This is why we have more forests now:
Posted on 07/10/2021 11:37:51 PM PDT by grundle
Andrea Macklin never turns off his TV. It’s the only way to drown out the noise from the wood mill bordering his backyard, the jackhammer sound of the plant piercing his walls and windows. The 18-wheelers carrying logs rumble by less than 100 feet from his house, all day and night, shaking it as if an earthquake has taken over this tranquil corner of North Carolina. He’s been wearing masks since long before the coronavirus pandemic, just to keep the dust out of his lungs.
Some nights, he only sleeps for two or three hours. Breathing is a chore.
“I haven’t had proper rest since they’ve been here,” he said.
That was eight years ago, when the world’s largest biomass producer, Enviva, opened its second North Carolina facility just west of Macklin’s property in Garysburg. The operation takes mostly hardwood trees and spits out biomass, or wood pellets, a highly processed and compressed wood product burned to generate energy. Enviva is one of nearly a dozen similar companies benefiting from a sustainability commitment made 4,000 miles away, more than a decade ago.
In 2009, the European Union (EU) pledged to curb greenhouse gas emissions, urging its member states to shift from fossil fuels to renewables. In its Renewable Energy Directive (RED), the EU classified biomass as a renewable energy source — on par with wind and solar power. As a result, the directive prompted state governments to incentivize energy providers to burn biomass instead of coal — and drove up demand for wood.
So much so that the American South emerged as Europe’s primary source of biomass imports.
Earlier this year, the EU was celebrated in headlines across the world when renewable energy surpassed the use of fossil fuels on the continent for the first time in history.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
Well, Biomass is a very tricky thing.
There is a lot of commercially useless wood, products of forest management (thinning) and lumber operations (e.g. branches). That stuff needs to be disposed and the best is to burn it.
Garbage could also be burned. They used to call that itineration, but it became bad word.
I call it a “good biomass” to burn.
That used to be done before the global warming frenzy. Actually, it used to be done a lot more then, before the enviros started protecting the trees and drove lumberjacks out of business.
However, with immerse demands for “green” energy, people started commercially grow whole forests to burn. Giant acreages of young, fast growing trees just to burn as biomass.
It is actually cheaper to grow these forests than gather all that “good biomass” so lot of “good biomass” which could be burned is sitting in forests rotting and waiting to catch fire, while biomass operations are clear cutting biomass forests.
Government regulations have unintended consequences!
I’ll point this out....biomass energy plants in Europe are fairly limited (maybe five countries with the bulk: France, Poland, Denmark, Sweden, and UK).
If you count up the energy required to cut the trees in the US, then transport the pellets across the Atlantic, and truck them to the plants....then none of this makes economic or environmental sense.
I’ll also point this out...on calculating efficiency, this is one of the worst ways of generating energy on a large scale.
It shows how ignorrant the gorbal warmistas really are. Maybe stupit is a better word.
The math makes sense if you’re “redistributing” wealth or paying off favors.
And make no mistake...the Butchers of Beijing are laughing their a$$es off watching the West cripple their economies with "green" policies and Wuhan Flu shutdowns. It's full speed ahead for Red China!
There are Substantially more trees in the Northern Hemisphere now than 100 years ago - because people quit burning trees and started burning coal.
Northampton County, NC:
Trump 2020 votes...39.5% (3,989)
Biden 2020 votes...60.1% (6,069)
Let’em choke.
I’m guessing the local Dem Big Guys got their 10%.
The main beneficiary is DRAXX power plant in UK. This is the largest power plant in UK, capacity 4200 MW (6 units each approx 700 MW)
They have converted 4 generators to burn wood pellets.
In 2018, this power plant burnt 7.1 Million Tonnes of pellets, most of imported from USA (4.5 M) and Canada (1.5 M).
According to rules in UK, this is carbon neutral operation and renewable energy credits make it a profitable one.
Just imagine the effort to get such a large quantity of wood cut, transported to mills that produce pellets, shipped across the ocean and than transported using trains to the DRAXX station.
All this is preferable to using local coal.
It is a madness, if all countries started to behave the same, we would have burnt forests before they could grow back.
This is why we have more forests now:
Stupid, yes. Except that they were smart enough to source the pellets offshore rather than depleting their own forests.
Private growers are slowly starting to realize that ‘farming’ of trees is unsustainable without returning nutrients to the soil. Nature used to do that on its own, but then they demonized fire.
I fully expect that at some point they’ll be dumping chemicals in the forest to keep the trees growing.
Totally absurd, but this is ‘green’ today.
It’s a Green scam! They get the “credits” for “clean” generation and shove the “carbon” cost back on the USA.
***They have converted 4 generators to burn wood pellets.***
I remember, fifty years ago, back to the earth magazines promoting wood burning power plants.
What is the guy doing with the tv on all day? Maybe he should get his butt in the woods working.
It seems to me that some type of compromise could be made in these situations. Just telling people that they should have read the fine print, or that's life especially since corporations have become so woke and evil doesn't cut it.
I challenge your statement that burning is anything but an exception these days.
I live in the heart of timber country and have researched/written extensively on both wildfire and logging practices.
‘Environmentalists’ in this country, ironically, are best at ‘slash & burn’...
This is absolutely the case, and they are not just shoving it off on us, either. They make their “green energy” substitutes with rare earth minerals, the mining of which is polluting parts of China as well as devastating the land there.
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