2024-08-29
"Biomass" (or "wood" to you and me) Is essentially the product of chopping down trees, and drying and pulping and pelleting them (using energy in the process).
The resulting nuggets / pellets / however you want to describe them are then shipped across oceans (using more energy) and burned in power stations such as Drax in Yorkshire (creating as much CO2 as from fossil fuel).
How is this more sustainable than just burning coal (or better yet gas or oil since these can be transported by pipeline whereas coal needs to be shipped like wood pellets)?
We might as well have created the same amount of CO2 from burning fossil fuels and left the trees alone to remove it, saving everybody much expense!
And are we really replanting and regrowing the "biomass" sufficiently fast to replace the "biomass" that we are burning away? Is anybody checking, or are the loggers just coining it? And if fines really are levied, is that just a "cost of doing business"?
Obviously, it doesn't take long to fell a wood these days but it will take many multiples of the time taken to regrow the same - I don't know how long, but say only 5 times as long (to be rather generous to the "sustainable" fanatics). If we rotate growing and logging operations then we would need to dedicate in total 6 times the land area that would grow one year's "biomass" to make it "sustainable" - land that could have been used to grow food from all the extra CO2 that would have been produced from burning fossil fuels ... but now has to be used for regrowing the "biomass" destroyed.
And I would hazard a guess that 5 years to regrow is an underestimate ...
See what you think:
(12 minutes)
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