Things We Lost in the Fire

I recently ate lunch with a scientist? working in Federal policy around Biomass.? I confessed that I struggle with the dogma around Biofuels: that the pursuit of a cleaner, cooler, CO2-light atmosphere points to policies that encourage taking massive amounts of vegetative matter and lighting it all up in an industrial bonfire. That releases massive amounts of smoke, particulate –? and yes enormous quantities of CO2.? For the war on carbon and the war on climate change, it seems highly counterproductive.

Wouldn’t it be better – if we are going to burn something that releases CO2 –? to use products from the oil and gas industry?? They usually burn cleaner than wood, and don’t require chopping down forests.? No kidding, my fellow scientist was shocked by my stance on this.? She answered succinctly:? “Biomass is renewable.”?? Plainly dismayed, it was clear she didn’t have the patience to teach me something so basic.

The WSJ treatment on the Enviva bankruptcy called it the “product of deranged European Climate Subsidies”.?

I was inspired (triggered?) to write this comment after reading about the cratering of a U.S. wood pellet maker called Enviva (“The Rise and Fall of a Green-Energy Star”, Wall Street Journal).? The article describes the pending bankruptcy of Enviva, which was feeding a voracious demand for more wood pellets than it could produce, and at prices that were not sustainable.?

That’s bad business, but what inspired Enviva to take $20 B in orders for pellets? Answer: edacious demand in? Europe, where in the wake of the cutoff of Russian gas, boiler plants needed a “green” alternative to coal. More on this cautionary tale in a moment.

The term “renewable” is used inconsistently in climate orthodoxy, but it consistently means “good”.? Biomass is renewable because CO2-releasing organic fuel is harvested, burned, and the land where it stood is (ideally) re-planted. That new growth soaks up the same amount of carbon as just released, and then you can burn again.? If you disregard the element of time, the carbon balance is ZERO. Grow-burn-grow-burn. Anything that goes in a circle is good (renewable). Never mind that your acre of pine pellets may take 10 minutes to burn and 10 years to grow. If we need more energy, we’ll dedicate more acres, and we’ll always re-capture the CO2 sent up along with a choking dark plume of smoke…eventually.

This leaves me with a couple of “cognitive dissonances”.? First, if we’re going to liberate CO2, wouldn’t it be better if we just left that land alone, endowed in its natural state accumulating Biomass and sequestering carbon … And simply took some equivalent amount of cleaner burning fossil fuel out of a small well? If you live in New York State, you might get excoriated for cooking with natural gas,? but organize a forest fire in a metal box and suddenly you're Rachel Carson.

To match the output of just a single nuclear unit with pine Biomass would require? nearly one million acres.? For reference, the State of Rhode Island is about 600,000 acres.

A smart friend told me that the nuance I am missing is that forests and natural areas do build up Biomass, but that these organisms all eventually die, decay, and liberate all that fixed carbon anyway, whether or not man interrupts this cycle to grab it for himself and burn it first. Biofuel farmers only hasten the inevitable.?

I don’t totally buy that. I do realize that sometimes there are natural forest fires, and that otherwise deadfall in forests eventually decays, but I don’t think it usually decays all the way to ash. In fact, 300 million years of fossil fuels, 1 trillion tons of global coal reserves, the Scottish peat bogs, and Otzi the Ice Man all belie the assertion that everything that dies is reduced to ash. In geologic eras, the balance of CO2 in the atmosphere was much higher than it is today. Biomass has been gradually winning the game until very recently. Natural decay creates habitat and feeds the ecosystem.? A pellet fire does neither.

The discipline of Biomass is a discipline of using agriculture for energy.? Two things are often true about farming: it leads to deforestation, and it’s water intensive. This is especially true for the modus operandi of a Biomass producer, motivated by subsidies and credits, and bent on maximizing yield. A superb reference on this topic is Collapse by Jared Diamond.? The author presents a series of real-world case studies to demonstrate what happens when a human populace outruns the capacity of its environment.? Man can be really good at agriculture, until he crowds himself out. This book upended my perspective on how we live sustainably.? Most of the Collapse cases involve islands where land is finite. Often deforestation is an important trigger for a collapse. The immense deforestation of the Amazon river basin over the past 3 decades is also primarily driven by agriculture.

The term “renewable” is used inconsistently in climate orthodoxy, but it consistently means “good”.

Is “Biomass” as a green discipline land intensive?? Glad you asked.? A pine forest optimized to grow wood pellets can put on about 7 tons of Biomass per acre per year. When burned, that pine releases about 5,000 kilowatt-hours per ton.? (For reference, you probably pay 15￠ for one of those kilowatt-hours delivered to your home, and you’ll use about 1,000 of them in a month.)

Unfortunately a Biomass facility only converts heat to electricity at about 25% efficiency, so one year of growth on an acre of pine forest can produce about 7 tons x 5,000 kwh / ton x 25% = 8,750 kilowatt-hour electric energy.? A large (“1,000 MW”)? nuclear unit by comparison produces 1,000,000 kwh per hour. This means that dedicating one acre of land, fertilizer, and water to grow pine pellets provides enough energy to match the output of one single conventional nuclear unit for 32 seconds.? Said another way, to match the output of just a single nuclear unit with pine Biomass, I would need to dedicate nearly one million acres.? For reference, the State of Rhode Island is about 600,000 acres. To gratify all current US demand for electricity would require around 500 million acres (about 1/4th? of the land area of the lower 48).

