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Hummm, not sure wood pellets are carbon neutral. I think the UK has just offshored its CO2 emissions to the US. Great video below explaining in more detail. ht

Hummm, not sure wood pellets are carbon neutral. I think the UK has just offshored its CO2 emissions to the US. Great video below explaining in more detail. https://youtu.be/6RP-jYDgiMg?t=100 https://youtu.be/6RP-jYDgiMg?t=100

renegading 6y ago
The carbon is captured when the tree grows and then released when the wood is burned. This is different from fossil fuels where it is underground.
- azinman2 6y ago
  And how does it get from the forest into compressed form, and then to the UK?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- rowanG077 6y ago
  How is that different? Fossil fuels were also captured many years ago. The only difference is the number of years.
  - chrisseaton 6y ago
    The time it takes to renew.
  - PopeDotNinja 6y ago
    Main difference is releasing co2 from fossil fuels introduces carbon that wood pellets don’t. Imagine we burn 100% of fossil fuels and then start burning wood pellets, versus going straight to wood pellets. The former releases a lot more carbon than the latter.
  - woodandsteel 6y ago
    The difference is ff's were captured over many millions of years, and natural forces controlled the total amount of co2 in the atmosphere. What is happening today is the ff's captured co2 is being released a thousand times faster than it was captured, and that is overwhelming natural forces and causing co2 levels to skyrocket. Wood pellets are one of the ways to counter this. I could be wrong, but my guess is that you already knew all this and were only pretending to be ill-informed because you are a member of the fossil fuels forever club. If I wrong, then please let us know your views on global climate change.
  - jotm 6y ago
    Eh, well, how is humans dying out different than dinosaurs dying out? The only difference is the species :D
- hn23 6y ago
  The reason wood is considered neutral is, that most of the wood is used for construction and other stuff. If you burn it and happen to burn fossil fuel as well, nothing is neutral.
  - dmurray 6y ago
    No, it's considered neutral because you plant more of it to replace the trees you cut down (not because you are trying to save the world, just because you have some land that's suitable for growing a sustainable commercial forest). Over the life cycle of the tree from planting to burning, it's carbon neutral, though the shape of it for any given tree is 20 years of carbon sequestration followed by 20 minutes of carbon release.
    - kspacewalk2 6y ago
      The issue with that is two-fold: 1. Not nearly enough trees are being planted to offset the ones being cut down. 2. Neutral on a scale of 30 years doesn't much matter when we have to reduce the degree to which we're accelerating a highly non-linear climate change process right now.
      - chrisco255 6y ago
        I'm not sure about in Britain, but in the U.S. we do sustainably farm trees used for timber and have done so for the past 100 years.
        jschwartzi 6y ago
        What kind of vehicles do you use to move the lumber from the farm to market, how are the pellet factories powered, and what kind of vehicles are used to move the bulk pellets from US to UK ports?
        belorn 6y ago
        That is the point where someone bring up photos from almost 100 years ago and make comparison photo of today and notice the obvious: there is a lot more trees in the old photos.
- vkou 6y ago
  1. 'Waste wood pellet' power plants are a con job. 2. There is not nearly enough wood waste from construction sites/etc to operate them. 3. They have to be supplemented with wood cut down from forests. 4. There aren't nearly enough forests in the UK to operate these plants sustainably. 5. So, the wood they burn comes from cutting down Canadian forests, trucking them down logging roads, loading them onto barges, and shipping them across the Atlantic ocean to the UK. By the time you're done with all that, the carbon footprint of your wood pellet plant is greater than that of a coal plant.
  - polycaster 6y ago
    > By the time you're done with all that, the carbon footprint of your wood pellet plant is greater than that of a coal plant. Could be true. Are there numbers/sources backing this argument?
    - vkou 6y ago
