier problem to solve than the multitudes of problems with any renewable.
Not an issue because it’s powerful enough to negate the need for a mixed-source patchwork kludge grid… Which is a terrible idea for many other reasons. Why do we need that again? Just keep the nuke online and run everything off the nuke.
This gets back to the NGO complex mentioned above. People built these plants quickly and safely in the past, it can be done again.. It only requires will to do so. And to shake off those who would intentionally hamper it.
These days even building a new bridge takes decades and far too much budget (e.g. Francis Scott Key Bridge) whereas it used to be done in months.. This problem is artificially imposed by a parasitic bureaucracy that does nothing else of actual value. It can be solved, but the useless sycophant functionaries will make a terrible din on their way out and claim that the sky is falling. Push through this or perish
Just saying, we already have the solution… And it is not being used because it is exactly that: a solution. How badly do you want a functional biosphere?..
Also I hate to break it to you but the gonzo renewable patchwork grid thing with nonexistent superbatteries and a bunch of big red question marks scattered all over the schematic is also going to take a lot longer than 20 years, time we don’t have.
That poor bridge is probably still going to be humped several years or even decades from now. They say 2028 but that’s a bald lie. It’s crunch time and we can’t even do proper large construction projects anymore. That’s a big problem no matter what solution you go for.
Those first paragraphs were meant to be numbered 1, 2, and 3 like yours, but apparently the comment system didn’t like that, oh well
You know – where i live in Europe – we have fair amount of lignite power plants – in the past (50s), the waste from these coal power plants was used as a building material (it was pressed into bricks with other material like cement) – the activity (mostly because of Ra-226 but also U) was in some cases so bad that in the 60s it was stopped being used altogether. And almost all waste piles near the coal power plants has measurable radioactivity (higher than the standard background).
In contrast you will not be able to measure anything near the ponds with waste nuclear fuel or other used nuclear fuel storage facilities, because if you did, all the “green groups” would be immediately rioting near every government building possible.
The claim that we are in an emergency situation and have to act now is more than 50 years old. It is no more true now than it was 50 years ago.
The legal and bureaucratic regulations are indeed a serious delay and a wasteful burden on society. They need to be cut and more impediments put in place to prevent new regulations.
In my almost 50 years I have definitely seen climate change. Where I grew up sledding, making snow forts and snowmen as a kid my child, in a house less than 50 miles from the one I grew up in has barely even seen snow that didn’t melt the next day.
While I remember going outdoors and enjoying the summer… it’s too damn hot to enjoy most of the time.
And the docks a the local access to our nearby great lake… had to be raised because they were frequently underwater.
50 years ago it was an emergency to prevent it.
The assholes ensured it was not prevented.
Now it is an emergency to contain the scale.
The assholes continue being assholes.
And another reason Nuclear is a BAD IDEA to generate Ekectric Power is that after a future Carrington Event knocks out all of the Earth’s Electric Power Transmission Grids smoking the transformers already in short supply since COVID-19, THEN….no workers stay to maintain the used nuclear rode cooling ponds because diesel fuel, or spare parts, or skilled workers to maintain the stored spent nuclear rod ponds pumping cooling systems are non existant after 97% of the Worlds population has passed away from hunger leaving just 3% of humans standing, and the remaining plants, animals still okay all have to deal with nuclear fall out everywhere as the so bad idea of nuclear power plants with fuel rods in cooling ponds start to overheat belching radiation out everywhere to be carried by the jet streams to kill off the 3% humans left to carry on, the (food) plants, the (food) animals .
Molten salt reactors
Or Thorium. My limited understanding is that they shut down safely, and can actually process existing radioactive waste to make it dramatically safer AND the byproduct of that processing – heat!
Geomagnetic events like the Carrington Event are no longer a problem. The issue with large transformers was fixed at least a decade ago.
How about a Miyake event? 80x more powerful than a Carrington event. Forget wires–Probably fry circuit boards from induced currents in the traces.
So phase out the current reactors which are all decades out of date anyway while replacing them with newer designs that don’t have that problem.
Killing nuclear development was short-sighted and stupid.
Not resurrecting it would be the same.
Not continuing to develop wind, solar or any other green tech even as we resume developing nuclear would also be dumb.
