7 ms·

How to Make Biomass Energy Sustainable Again

56 points by privong 6y ago

hinkley 6y 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 6y 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.
- philipkglass 6y 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_Biomass_and_Solar_Energy_Yields https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Biomas... https://www.biofuelwatch.org.uk/2018/biomass-and-land-use/ https://www.biofuelwatch.org.uk/2018/biomass-and-land-use/ https://ucanr.edu/sites/WoodyBiomass/files/78993.pdf https://ucanr.edu/sites/WoodyBiomass/files/78993.pdf
  - hinkley 6y 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.
    - philipkglass 6y ago
      We need to stop looking for One Weird Fix. It’s not out there, and/or we keep breaking it by changing the conditions. I'd agree with that. Low Tech Magazine keeps promoting One Weird Fix of "use less complicated technology." In early issues it highlighted a few simple old technologies that were plausibly equal or superior to modern complicated technologies. But it rapidly exhausted plausible candidates. Recent Low Tech Magazine articles are good branching off points for exploring historical technologies but poor at conceiving solutions to the energy and environmental problems we face in the 21st century. They keep highlighting ideas that barely touch on today's largest energy demands or that require far too much land per person. I have a bunch of energy crisis books from the 1970s and they also frequently dreamt of a more rural existence than is now possible for Earth's billions of people. They kept invoking past lifestyles, ignoring how many fewer people there were in the past. The mismatch is even more severe in 2020 than it was in 1974.
      - hinkley 6y ago
        It's a complex problem. They're all complex problems when you have to solve them for 8 billion instead of 80,000 The more we automate the creation of food, water, clothing, and shelter, the fewer people we need to keep the rest of us from starving or freezing to death. What do the rest of us do for a living? Why do we keep going? A very careful dose of pastoralism can address part of that problem. Locally produced goods also tend to have a smaller carbon footprint, so there's something there as well. There are people who think we can fix all of our problems that way, and so far I've carefully avoided having to tell any of them they're wrong. Related to pastoralism is a bigger category: Stewardship. We could keep a lot of people in meaningful work by doing all of the deferred maintenance we're neglecting as we industrialize. Every time we find a new way to Go Fast and Break Things, we should be fixing what we break. Looking at sustainability and lifecycle costs. There's a PR problem with becoming a glorified gardener. It's a janitor with a better class of filth but a higher risk of injury. The hype you see is, fundamentally, trying to raise the 'station' of a whole raft of professions and hobbies. Romanticizing them.
- boo_boo 6y 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_w 6y 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.
    - skyfaller 6y ago
      We definitely need to move to solar power. That said, there are some serious issues with the transition. One of them is that constructing and deploying solar panels inevitably produces greenhouse gases, and there is a limit to how much solar power we can produce per year while remaining within our carbon budget (since we are starting the transition so late): https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2015/04/how-sustainable-is-pv-solar-power.html https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2015/04/how-sustainable-is-p... As a result, switching to renewables needs to be combined with reducing our energy use, so that renewables can meet our needs without causing the emissions that we are seeking to eliminate on a very short timescale. Reducing energy use, as you might imagine, is a very complex subject. One difficulty is the Jevons Paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox If you rely too heavily on the technological solution of energy efficiency, people just use the technology more and energy usage isn't actually reduced. Low-Tech Mag mentions the example of more efficient LED lights leading to the popularization of digital billboards, which use more energy than a regular billboard (but less energy than a digital billboard would have used before LEDs). https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/01/bedazzled-by-energy-efficiency.html https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/01/bedazzled-by-energy-...
- Animats 6y 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 6y 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
danans 6y 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.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- est31 6y 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.
  - danans 6y 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.
black6 6y 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 6y 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.
Animats 6y 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-agency-wants-to-ban-open-6171602.php https://www.sfgate.com/science/article/Bay-Area-pollution-ag...
- boo_boo 6y ago
  And where does the pollution caused by natural gas extraction fit into this comparison?
  - hinkley 6y 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 6y 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/ http://volodesigns-sterlingproject.blogspot.com/ [2] http://www.oekofen-e.com/en/engine/ http://www.oekofen-e.com/en/engine/
lightgreen 6y 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 6y 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.
  - lightgreen 6y ago
    > inefficient compared with PV Yes, if you only need to have electricity during shiny day.

