How to Make Biomass Energy Sustainable Again

https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/09/how-to-make-biomass-energy-sustainable-again.html

by privong • 6 years ago

56 43 6 years ago

hinkley5• 6 years ago

Pollarding is essentially coppice but high enough that grazing animals can't denude a recently pruned tree.

Coppice and pollard give you long straight shoots, which you can use for building and crafting materials, or the greens can be used as fodder in colder climates.

Some of the oldest trees in England are apparently fallow pollards (pollarding, like bonsai, can extend the life of the plant, rather than shortening it as you might expect).

jpollock• 6 years ago

I kept waiting for how coppicing would fit into modern lumber and energy production, it never showed up in the article. I guess they could use the sticks to produce bamboo like plywood? Maybe chipboard - except that's typically produced from waste products already (I think)?

This is probably the key take-away:

"Coppicing cannot compete in an economic system that fosters the replacement of human labour with machines powered by fossil fuels"

Then the kicker is the last paragraph:

"These numbers confirm that it is not biomass energy that’s unsustainable. If the whole of humanity would live as the 40% that still burns biomass regularly, climate change would not be an issue. What is really unsustainable is a high energy lifestyle. We can obviously not sustain a high-tech industrial society on coppice forests and line plantings alone. But the same is true for any other energy source, including uranium and fossil fuels."

So, we ramp down our energy use by a couple of orders of magnitude.

That's not going to happen.

philipkglass2• 6 years ago

The article has some interesting history but it also misleads by omission. Europe's forests were denuded by hand-tool harvesting of wood well before power tools were invented. The earliest use of coal in European iron making was motivated by charcoal supplies running short due to extensive deforestation.

When the article says "two-thirds of the wood that is harvested in developing societies is harvested sustainably" it's also saying "one third of the wood that is harvested in developing societies is harvested unsustainably." Even the very low energy consumption per capita of biomass-reliant populations is not sustainable at modern population densities.

Biomass is a very low efficiency method of converting sunlight to energy useful to humans. That's why mainstream scientific and environmental organizations are more interested in solar photovoltaic technology; PV can provide 50 times more useful energy per hectare than biomass. The "high tech" approach is not just fashion-driven technology for technology's sake.

https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Biomas...

https://www.biofuelwatch.org.uk/2018/biomass-and-land-use/

https://ucanr.edu/sites/WoodyBiomass/files/78993.pdf

hinkley5• 6 years ago

You have to factor in the embodied energy into the equation of power per hectare, including replacement and maintenance, and once you’ve done that, ask if the other services provided by agroforestry are ever worth more than the energy from the PV farm that can only be used during the day (or stored, in which case include the embodied and maintenance energy of the storage system, too).

We need to stop looking for One Weird Fix. It’s not out there, and /or we keep breaking it by changing the conditions. You will be looking for hedges, and some of those hedges will have stacking functions.

Scoundreller• 6 years ago

Biomass is a very low efficiency method of converting sunlight to energy useful to humans.

Has great storage efficiency though.

boo_boo2• 6 years ago

So, we ramp down our energy use by a couple of orders of magnitude.
That's not going to happen.

It'll need to happen in order for the escalating effects of climate change to be curbed to any meaningful extent. The focus on renewables and other abstractions away from fossil fuels is a distraction from this fact.

ben_w3• 6 years ago

PV can supply in the order of one thousand times current worldwide all-source power consumption, even when the panels are limited to 20% efficiency.

Storage and transmission still have room for improvement, but generation by PV is already so cheap that all we have to do to “win” that part of the race is continue the last 30 years of trends in PV deployment for roughly 12 more years.

Animats2• 6 years ago

"Coppicing cannot compete in an economic system that fosters the replacement of human labour with machines powered by fossil fuels"

Do they want to bring back slavery, or serfdom?

"How Ya Gonna Keep 'em Down on the Farm After They've Seen Paree?" (1919)

markvdb• 6 years ago

The article text doesn't refer to it a lot, but it does mention some interesting resources. [0]

[0] 10.1016/j.biombioe.2014.11.019

danans4• 6 years ago

If what they are talking about is the whole world returning to some kind of agrarian existence in order to make manually harvested biomass a sustainable energy source, that's not going to happen without a major civilizational collapse.