“Nuclear waste, the risk of accidents and the risks of abusing the plant for military purposes (a risk that is real but overhyped and with good regulation, neglegible)”
Reactor designs already exist that address all of that. As far as weapons grade fissile material production is concerned, that cat was out of the bag LONG ago.
Gen IV reactors:
Nuclear waste that remains radioactive for a few centuries instead of millennia
100–300x energy yield from the same amount of nuclear fuel
Broader range of fuels, including unencapsulated raw fuels (non-pebble MSR, LFTR).
Potential to burn existing nuclear waste and produce electricity: a closed fuel cycle.
Improved safety via features such as ambient pressure operation, automatic passive reactor shutdown, and alternate coolants.
On that CO2 thing. Fixed their title:
China is building six times more new coal plants than [all other] other countries [combined], report finds – March 2, 2023
https://www.npr.org/2023/03/02/1160441919/china-is-building-six-times-more-new-coal-plants-than-other-countries-report-fin
“Everybody else is moving away from coal and China seems to be stepping on the gas,” she says. “We saw that China has six times as much plants starting construction as the rest of the world combined.“
https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/US%20China%20fossil%20fuels.png
As for your point #2:
That’s true of current designs, but to a large degree it’s not an inherent feature of nuclear plants as such. If the current hype of SMRs persists and they get deployed it will allow for finer granularity in regulation.
And even if we stay with large blocks they can be designed with faster regulation in mind, since the problem is more with the steam cycle and thermal properties of the materials used. Large coal fired plants do face similar problems too.
After all the nuclear core can change the power output very fast as the Chernobyl #4 unit operators learned.
There is a big one or perhaps two points to add for current nuclear technology at least (though I’d probably bump it up to slot 1 or 2 as nuclear waste and the fearmongering are very solvable non-issues in reality – in the same way the famous German bureaucracy can be ‘solved’ by simply bypassing it almost entirely to build LNG terminals almost overnight when Russia kicked off).
A finite resource, unevenly distributed in the ground. So it will both run out if everyone is using it and many nations would be entirely dependent on a small handful of other nations – OPEC is bad enough in many ways for geopolitical issues, but as fossil fuels exist in a much wider range of places in their various forms it really isn’t the end of your world if these OPEC nations decided to fix the price 40% higher than it was yesterday as they don’t like you much… Its rather more complex and longwinded to change reactor types to run on a different grades of fuel than the transition between coal/oil/gas.
Such reactors aren’t safe, though. Not by our standards here in Europe, I think.
France for example, that country with the reprocessing technique, does align its reactors in the east, next to Germany. So that we will get the fallout, by the west wind. ;)
That shows how much faith it has in its own technology.
I didn’t know that, maybe France considers it Maginot Line 2.0?
B^)
Or maybe, just maybe, this is the best place to put a power plan ? You know, next to the delivery area … Same as with Belgium. And last I checked there isn’t even that many, it is scattered around France
What does it means “align its reactors in the east”? The heat/water vapor towers ? They are circular. In France, they are nuclear reactor spread other the whole country, so no, they aren’t “next to Germany”, or only by the fact that France is a border away from Germany, so they are also “next to Spain, next to Italy, next to Switzerland, next to Luxembourg, next to Belgium, next to Great Britain and so on”.
The plants are often also close to Germany because German industry buys a lot of their output.
They like the reliable and cheap power, but due to short sighted policies, the plants cannot exist on their side of the border.
And for some reason Europe hasn’t wanted Germany to have nuclear since WWII.
B^)
No offense intended but from what I have heard regarding the level of anti-nuclear propaganda that is inflicted upon Germans starting in youth… I’m going to take anything you say with a grain of cesium salt.
This just isn’t true though. There’s no industry available where you can’t find a way to generate (un)necessary jobs and salaries if you really want to. And I’m not sure that it’s entirely a bad thing, because people are still going to have kids, and those kids still need presents at the holidays and a house to live in, and people need something to keep them busy during the day (other than their vices). Yes, we probably should find a way to encourage smaller families and reduction (if not flatline growth) of the global population; but it should be carrot, not stick.