      I don't have a source that's likely to satisfy you - for two reasons. 1. Nobody has actually done a through, scientific carbon audit of the supply chain for these plants. You have napkin arguments in film, or on the internet, that you can trivially search for, that conclude this one way, or another, depending on their politics. 2. The carbon cost of running them is incredibly dependent on local conditions of the precise bits of wood that were sourced. I can expand on the latter. The hardest part about logging is getting your equipment to the logging site, building the roads to it, and then using those roads to get the logs out. I guess those are the three hardest parts about logging. If you can cut down your logs, truck them only a few miles, toss them in a river, and then pick them up a hundred miles downstream, to load onto a barge, your carbon footprint is minimal. If, on the other hand, you have to truck them 15 miles down logging roads, and then 90 miles down a freeway, your footprint greatly expands. (And has to include factors like building the logging roads to begin with.) Unlike with mining, building logging roads is much harder than building roads to a mine - because you have to cover a lot more ground, to get an industrially useful amount of wood - compared to something like a pit mine. You have to use heavy equipment to drag logs over incredibly difficult, unroaded terrain, so that they can be loaded onto trucks that will go down the roads.
VBprogrammer 6y ago
Some back of the envelope maths, he said it takes an area 18 miles by 18 miles every year to produce 7% of the UKs electricity demand. Pine trees are harvested around 30 years old (ignoring thinnings deliberately here). So to set up a 30 year rotation of 300 square miles you are looking at an area roughly the size of Wales. That seems pretty unsustainable from a UK point of view but obviously there are less densely populated parts of the world where wood can be shipped from. I'm not sure. Perhaps as a dispatchable source of power it makes sense.
- hinkley 6y ago
  Carbon neutral has to cover the entire supply chain, for which pellets are going to have a lot of sooty diesel engines in the mix.
  - VBprogrammer 6y ago
    There are few coal mines left in the UK so coal has the same issue. I think we can all agree that biomass might be a slightly less bad than coal solution to reliably dispatchable power generation. It's far from perfect though.
    - hinkley 6y ago
      Coal is irredeemable. We don't talk about if it's neutral because you can't even see neutral from where coal is. We need improvements, and we should encourage them. But. If we stop shy of the goal because people start misusing terminology or using fuzzy math then we are just as dead but drag it out longer. The Earth doesn't care about spreadsheets or feelings. It only cares what actually happened.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
  The UK already has around 12,000 sq miles of forest, which is about 13% of the area. Half of the UK's land is owned by 1% of the population - a mix of aristocrats, wealthy individuals, and corporations. There is no practical issue with mass reforestation contributing to energy self-sufficiency, but there would be huge political issues.
torpfactory 6y ago
Wood pellet burning is a temporary distraction and distortion caused by regulation that allows it to be counted as "renewable". I believe you can make a reasonable argument wood burning is carbon neutral. Unfortunately, land used for growing forests of fuel represents a terrible opportunity cost - you could grow food or let the forests absorb atmospheric carbon, provide animal habitat, re-wilding, etc. However, there is no long-term future in which wood pellets are used for much other than limited residential space heating. Cutting down a forest, processing it into pellets and shipping them half way around the world isn't going to be the cheapest option for bulk power production. Don't let the foolishness of wood-burning being counted as "renewable" distract you from the broader story of the quickly improving value proposition of solar, wind, and (soon, hopefully) battery storage.
- ip26 6y ago
  Wood pellets are at least a useful transitional resource. I'm not sure how pellets compare as a coal replacement, but for residential heating a pellet stove is a big improvement over a split log fireplace or stove, in efficiency and air quality.
- hinkley 6y ago
  Or a carbon sink. Most of these trees are coming from temperate forests, and while tropical forests don't put much carbon in the soil, temperate forests do. Or rather, mature trees in temperate forests do. As long as you can keep the temperate zones from moving too far toward the poles (and plant tundra aggressively as it thaws) that's another opportunity cost of cutting them down before they hit their stride.
  - jacobush 6y ago
    In Sweden, our agencies classify pellets as better than fossil fuels, but with problematic local effects, and it's estimated that each year 1 in 10000 die from its pollution. (1000 people in Sweden, in a population of 10 million.) One can assume that locally the effects must be worse?
- totalZero 6y ago
neilwilson 6y ago
Not to mention importing fuel in a COVID world. Relying on imports for strategically important resources is a bad idea. As we’ve seen you can’t get enough diversity of supply with sufficient burst capacity to get you through when the brown stuff vs. fan impact occurs. Shortage of PPE is one thing. Brownouts quite another.
ciconia 6y ago
That and the transportation costs from the US to the UK which are also not negligible.