Then again, perhaps that's what the author is actually advocating . If so, it's not so surprising. There are a lot of cheerleaders for civilizational and especially institutional destruction these days, often just as a means to replace them with some other system more appealing to their personal preferences, whatever those are.

Renewables like wind and solar are hardly radical solutions for energy production anymore, despite the narratives coming out of fossil-fuel aligned political groups. They are just the obvious incremental next step in the evolution of harnessing solar energy. Yes, they are complicated enough technologies that, unlike biomass, they can't realistically be harnessed today without a dependency on global supply chains. If you consider that a problem, then well, that's a different topic altogether.

est312• 6 years ago

Small scale subsistence farming is still widespread around the globe in poorer countries. If they can, farmers try to send their children to schools so that they can have a better life. And many do! The reason why China can offer such cheap labour is because of this effect. Your laptop/smartphone etc was likely assembled by someone who's parent was a farmer. To say that subsistence farming is the only good lifestyle is western decadence tbh.

danans4• 6 years ago

6 or so generations back nearly all of our ancestors we're engaged in some sort of agrarian existence. There's plenty to be said for re-establishing the common knowledge people had back then with regards to growing their food - via things like allotment gardens, reintroducing the basics of farming in the educational system, etc - but the frequent fantasizing you see about returning industrial society broadly to an agrarian condition is often dishonest in its stated intent.

Very few want to return to agrarian society, but some want to use a reversion as a pretext for controlling industrial society toward illiberal ends.

User23• 6 years ago

Small scale semi-subsistence farming is still widespread in the rural United States. It doesn't take much land to grow enough vegetables to feed a family for a year and chickens aren't too much of a hassle either. Even cows aren't too bad if you can get a timeslot with a butcher, but these days you can't.

skyfaller4• 6 years ago

What Low-Tech Magazine is talking about is not mysterious or sinister. They advocate for reducing energy use, especially in developed nations, in order to reduce the difficulty of transitioning to renewable energy on a short enough timescale to avoid climate catastrophe. https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/01/how-much-energy-do-w...

danans4• 6 years ago

The issue with Low-Tech-Magazine is the ludicrous way they advocate to lower energy use, by abandoning higher efficiency technology altogether, i.e:

"There are several ways to escape from the parallel universe of energy efficiency. First, while energy efficiency hinders significant long term reduction in energy demand through the need for equivalence of service, the opposite also holds true – making everything less energy efficient would reverse the growth in energy services and reduce energy demand"

"Likewise, if an “energy inefficiency policy” were to mandate the use of inefficient central heating boilers, heating large homes to present-day comfort standards would be unaffordable for most people. They would be forced to find alternative solutions to achieve thermal comfort, for instance heating only one room, dressing more warmly, using personal heating devices, or moving to a smaller home."

https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/01/bedazzled-by-energy-...

It almost reads like marketing copy from the oil industry.

A far more sensible way to handle this is not to return to 1960s ICEs for cars and oil powered central heating boilers for heating (with all their associated local pollution damage), but rather to price renewable electricity appropriately to ensure efficient consumption by having rapidly increasing price tiers for higher usage consumers and time-of-use pricing based on supply and demand. This already happens in many places. This should also satisfy the requirements of those who wish impose a type of "noble hardship" upon the population, as it still subjects them (via pricing correlated with weather events) to the vagaries of nature, including weather (want to set your AC to 65 at 4PM during a heat wave, without a medical requirement? No problem, that will be $0.80/kWh).

Also, remember that the cost of producing renewable electricity is not based on the the marginal cost of generating it, but on the capital cost of building and financing it. That cost will drop, but it isn't going to zero any time soon. What is needed is for renewable+storage to drop in cost below the that of fossil fuels. We're almost there.

black6• 6 years ago

I looked into coppicing/pollarding timber a number of years ago as a sustainable fuel sourve when I started research into modifying my truck to run on syngas from a wood gasifier. Not near as convenient as filling up a tank with petrol, but sustainable.