I’m all for nuclear power, but you can’t tell me that it has to come at a smaller amount of jobs.
Solves one problem and creates another one.
The new problem is “less bad” in the short term, but currently impossible to solve in the long term.
Nuclear waste is an enormous issue, and we don’t have the right to saddle the next 2500+ years of humans with it.
No it is not. All of the United State’s nuclear waste can fit in a single olympic size swimming pool. Additionally, most of that waste is low level material, such as used gloves, damaged tools, and objects that will be completely safe within at most one year.
The high level waste is easily recyclable, and with a properly designed reactor, a meltdown is a nonissue. No modern reactor system has even a remote chance of melting down. There really are no good arguements against nuclear except for those weak arguements put forth by sensitive NIMBY suburbanites who failed high school science.
No, thanks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smiling_Sun
Isn’t it ironic that those goofballs used the biggest nuclear reactor in our solar system as their logo.
It is an issue that can be solved with technology. In fact, CERN itself has built a prototype thorium reactor that can process radioactive waste. CERN considers the construction of these type of reactors to be a “bounded problem” meaning no new inventions or discoveries are required – just engineering, money, and responsible government.
Those last two words appear to be an oxymoron.
B^)
The argument that ending a wasteful industry will cause massive unemployment and widespread economic-social problems is wrong and always has been. People leaving such a failing industry will have to find new jobs; such new jobs by the very fact of their success will be less wasteful.
Technology was invented to reduce labor so people would have more time for the people and things they love. As jobs are eliminated some new ones will be opened in new fields. But there is a difference to be made up. Some of it should be made up by as a society doing new and greater things, thus creating new jobs. (ex.. space industry). But there is no reason to just keep consuming more and more just to produce a job. At some point we have to increase the value with which we regard our time, work fewer hours split among more people.
Or… we just freeze at whatever one thinks is or was the idea level of technical development. It would be 1969 forever if the Boomers had their way.
Then we all go to work and do something that technically is totally unnecessary but was made artificially in-demand by choosing not to progress. At that point.. there is no point. We might as well be paying people to pick up a pile of rocks, carry them from point A to point B and when they are all moved turn around and put them back! No one wants to do that right?!?!
Coal Miners> It’s like we are invisible! We have been screaming back here, that is EXACTLY what we already do and we NEVER want any change!
“It would be 1969 forever if the Boomers had their way.”
Huh?
(From a Boomer who likes using microwave ovens, cell phones, The Internet, ICEs with EFI, etc.)
“Boomer” is a mindset. “Baby Boomer” an age group. Though there is overlap, the Venn diagram of these two groups is not a single circle.
Not necessarily. They could end up in services. The services economy is fundamentally about making other people consume more in order to get paid yourself – without creating any new value but simply serving whatever already exists on the market.
Services exist primarily to facilitate production, which then pays for the services, whereas the services economy exists like a goiter on the neck of the society, by people who needlessly insert themselves in between the value chain or just make stuff up and sell it to people who don’t actually need it.
That’s about 80% of the economy right now in terms of GDP. People doing make-work. It isn’t really any better than being a government bureaucrat or an academician researching a dead-end subject. Your new job will probably be something related to sales and advertising, or meta-services to such companies, which doesn’t contribute to the bottom line of people getting food on their tables and power to their light bulbs.
Plastic waste. It’s a growing problem, basically solidified petroleum, energy dense, and in many cases recycling is inefficient or ineffective.
Exactly, but far to sensible to ever happen.
A while back Hackaday posted a blog about melting plastics back into petroleum to power vehicles.
Something future Mad Max’s will find handy.
Yep!
Plastics are considered “energy waste” here and are burned in combined district heat and power (CHP) plants here.
There exists some recycling as well, but at the end of the day, the unrecyclable stuff can be burned.
That option is curiously often ignored. Currently we need oil as: 1) fuel, 2) raw material. If it is done in a controlled environment, I don’t understand why the old plastics cannot be used as fuel (2->1). All current recycling methods also create a lot of toxic waste. Throw away plastics to a landfill looks like a big waste. Until we stop using oil maybe we also should invest in cleaner/safe ways to use used plastics as energy source. Burning them probably can also be useful to recover metals from composite plastic materials.
