Anybody see the problem with the article below? Like so many of these attempts at
solving the global warming "problem", they result in producing more CO2, not less.
My brother-in-law in northern Michigan converted his primary home heating from wood
pellets back in 2013 due to high costs. Any guess what he changed it to? . . . natural gas.
Global warming can simplisticly be reduced to the following argument.
There is going to be global warming or global cooling, and then after that we will surely
have the other. The only person who loses is the person who thinks we are going to have
global staying the same.
Despite claims to the contrary, whether cooling or heating is coming next has not been definitively
settled. For the last ~18,000 years we have had general warming, with a few notable exceptions for
short periods. It's not a big stretch to think that the warming may continue for some time.
Personally I am rooting for global warming. If you think about the consequences for the whole world
objectively, you may arrive at the same conclusion.
This article below is taken from the July 2014 issue of "Power" magazine.
The Expanding Wood Pellet Market
Last year, the U.S. exported nearly twice the amount of wood pellets it sent overseas in 2012 and almost all of it went to Europe for heat and power needs. This trend has gained momentum since 2009, when the European Commission (EC) enacted its 2020 climate and energy package, and will possibly continue in the long term, says the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) in a new report. As recently as 2008, about 80% of U.S.-made wood pellets, typically from wood waste (such as sawdust, shavings, and wood chips), but also from unprocessed harvested wood, were consumed domestically for residential heating fuel. But the EC's binding 2009 legislation, which calls on the European Union (EU) to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 20% from 1990 levels and to produce 20% of its power from renewables, has sent demand for U.S. wood pellets soaring, the EIA says.
At least 98% of wood pellet exports (and 99% sourced from ports in the south-eastern and lower Mid-Atlantic regions of the U.S.) went to Europe in 2013, mostly to the UK, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Italy, and other countries that are using wood pellets to replace coal for power generation and space heating (Figure 2). The UK, specifically, consumed 59% of U.S. wood pellet exports to meet demand that has grown from near zero in 2009 to more than 3.5 million short tons in 2013. It also imported from Canada and other European sources.
One reason for the soaring growth is the UK's Renewables Obligation program, through which operators of several large coal-fired power plants have either retrofitted existing units to cofire biomass wood pellets with coal or have converted to 100% biomass. Last December, for example, Drax completed the $1.14 billion conversion of three of its six coal fired units at the Drax power Station to biomass. The facility reportedly needs at least seven million metric tons of wood pellets a year. At the same time, Drax is considering converting a fourth unit, meaning pellet demand could exceed nine million metric tons. The company is building two of its own pellet plants in Louisiana and Mississippi.
According to one of the largest U.S. wood pellet manufacturers, Enviva, the primary reason that European utilities are banking on imports-rather than using wood from European forests-is because "North America has significantly more forest land than Europe as well as a long history of sustainable forest management and productive commercial forest product industries." And biomass isn't being adopted on the same scale in the U.S. because it just doesn't have a "cohesive,, national renewable policy as the EU does. Meanwhile, ocean freight is "substantially more carbon and energy efficient in a per ton basis than trucking." says the company. This means that shipping a ton of pellets from the Southeast U.S. to England results in less carbon emissions than trucking that same ton from northern Scotland to England. For Enviva, the growth of the wood pellet export market is sound. Though the UK recently placed a 400-MW limit on new-build biomass-fired power plants, there's no limit on the conversion of existing coal plants to biomass or on the construction of biomass-fueled combined heat and power (CHP) facilities," it says. "Demand for sustainably produced biomass fuels is still expected to grow substantially through 2020 as coal-fired power facilities attempt to meet regulatory targets and improve the environmental profile of energy generation."
How come we don't see more artcles like this one:
Renewables Are Expensive
Mainly because there is a "right" answer and a "wrong" answer. Our government thinks
this is the wrong answer. I suspect these guys won't be getting any research grants from
our goverment.
In case you are wondering, DG (distributed generation) is where every home is going to
have their own solar cells, wind mills, or nuclear reactor in the basement, and these people
will only need external power when the sun doesn't shine or the wind doesn't blow.
This guy is not a good writer, but he has some good charts that put the whole thing into perspective:
http://abriefhistory.org/?p=4022
This is a very long article that gets into the details of why "deep decarbonization" is not likely to happen:
Why Deep Decarbonization Won't Likely Happen Soon
Unfortunately for global warming advocates, nuclear fission power generation is the only logical near-term solution to
the global warming "problem". But look at this article that laughingly claims we cannot do nuclear power because of
the 10 year time period it takes to build a plant! They say we don't have 10 years to fix the problem! Ha, I had a good laugh
with that one.
Regardless, I'm glad they came to that conclusion. Nuclear power is not a good idea. A simple calculation
of long-term waste handling would have been a much better argument to present.
The same article in jpg format.
In the long term I have my money on solar energy in space. Not because we have to fix the global warming "problem". But
instead because it has a chance to reduce our energy costs.
Here is a map of the 300 windfarms in the USA (as of 2013) that have 50 or more wind turbines:
http://www.mflan.com/temp/wind/index.html
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