The religion of Biomass in the U.S. probably started with ethanol mandates for gasoline. Ethanol is a fuel made by growing corn.? Ethanol’s use as a motor fuel started in the late 1970’s after the “energy crisis”. In the shadow of the Arab Oil Embargo, use of ethanol was seen as a way to reduce reliance on oversea oil.? Knocking out 5- or 10% of required oil from the Middle East is a start, right? Ethanol’s role in gasoline was cemented in the early aughts with U.S. “Renewable Fuel Standards”, which required fuel processors to replace at least 10% of gas with ethanol. By the time those blending requirements became fully effective, the aim of reducing foreign reliance had faded to irrelevance, due to burgeoning domestic production.? The continuing justification for ethanol has been that it reduces greenhouse gases.

But does it?? Burned stoichiometrically, ethanol produces about the same amount of CO2 as gasoline: 19 g / kilowatt-hour.? However, burning gasoline liberates “new” CO2 that had been locked underground for 300 million years; whereas, burning ethanol liberates CO2 only recently “sequestered” by farming corn, so according to advocates, it shouldn’t count.? Corn pundits say you should subtract that farm-fixed CO2 from the ethanol ledger … then even after adding back CO2 from the significant energy used to grow, manufacture, and transport that ethanol, the net-net is that ethanol reduces CO2 by 20- to 40% compared to gasoline, at least for the 6% of the energy in your tank that comes from ethanol.?(And thirty percent of 6% means a comprehensive reduction of just 1.8% for the whole tank.)

This calculation is complex, sensitive to assumptions, and controversial.? It’s a narrower framing of the general question on the overall probity of encouraging Biomass. In calculating that benefit of carbon capture by farming corn, analysts don’t consider what might happen on that same land if it were left in a natural state.

How much land? The ethanol industry uses about 35 million acres of land in corn farming.? That represents 40% of all land growing corn in the U.S. for everything: feeding livestock, feeding 330 million Americans, and feeding export markets.? The 35 million acres of ethanol corn, blended at 10%, provides around 6% of the energy in our gas tanks.? To provide 100% would require about 600 million acres, or close to 1/3rd? of the land area of the lower 48. A single acre of land only makes about 380 gas-equivalent gallons per growing season, enough to fuel just a single gasoline-powered vehicle. Ethanol is also rapaciously thirsty. Best practices use 3 gallons of water to manufacture a single gallon?? … plus another 200 gallons to grow the corn.

Remember Enviva, the bankrupt pellet maker?? Much of the demand for its product both in the U.S. and Europe came from the green-washing of Biomass.

And the green bona fides of Biomass are not to be questioned -- either in the U.S. or in Europe. U.S. policy has us swimming in an alphabet soup of subsidies for Biomass going back to the 1970’s: PTC, ITC, BCAP (Biomass Crop Assistance Program), REAP (Rural Energy for America), BRDI (Biomass R&D Incentives), and various state and Cap-and-Trade programs. In Europe we have Renewable Energy Directive (RED, 2009) and RED II (2018), the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS), and a variety of country-specific handouts. In Germany, utilities can charge more for electricity generated with biomass. In the UK and Sweden, homeowners get paid to install biomass boilers: you can stay warm like the Neanderthal in exchange for waivers on taxes and carbon levies. The common thread in both the U.S. and Europe is that Biomass is treated as a renewable fuel, and enjoys every benefit, inducement, and subsidy written into law for renewables. Let those CO2 releases be damned!

The issue for climate change is CO2. It’s about the gas, not the fuel. CO2 gas comes from burning any organic matter old or new. Climate inducements that give a free pass to anything grown recently, without any honest accounting for the balance of liberation versus sequestration, predictably lead to a frenzy of “burn everything as fast as possible”, which is what Enviva’s customers were trying to do. Climate change was supposed to slow us down, not speed us up. The WSJ treatment on the Enviva bankruptcy called it the “product of deranged European Climate Subsidies”.? The article stated this issue so cogently, I feel the need to replay it here:

Scientists and environmental groups have raised questions about the climate claims put forth by the wood-pellet industry. Burning wood, many scientists and environmentalists say, is less efficient than burning fossil fuels, emitting more carbon to generate equivalent energy. Demand for pellets, they say, causes trees to be cut down that would otherwise remain standing—and removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

The rise of coal in the 1800s saved Western Europe’s forests from being wiped out for firewood, “but the solution to replacing coal is not to go back to burning forests,” said a 2018 letter to the European Parliament signed by 772 scientists.        

Enviva claimed its feedstock was coming from construction waste, but there wasn’t enough in the world to feed its machine. Markets exist today in both the U.S. and Europe to buy and sell credits for carbon sequestration in forests and natural carbon sinks.? Why induce industrial deforestation so we can repurpose land to grow ethanol and pine pellets, when the same acres can sequester carbon in ways that are natural, organic, and don’t depend on fertilizers and irrigation? Why send humanity back to the dark ages, farming and burning straw and wood, culminating in dirty and inefficient forms of combustion?

The dispensability of Biofuels doesn’t reduce or increase global demand for heat or energy, and there isn’t great evidence that burn-grow-burn-grow improves CO2 sequestration, compared to the restorative effective of leaving more land in a natural state. In any event, the amount of land required is not sustainable.? If we mean to continue to permit any combustion for energy whatsoever, we should focus on using the cleanest and most efficient fuels, with the highest thermal conversion efficiency, and with the least environmental impact overall. The unconditional green-waiver given to Biofuels in both the US and Europe is an atavistic fig-leaf that is worse than the status quo ante.? If we mean to stay committed to carbon neutral or better, we should rapidly move to deploy and enhance the manifold technologies that don’t liberate any CO2 at all, including wind, hydro, solar, nuclear, and geothermal.? Giving Biomass a free pass, or worse a subsidized accelerant, is creating a frenzy of combustion that is deleterious and counterproductive, and moving us backward in time.