Sobering…
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/only-63-out-of-1500-climate-policies-over-the-past-25-years-were-successful-study/ar-AA1pnvcd
Ok, here’s another way to look at that.
4.2% succeeded.
That’s 4.2 tries out of 100 succeeding at making a difference in the trajectory of our world that moves with the momentum of 8 billion people and growing.
4.2% seems like an extraordinarily high success rate for doing something so huge!
As a Brazilian, i must note the etanol iniciativas back in the 70’s.
Not only use sugarcane to make alcohol, but, use several millions tons of residues to make eletricity by burning them.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S136403212300504X
Burning wood for electricity just seems like solar power with extra steps at this point in the game.
Every source of energy is solar power with extra steps. Even all that uranium was once fused inside some old sun
Not gravitation (tidal + ~50% hydropower) and geothermal.
Yes, maybe hydropower, since the evaporation requires heat and heat comes from the sun, but the power comes from the potential energy of the fluid, not its heat.
Uranium was not fused inside any stars. When the core starts fusing things into iron or nickel, the star starts dying. Then, stellar mass permitting, it goes supernova creating things up through rubidium. Other dying stars might eventually produce up to lutetium.
To get uranium in sufficient quantities, neutron stars need to collide. Something about needing enough neutrons for neutron capture to occur
At least, that’s my understand of the current best guess. It’s not my field of study. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernova_nucleosynthesis#r-process_nucleosynthesis has a periodic table with stellar sources.
It’s moronic and the fact that people even consider this is disturbing.
It really isn’t moronic at all, just not suitable for everyone, everywhere.
But take the nations with giant forestry industries for instance – lots of wood bits created that isn’t any good for building with, but this waste still burns great. Same thing with bio-digester and the gas output – making the ‘waste’ useful is a good thing and really helps close the circles.
It only becomes problematic if you don’t have degree of forward thinking and resource management, so just chop down all the forest inside of 2 years… Or if you are burning it inefficiently in a built up area or something so the flue gases and particulates are problematic.
But what then will they use for hotdog filler?
One gigawatt-scale power plant would need on the scale of 1000 square kilometers of managed forest to run. Mainly because trees take 40 years to grow.
The question is, even if you have the trees, is it a good idea to chop down so much? The depletion of the soil and the loss of biodiversity in managed forests take its toll on the environment too, and without letting the trees decompose naturally and the organic matter to sediment into the soil, you lose a major carbon sink.
Give it time and one or two environment considerations and wood becomes coal, and other bio-mass becomes oil…
You can speed the process up by using variations of “wood gas production” as Germany did back in World War II nearly 100 years ago.
Thus people should think about “carbon” yes we are putting a lot in the air, but we really do not have much more of it than we did a few billion years ago. Consider the time when “The Pole” was not covered in snow but as far as we can tell lush tropical forest…
In effect carbon is one of the Earth’s global solar batteries…
What we need to find is a way more efficient way to turn carbon dioxide and water back into light hydrocarbons etc. The big problem appears to be cracking the hydrogen and oxygen of water.
One thing we know that in effect does it with bio-mass is getting bacteria to turn it’s sugars into alcohol. Maybe we should find a way to turn sugars and lignum into other light hydrocarbons more efficiently.
It won’t solve the worlds energy needs but it will enable us to do the “last step” which is efficient storage to take the peaks and troughs out of “green energy production”.
However… A further thought, if someone does come up with a way more efficient bacteria, what happens when it inevitably escapes?
Hmm… remembers me a relatively remote neighbor who used straw to heat is poorly isolated big stone house for “free”. He was not paying the price on our lungs.
Seriously. Burning biomass to heat generation is plain stupid. Even at high-temperature burning is releases quite some gases that also interact with the atmosphere. Sure it´s possible can cool that exhaust down, condensate the water and filter the rest but it´s more complex, costly and you end up with toxic waste.
Even using bacteria to produce gas from biomass is not without problem. Here airborne toxic chemicals.
The only any-scale, viable way of dealing with biomass is to use it to generate some other biomass. Producing energy from it is a mistake. It´s just loosing the benefit of having that biomass storing carbon. The goal is to remove carbon from the atmosphere, not to bring it back.