Like so many of my other side projects, though, it is still in the "research" phase.

hosh• 6 years ago

Coppicing works great. In addition to electric-generating modules, the stove itself can be redesigned either as a rocket stove, or a wood gassifier. The stove or gassifier can be made a part of the overall design of the house -- during the summer months, you would be cooking outside, instead of inside, for example.

Like all practices, you have to consider the entire living system, and not just a technique in isolation. Coppicing reduces the available habitats for birds, which weakens the overall ecosystem.

In permaculture design, a site would be divided into different zones. There would be a zone (zone 3 or zone 4) set aside for coppicing, and there would be a zone (zone 5) set aside as a wilderness preserve that is not coppiced. Additionally, the site might be designed in such a way that the trees set aside for coppicing are planted in a way that forms a living hedge, acting as both windbreak and privacy.

Animats2• 6 years ago

Oh, they're pushing their thermoelectric stove scheme again. We went through this before on HN. You might be able to charge a cell phone (a nice feature for a camp stove) or get a little LED lighting. That's about it.

Burning biomass, usually at rather low temperatures, is terrible for air quality. One fireplace produces pollution comparable to a few thousand natural gas heaters.[1]

[1] https://www.sfgate.com/science/article/Bay-Area-pollution-ag...

boo_boo2• 6 years ago

And where does the pollution caused by natural gas extraction fit into this comparison?

hinkley5• 6 years ago

I'm watching Raised By Wolves, and I'll try to keep any spoilers out but you might scroll past anyway.

Burning organic matter means half of the nutrients in the material float away with the wind, so you don't want to combust it for any reason (and especially not for disposal, which is currently my biggest beef with the show).

So I like biomass, and I don't like biomass. As I understand it, you can limit your losses in that respect by separating your ramial (young) wood out. It's higher protein and nutrient content, suitable for composting if done correctly. But most of your coppice is going to be ramial wood, so where's your sustainable harvesting angle?

The only tech I know that completely avoids that problem (Super Critical Water Oxidation) requires pressure vessels and very high tech ceramics. Last I checked it was so expensive they only used it for superfund site cleanup. Turns out salts become highly corrosive at high pressures and temperatures, and there's a triangle of heat, pressure and corrosion for ceramics, so you need ceramic composites to build a reaction chamber with any sort of durability.

You wouldn't want one of these in your basement, let alone your kitchen.

ekr• 6 years ago

Stirling engines built into a wood stove is a mature technology capable of delivering lots of power (kWs for a regular wood stove found in a home). Simple to build.

As for pollution, no-one can deny that, but the rocket stove bunch claim much reduced emissions compared to even modern wood stoves (which I personally find hard to believe). But still, billions of people are still using wood to heat their homes; that's not going to change soon. Reusing that to produce electricity as a byproduct is something that some people call 100% efficient.

[1] http://volodesigns-sterlingproject.blogspot.com/

[2] http://www.oekofen-e.com/en/engine/

littlestymaar• 6 years ago

Burning biomass, usually at rather low temperatures, is terrible for air quality. One fireplace produces pollution comparable to a few thousand natural gas heaters

open fires is terrible for air pollution because the temperature is indeed quite low, which leads to a lot of material not burning and ending up in the air, but you can easily[1] build a stove which burns way better.

Then regarding electricity production, a fireplace insert usually produce 5-15kW of thermal energy around 800°C, which you can pretty cheaply convert to at least 1kW of electricity. That's way more than what you were talking about.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_stove

lightgreen2• 6 years ago

We have more than enough uranium to power everything we need for many many years without asking people to restrict power consumption. I apologize for bringing this topic again, I cannot calmly read these dead end environmentalists ideas.

ZeroGravitas• 6 years ago

I quite enjoy lowtech magazine, even though I disagree with some of their conclusions.

Ironically, I mentally lump the people who want nuclear powered steam generators as the only power source into the same general bracket. It all seems a bit quaint and inefficient compared with PV.

lightgreen2• 6 years ago

inefficient compared with PV

Yes, if you only need to have electricity during shiny day.

How to Make Biomass Energy Sustainable Again

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