renegading 6y ago

The carbon is captured when the tree grows and then released when the wood is burned. This is different from fossil fuels where it is underground.

azinman2 6y ago
And how does it get from the forest into compressed form, and then to the UK?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
rowanG077 6y ago
How is that different? Fossil fuels were also captured many years ago. The only difference is the number of years.
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  The time it takes to renew.
- PopeDotNinja 6y ago
  Main difference is releasing co2 from fossil fuels introduces carbon that wood pellets don’t. Imagine we burn 100% of fossil fuels and then start burning wood pellets, versus going straight to wood pellets. The former releases a lot more carbon than the latter.
- woodandsteel 6y ago
  The difference is ff's were captured over many millions of years, and natural forces controlled the total amount of co2 in the atmosphere. What is happening today is the ff's captured co2 is being released a thousand times faster than it was captured, and that is overwhelming natural forces and causing co2 levels to skyrocket. Wood pellets are one of the ways to counter this. I could be wrong, but my guess is that you already knew all this and were only pretending to be ill-informed because you are a member of the fossil fuels forever club. If I wrong, then please let us know your views on global climate change.
- jotm 6y ago
  Eh, well, how is humans dying out different than dinosaurs dying out? The only difference is the species :D
hn23 6y ago
The reason wood is considered neutral is, that most of the wood is used for construction and other stuff. If you burn it and happen to burn fossil fuel as well, nothing is neutral.
- dmurray 6y ago
  No, it's considered neutral because you plant more of it to replace the trees you cut down (not because you are trying to save the world, just because you have some land that's suitable for growing a sustainable commercial forest). Over the life cycle of the tree from planting to burning, it's carbon neutral, though the shape of it for any given tree is 20 years of carbon sequestration followed by 20 minutes of carbon release.
  - kspacewalk2 6y ago
    The issue with that is two-fold: 1. Not nearly enough trees are being planted to offset the ones being cut down. 2. Neutral on a scale of 30 years doesn't much matter when we have to reduce the degree to which we're accelerating a highly non-linear climate change process right now.
    - chrisco255 6y ago
      I'm not sure about in Britain, but in the U.S. we do sustainably farm trees used for timber and have done so for the past 100 years.
      - jschwartzi 6y ago
        What kind of vehicles do you use to move the lumber from the farm to market, how are the pellet factories powered, and what kind of vehicles are used to move the bulk pellets from US to UK ports?
      - belorn 6y ago
        That is the point where someone bring up photos from almost 100 years ago and make comparison photo of today and notice the obvious: there is a lot more trees in the old photos.
vkou 6y ago
1. 'Waste wood pellet' power plants are a con job. 2. There is not nearly enough wood waste from construction sites/etc to operate them. 3. They have to be supplemented with wood cut down from forests. 4. There aren't nearly enough forests in the UK to operate these plants sustainably. 5. So, the wood they burn comes from cutting down Canadian forests, trucking them down logging roads, loading them onto barges, and shipping them across the Atlantic ocean to the UK. By the time you're done with all that, the carbon footprint of your wood pellet plant is greater than that of a coal plant.
- polycaster 6y ago
  > By the time you're done with all that, the carbon footprint of your wood pellet plant is greater than that of a coal plant. Could be true. Are there numbers/sources backing this argument?
  - vkou 6y ago
    I don't have a source that's likely to satisfy you - for two reasons. 1. Nobody has actually done a through, scientific carbon audit of the supply chain for these plants. You have napkin arguments in film, or on the internet, that you can trivially search for, that conclude this one way, or another, depending on their politics. 2. The carbon cost of running them is incredibly dependent on local conditions of the precise bits of wood that were sourced. I can expand on the latter. The hardest part about logging is getting your equipment to the logging site, building the roads to it, and then using those roads to get the logs out. I guess those are the three hardest parts about logging. If you can cut down your logs, truck them only a few miles, toss them in a river, and then pick them up a hundred miles downstream, to load onto a barge, your carbon footprint is minimal. If, on the other hand, you have to truck them 15 miles down logging roads, and then 90 miles down a freeway, your footprint greatly expands. (And has to include factors like building the logging roads to begin with.) Unlike with mining, building logging roads is much harder than building roads to a mine - because you have to cover a lot more ground, to get an industrially useful amount of wood - compared to something like a pit mine. You have to use heavy equipment to drag logs over incredibly difficult, unroaded terrain, so that they can be loaded onto trucks that will go down the roads.