Using the pretext that it´s sustainable (grows every year) to send the carbon it trapped back to the atmosphere it best blindness, at worst dishonest.
Bury it and grow perennials with it. or make furniture with it if you wish: as long as it keeps trapped, it´s good. There are many ways to value even the humble straw.
And putting it in the soil is no “waste” ! without a constant supply of biomass your soil just dies. Got to feed your earthworms and let them fertilize your plants, move around nutriments, degrade organic pollutants, make galleries that aerates the soil, feed predators…
“Sure it´s possible can cool that exhaust down”
Instead, raise the exhaust gas temperature with a catalytic converter.
Yes. This is how my old woodstove works and it works very well. The temperature control was garbage though and loved to shoot past 1600 degrees at the cat, melting things that shouldn’t melt. I replaced it with an esp32, multiple thermocouples and a servo controlling the air inlet. A very loud overtemp alarm and text messages reminding me to fill up makes it extremely convenient and reliable.
Interesting – never heard of these before.
As this is Hackaday – what catalyst do they use and can I hack one myself into my existing multifuel stove?
I haven’t heard of adapting a non-catalyst wood stove to use a catalytic converter. IIRC, there needs to be a chamber above the catalyst, maybe to complete the combustion process.
Like the other person said, I’m not sure if you could retrofit one. Activating the damper forces the smoke through an alternate path through a few chambers made out of some kind of high temperature refractory board, though the catalyst, past some stainless steel heat deflectors and back up the chimney.
The cat starts to activate around 800f. Past 1600f and damage starts occuring. I’ve seen basketball sized holes melted in cast iron from overheating.
You also need to be careful what you burn, cardboard and inks on paper can poison the cat and thermal shock can destroy one easily. Dry wood and several minutes of burning with the bypass disengaged during a reload to remove any moisture should make it last a long time.
Opening the lid without disengaging the bypass can also thermally shock it from the cool air but the bigger issue is usually the resulting fireball from the woodgas suddenly igniting with all the fresh air that is introduced.
You learn quickly after a few eyebrow removals.
In hot climates things work differently, the production and accumulation of biomass (leaves, dead plants) is enormous and fire is a necessary element to manage it (ie some species need it to reproduce). Thode fires can occur naturally and uncontrolled (great destruction and peak release of CO2) or in a controlled way, carried out by humans (less destruction and phased release of CO2). Burning local residual biomass (dead matter) in powerplants may be worthwhile. Cutting down South American forests and sending them to burn in Europe seems truly stupid.
The way Brazil does their sugar cane seems to work well. They burn some of the biomass along the way to produce their ethanol from the rest. Or as long as you do it cleanly, burning some random plant matter to make char (and ash) out of the rest can be good, if you don’t burn all the char afterwards. You don’t get a good result just adding as much green or even freshly composted biomass as you want to soil, there’s a maximum it will take. Char (in various physical forms) fills other functions, though you have to be careful what’s adsorbed in it for some of them, if you didn’t drive off enough of that stuff.
It’s the scale-up beyond local production and use that has imo turned the idea of biomass upside down and often made it an incentive for illegal logging and deforestation.
But even beyond that, we shouldn’t be burning biomass that can serve as mulch where it improves the soil or acts as mulch.
What’s worst perhaps is the economics of biomass-based energy production (comparatively high resource prices, along with transportation). But then it’s one of the few technologies ready for carbon-negative operation (by stripping some of the pyrolyzed intermediate before it reaches full combustion) that seems to be having a really hard time getting established.
Should re-read before posting :)
“can serve as mulch where it improves the soil or help retain water”
Here’s a short clip about a Swiss project that demonstrates biochar production with heat utilization: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syRSXgqC3Dc
Let’s hope we’re not tempted to leverage pyrolysis as a means to address seasonal energy storage :D
“and often made it an incentive for illegal logging and deforestation.”
Even legal forestation leaves the branches on the ground which are fueling the Ontario fires that are plaguing the East Coast (USA).
Not that the forest fires occurring the USA are exempt either.
