[brnaftr361]

I've never actually sat down and worked it out, but it seems to me that this is more of a political buoy than legitimately optimized.

Once you factor in all the processing of certain biomass, specifically I recall a European nation, the UK perhaps, was burning wood product. Wood is significantly less energy dense than coal for instance... If your workers are driving to and from work, if you're cutting it down with two stroke chainsaws, loading it into trucks, packing it into trains... I think these factors were all removed from calculations to conclude it's "carbon neutral".

And for some reason, probably wrongly, I'd like to imagine leaving the trees up is more beneficial (even if the fuel is a byproduct of industry), but I can imagine during a tree's lifecycle there's a "peak sequestration" age/size they're maybe targeting.

[Reason077]

You're quite right that wood biomass is not fully carbon-neutral when fossil fuels are expended in harvesting it and transporting it.

UK biomass is estimated to have a total-lifecycle carbon footprint of 230g CO2 per kWh. This is much worse than wind, solar, or nuclear. But still a very significant improvement on burning coal and natural gas! Compared to coal, it's about a 4x improvement.