VBprogrammer 6y ago

Some back of the envelope maths, he said it takes an area 18 miles by 18 miles every year to produce 7% of the UKs electricity demand. Pine trees are harvested around 30 years old (ignoring thinnings deliberately here). So to set up a 30 year rotation of 300 square miles you are looking at an area roughly the size of Wales. That seems pretty unsustainable from a UK point of view but obviously there are less densely populated parts of the world where wood can be shipped from. I'm not sure. Perhaps as a dispatchable source of power it makes sense.

hinkley 6y ago
Carbon neutral has to cover the entire supply chain, for which pellets are going to have a lot of sooty diesel engines in the mix.
- VBprogrammer 6y ago
  There are few coal mines left in the UK so coal has the same issue. I think we can all agree that biomass might be a slightly less bad than coal solution to reliably dispatchable power generation. It's far from perfect though.
  - hinkley 6y ago
    Coal is irredeemable. We don't talk about if it's neutral because you can't even see neutral from where coal is. We need improvements, and we should encourage them. But. If we stop shy of the goal because people start misusing terminology or using fuzzy math then we are just as dead but drag it out longer. The Earth doesn't care about spreadsheets or feelings. It only cares what actually happened.
TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
The UK already has around 12,000 sq miles of forest, which is about 13% of the area. Half of the UK's land is owned by 1% of the population - a mix of aristocrats, wealthy individuals, and corporations. There is no practical issue with mass reforestation contributing to energy self-sufficiency, but there would be huge political issues.

torpfactory 6y ago

Wood pellet burning is a temporary distraction and distortion caused by regulation that allows it to be counted as "renewable". I believe you can make a reasonable argument wood burning is carbon neutral. Unfortunately, land used for growing forests of fuel represents a terrible opportunity cost - you could grow food or let the forests absorb atmospheric carbon, provide animal habitat, re-wilding, etc. However, there is no long-term future in which wood pellets are used for much other than limited residential space heating. Cutting down a forest, processing it into pellets and shipping them half way around the world isn't going to be the cheapest option for bulk power production. Don't let the foolishness of wood-burning being counted as "renewable" distract you from the broader story of the quickly improving value proposition of solar, wind, and (soon, hopefully) battery storage.

ip26 6y ago
Wood pellets are at least a useful transitional resource. I'm not sure how pellets compare as a coal replacement, but for residential heating a pellet stove is a big improvement over a split log fireplace or stove, in efficiency and air quality.
hinkley 6y ago
Or a carbon sink. Most of these trees are coming from temperate forests, and while tropical forests don't put much carbon in the soil, temperate forests do. Or rather, mature trees in temperate forests do. As long as you can keep the temperate zones from moving too far toward the poles (and plant tundra aggressively as it thaws) that's another opportunity cost of cutting them down before they hit their stride.
- jacobush 6y ago
  In Sweden, our agencies classify pellets as better than fossil fuels, but with problematic local effects, and it's estimated that each year 1 in 10000 die from its pollution. (1000 people in Sweden, in a population of 10 million.) One can assume that locally the effects must be worse?
totalZero 6y ago

neilwilson 6y ago

Not to mention importing fuel in a COVID world. Relying on imports for strategically important resources is a bad idea. As we’ve seen you can’t get enough diversity of supply with sufficient burst capacity to get you through when the brown stuff vs. fan impact occurs. Shortage of PPE is one thing. Brownouts quite another.

ciconia 6y ago

That and the transportation costs from the US to the UK which are also not negligible.