Just to put things in perspective, in the 17th/18th century, they were a lot fewer people on Earth, and their “biomass” consumption for heating and producing stuff put so much stuff in the atmosphere that the Earth started to froze other. If 200 million humans could cool the Earth with their own biomass consumption, I wonder 9 billions can revert the climate heating process in a 10 year timeframe. Their lungs will suffer, the lungs of their children too, but after that, it should be fine.
Those last two words appear to be an oxymoron.
B^)
Dang!
Instead of a new comment my Android tablet repeated the last one !
Krakatoa apparently had something to do with the decreased temperatures around then too!
The So Simple Solution : Replace Coal Powder with Iron Powder to Fuel Existing Coal Fired Electric Power Plants. Iron Powder is ZERO air polluting when burned, it oxidizes to you guest it, Rust ! Rust when exposed to Hydrogen Gas becomes, you guest it Iron powder again. Hydrogen can be produced from salted water by wind or solar during typical random times of availability to convert stockpiled oxidized iron (rust )back to Iron powder to re- feed the former coal fired power plant now non polluting iron powder fired power plant. Fuel the Iron Powered Electric Power plant once and recycle the fuel with zero greenhouse gases. Oh and the electrolytes makes oxygen. Meet you at the Oxygen Bar real soon for a sniff together of the byproduct of fueling Coal Power Plants with Iron Powder. See there is a SO simple solution.
“A feature of growing up in rural England before the end of the 1980s[…]”
We had the same feature growing up in rural Northern California before the end of the 1980’s. I always understood our particular brand of choking smoke to be the result of burning rice stubble (and likely other agricultural by-products) south of us. The Sacramento Valley seemed to do a fine job of containing and channeling the smoke.
The smell of a grass fire brings back memories…
(the above was meant to be a reply directly to the article. not sure how I managed to link it to David L. Howser’s comment)
Have you just described Perpetual Motion?
B^)
I don’t think so since OP discusses producing the hydrogen using wind or solar. More an overly complex, likely hideously expensive option for grid scale storage to mitigate renewable intermittency.
I think Poe’s Law applies here, but it is tough to tell.
IOW, fertile ground for government grants!
B^)
Not this crap again.
HaD put up an article on this a few days back. Sound great until you realise you’re basically building an iron smelter. Good luck with that as a battery.
Anyway, replace the iron with aluminium, works much better.
Nothing green about solar or wind given the energy and resources to obtain the raw materials, manufacturer, assemble and maintain. Solar, wind, and EVs are junk technologies that worsen the environment for little benefit. As the first poster above mentioned, there is no grift in nuclear or natural gas or things that work and may use less resources.
LOL, no grift. There is grift E V E R Y W H E R E. Beholden interest or actual naivete?
Okay, much less grift. Green energy was a scam from the beginning and is harmful to the environment even more so than nuclear or natural gas turbines for electricity generation.
You were doing well until you got to the gas turbines bit.
CO2 emissions could be reduced by riding bicycles more often and by using public transportation.
Re-using things like cups might help, too. As far as we get away from a throw away society, the better.
Reduction on eating cow meat will also help, cows produce a lot of methane.
So keeping population on a natural level might help.
Birth controls like in China could also help with overpopulation and the need for more resources, but there are ethical and philosophical considerations.
Thermal power plants could maybe installed in places like deserts. Traditional nuc. power plants have little future, I think, it’s not worth getting back.
They’re too fragile and regeneration of the material is stressful and cumbersome.
In the ~80s there had been some considerations on using reed grass as an alternate power source.
Just an FYI — China is no longer doing “birth controls”. In fact, it is seeking to increase its population via new births, which it is having trouble doing:
https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3262644/china-population-beijing-rounds-experts-birth-rate-recommendations-youths-report-reluctance
Depopulation is death.
Indeed. Education and standard of living improvements are much better than forced birth controls.
So all the Chinese people died? No? Depopulation just makes the lines on the chart go down, and economics dweebs hate it. Nobody should care, though.
Depopulation skews the population pyramid so you get too many elderly people and not enough productive workers to sustain them, leading to economic collapse, leading to loss of control as the government can no longer function without a functioning economy.
At some point the people will revolt against you and ignore your command.
You are thinking in such small scales that it is pointless.
We cannot make up for 150+ years of debt by saving pennies.
You have to start thinking in terms that matter.
