[vkou]

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.

[DoingIsLearning]

Most of your points are verifiable _facts_, so there is no discussion to be had there. However, the _why_ is an important point that you didn't mention.

If these 'bio-mass' operations are so obviously illogical and unstainable why are they pushed so hard?

The large portion of these operations are old coal plants and incinerators. These are effectively wood chip burning furnaces that managed to reposition themselves through lobbying and marketing in order to ride the 'green' wave and be labelled as 'renewable' on paper, enabling them to collect massive amounts of tax payer "green" funding to pay for operational costs that could never be profitable otherwise.

This is a case where you have old polluting businesses trying to avoid bankruptcy by grabbing "green" funding.

PS: Things I've read in the past from astroturfers on this topic:

- It's "renewable" because we plant trees that capture carbon (not at the rate that you need to burn it to break even).

- It's reclaimed wood (marginal volume compared to forest wood).

- We also burn organic waste (doesn't burn as hot as wood chips).

- It's wood from responsibly sourced forestry (which you transported across oceans from Canada, Malaysia and Brazil).

- It's not sustainable now because we haven't started replacing local forest with fast growing trees (this would absolutely kill local woodland bio-diversity).

[DFHippie]

> 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.

I would like to see a citation for this. It seems highly improbable.

[jotm]

Seeing as coal is just as energy intensive to mine and transport, yeah... But I guess his point was that wood burning should be stopped along with coal, because it's nearly as bad.

[abakker]

to make matters worse, all the shipping involves wet wood, which makes the whole process more intensive, as you move a lot of water around, and then ultimately the water contributes negatively to the energy output when processed and burned.

[DFHippie]

Really? They don't make the pellets in Canada and then ship them?

Again, citation please.

[polycaster]

> 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]

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.