56 points by privong 6y 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 6y 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.

philipkglass 6y 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_Biomass_and_Solar_Energy_Yields https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Biomas... https://www.biofuelwatch.org.uk/2018/biomass-and-land-use/ https://www.biofuelwatch.org.uk/2018/biomass-and-land-use/ https://ucanr.edu/sites/WoodyBiomass/files/78993.pdf https://ucanr.edu/sites/WoodyBiomass/files/78993.pdf
- hinkley 6y 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.
  - philipkglass 6y ago
    We need to stop looking for One Weird Fix. It’s not out there, and/or we keep breaking it by changing the conditions. I'd agree with that. Low Tech Magazine keeps promoting One Weird Fix of "use less complicated technology." In early issues it highlighted a few simple old technologies that were plausibly equal or superior to modern complicated technologies. But it rapidly exhausted plausible candidates. Recent Low Tech Magazine articles are good branching off points for exploring historical technologies but poor at conceiving solutions to the energy and environmental problems we face in the 21st century. They keep highlighting ideas that barely touch on today's largest energy demands or that require far too much land per person. I have a bunch of energy crisis books from the 1970s and they also frequently dreamt of a more rural existence than is now possible for Earth's billions of people. They kept invoking past lifestyles, ignoring how many fewer people there were in the past. The mismatch is even more severe in 2020 than it was in 1974.
    - hinkley 6y ago
      It's a complex problem. They're all complex problems when you have to solve them for 8 billion instead of 80,000 The more we automate the creation of food, water, clothing, and shelter, the fewer people we need to keep the rest of us from starving or freezing to death. What do the rest of us do for a living? Why do we keep going? A very careful dose of pastoralism can address part of that problem. Locally produced goods also tend to have a smaller carbon footprint, so there's something there as well. There are people who think we can fix all of our problems that way, and so far I've carefully avoided having to tell any of them they're wrong. Related to pastoralism is a bigger category: Stewardship. We could keep a lot of people in meaningful work by doing all of the deferred maintenance we're neglecting as we industrialize. Every time we find a new way to Go Fast and Break Things, we should be fixing what we break. Looking at sustainability and lifecycle costs. There's a PR problem with becoming a glorified gardener. It's a janitor with a better class of filth but a higher risk of injury. The hype you see is, fundamentally, trying to raise the 'station' of a whole raft of professions and hobbies. Romanticizing them.
boo_boo 6y 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_w 6y 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.
  - skyfaller 6y ago
    We definitely need to move to solar power. That said, there are some serious issues with the transition. One of them is that constructing and deploying solar panels inevitably produces greenhouse gases, and there is a limit to how much solar power we can produce per year while remaining within our carbon budget (since we are starting the transition so late): https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2015/04/how-sustainable-is-pv-solar-power.html https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2015/04/how-sustainable-is-p... As a result, switching to renewables needs to be combined with reducing our energy use, so that renewables can meet our needs without causing the emissions that we are seeking to eliminate on a very short timescale. Reducing energy use, as you might imagine, is a very complex subject. One difficulty is the Jevons Paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox If you rely too heavily on the technological solution of energy efficiency, people just use the technology more and energy usage isn't actually reduced. Low-Tech Mag mentions the example of more efficient LED lights leading to the popularization of digital billboards, which use more energy than a regular billboard (but less energy than a digital billboard would have used before LEDs). https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/01/bedazzled-by-energy-efficiency.html https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/01/bedazzled-by-energy-...
Animats 6y 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 6y 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

danans 6y 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.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
est31 6y 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.
- danans 6y 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.

black6 6y 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 6y 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.

Animats 6y 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-agency-wants-to-ban-open-6171602.php https://www.sfgate.com/science/article/Bay-Area-pollution-ag...

boo_boo 6y ago
And where does the pollution caused by natural gas extraction fit into this comparison?
- hinkley 6y 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 6y 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/ http://volodesigns-sterlingproject.blogspot.com/ [2] http://www.oekofen-e.com/en/engine/ http://www.oekofen-e.com/en/engine/

lightgreen 6y 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 6y 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.
- lightgreen 6y ago
  > inefficient compared with PV Yes, if you only need to have electricity during shiny day.