There are X tons of Carbon on Earth.
There are Y tons in the atmosphere now.
We need Y to go down. Which it can (slowly) on it’s own. But we need to KEEP it stored, not just burn it again.
All of this “waste” material needs to be converted to solid carbon and stored. If we can get some energy out of it while we do it? Great.
But we need to think about it in terms of putting all that oil and coal BACK. Not literally. But what much carbon needs to go back into storage.
The problem is global warming, too. Math is cool, but it has to be combined with commonsense, as well.
Once the permafrost in places like Sibera melts away, lots of methane will be released and we’re in big trouble.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_methane_emissions
The pandemic had a really positive effect on CO2 emmisions, by the way.
Once places like China and USA had been put to rest, the atmosphere had been recovered within days.
So yes, I think human influence is a big factor here.
If 80% of the citizens in those aforementioned countries would start to walk or ride by bicycle overnight it would be measurable.
Cargo could be transfered via waterways or railroads instead of trucks, for example.
It’s maybe just a start, but still better than doing nothing and pretending there’s no alternative.
Countries with a big populations have to take responsibility for a while and get out of there comfort zone.
It’ll take centuries for atmospheric CO2 to get back to “normal”, and probably even longer for the oceans to cool back down.
But yes, we really should change how we do stuff, and probably should have started over 50 years ago.
@Joshua – There is so much wrong in this rambling text, I don’t know where to start….
Nuf said..
Lack of counter arguments speaks for itself, I think.
So were those millions of buffalo roaming the central plains of North America creating a methane issue in the 19th century? What about the herds of various herbivores currently roaming the African plains and jungles? The cow methane nonsense is just another way for the elite to have what they want while you go without. Now, there are some questions about factory agriculture in terms of other pollution, but methane is not one of them.
Lol. Personally I blame farting bison for the dust bowl.
Nuclear should be considered biomass.
It comes from the ground.
“Carbon Neutral” only matters if you are an executive or politician playing buzzword bingo.
We need a century of carbon negative.
That stuff they are burning isn’t “free”.
It isn’t “waste”.
It is carbon from the atmosphere that has already been captured.
You can’t keep thinking about burning less stuff so less CO2 gets into the atmosphere.
You have to start thinking about where ALL the Carbon is, and how to get the amount in the atmosphere down.
150 years ago we had enormous amounts of Carbon underground in lakes (oil) and rocks (coal). We also had more stored in forests/jungles that are now gone.
We need to think about recapture and storage if we are going to deal with the problem in the long run.
If we can think of useful ways to use this stored Carbon? Great.
But even if we can’t, we still need to deal with it.
The claim that atmospheric CO2 is a problem is increasingly looking mistaken.
That’s not true at all, though. You just made it up!
No, others have been saying it long before [Chris Maple]’s comment.
Depending on the timescale, coal and oil can be just a carbon neutral as wood.
Just stop burning stuff…. Just stop it!
Burning makes CO2. We have too much CO2.
There are much better and cleaner ways to make power
But, I want my toasted marshmallows!
Reduce the world population by discouraging reproduction and we can all drive monster trucks to work without a care in the world. Quality over quantity. Eight billion is too many.
Spoken like a megalomaniac, is that you Mr. Gates?
Why are people so vehemently against the idea of depopulation? Like, I get disagreeing, but people always act like I kicked their dog or something. Don’t you look at traffic, or crowds, or long lines you have to wait in, and hate it? Or do you genuinely enjoy the sardine can experience?
I don’t really understand why people are so against it either.
Long Term it’s a Good Thing. It does create problems in the short term though – as a smaller population of working younger people need to support a larger population of retired people.
The other problem is economists and politicians who are addicted to the drug of eternal “economic growth” as the panacea for all problems.
Antinatalism is just another death cult, made more icky by thinking itself superior to religious ones. Most people who are in love with it are already living in parts of the world that have stabilized or declining native populations, yet seem to be enchanted with the idea of sacrificing others on the altar.
It’s an overall pathological idea – ultimately benefiting those who would like to win a world war, but without the inconvenience of having to fight it and coming out as the one nation that didn’t buy into it.
Apart from that, we as a species are perhaps for the first time in a position where we can both provide a standard of living without extreme poverty starvation and actively work on fixing environmental problems we already caused, including those that do not magically resolve themselves.
Also read:
Wim Naudé, “We Already Live in a Degrowth World, and We Do Not like It”
https://www.iza.org/publications/dp/16191/we-already-live-in-a-degrowth-world-and-we-do-not-like-it
Agree!
That’s a whole lot of words, but not a lot of points made. People who live in declining populations enjoy population decline? Yeah, I know! It’s “icky”? I’m sorry you’re icked I guess? But what is your actual argument?
Regarding the paper you posted, it approaches degrowth from the perspective of growth being necessary; of course it will come to negative conclusions. The author seems to be criticizing a movement demanding the reduction of economic activity, by saying it will reduce economic activity. That’s the point! He criticizes declining innovation, without considering that maybe we’ve just discovered everything useful. He’s stuck in a mindset of infinity while living in a finite world, and either truly cannot comprehend it, or is being paid not to.
We have reached the limits of what can be done on earth; we’re not going to have flying cars any more than we’re going to have flying carpets. Most technological optimism is just fantasy. We need to learn to be happy with what we already have.
[Anonymous]
Back in the 1970s a scientist wrote a book showing the Earth could have a population of 50 billion people living comfortable lives without sacrificing National Parks, if we would just stop wasting resources for non-essential things.
[The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren]
And imagine what kind of lives 1 billion could have, if they did the same! Less is more.
Calculations have shown that if you were to stand the entire population of the earth one beside another, they would all fit within an area 25 x 25 miles. Now spread that out over the surface of the entire earth and it doesn’t seem that crowded unless of course you were talking about cities/activities where people like and tend to congregate.
Sardine can enthusiast. Got it. I don’t want to have to think of the packing density of humans.
And we’ll be knee-deep in sewerage by the end of the week, Sounds great.
Biomass is a very bad choice as it emits a huge amount of CO2 into the atmosphere that will take about 20 years to be absorbed again. That it has been absorbed in the previous 20 years makes it even worse, that means that the emission of CO2 was even bigger.
Nuclear energy is the only we can do. MSR in particular, regular fission for the time being.
Say it with me, nuclear.
Drax STILL being able to burn imported wood and claim it as “green” tell you all you need to know about the so called green revolution being just another big political scam and way to make some cash out of us all.
This type of green nonesense isn’t going to fix the actual problem. It’s just virtue signalling and brain washing to remove any form of actually reasonable debate about solutions to the warming problem.
It doesn’t help that the people that make most of the noise on green things are typically ill informed/fixated, duplicitous and often down right socialist in their desire to tell others what to do.
Don’t forget all those fraudulent fuel and CO2 taxes you need to pay while the elite use their private jets to fly from mansion to mansion. Not one person who believes in CO2 issues has ever explained to me how me paying an excessive tax and giving it to a government entity to solve alleged problem will actually do anything.
The sea has vast amounts of H2 in the form of H2O and C in the form of dissolved CO2 therefore we do not need biomass for energy, all we need is nuclear power and the tech developed for the US Navy to produce liquid hydrocarbon fuels. The biomass should be turned into biochar to enrich the soil, but there would be side products from that too, including some energy from wood gas.
What else does thermal decomposition and releases oxidizing gas at 150c-300c?
Cool side note: a cheap match flame is around 600c
Farting cows.
This is a misleading article. If you think hard about CO2 cycle, you will realise that if the regional carbon stock of forests that are being harvest is sustained (and sorry to inform, but this is the case), there is no net emissions! It doesn’t matter from a single tree perspective that it will take another 50 years to grow. Go out there and see what forest management companies do and how they ensure sustainable volumes over an area over time (and consequently carbon stock). Photosynthesis is the most cost effective way to capture co2 and we must use it wisely! Burning wood/pellets is part of the equation for a net zero future.
If we could just get all that CO2 to lase and beam all that infrared into space…. problem solved.
But seriously, If we are using biomass as a fuel, burning it generates CO2 which absorbs heat from the sun. If it is not immediately absorbed into plants, water ( ocean acidification) or rocks, we are still looking at temperature increases in the short to medium time frame.