Biomass heat: facing the carbon reality

[AECB admin]

Please post your comments here. Sofie Pelsmakers' and Kate de Selincourt's article can be found here – http://aecb.net/news/2013/01/biomass-heat-facing-the-carbon-reality-2/#ftnref8

[Mark Siddall]

Kate,
If we have to build then, on the whole, I do still tend to favour the idea of using timber. My post was just to reinforce the case for ensuring that timber is sourced from a carefully managed forest that plants more trees that it cuts down. (No doubt a good chunk of the “carbon debt” that I allude to is also shouldered by farming etc. )

Mark

[KATE DE SELINCOURT]

Quite so. Know your supplier, in construction as in lasagne!

As an addendum to our section on the air quality issues at the end, a rare bit of environmental intervention analysed here in the BMJ- a Tasmanian town decided to discourage domestic woodburning, and enjoyed a dramatic drop in (male) death rates as a result. At least, as a convincing association – proper science this, confounding factors addressed, confidence intervals, the lot! http://www.bmj.com/content/346/bmj.e8446

[KATE DE SELINCOURT]

No need to be intimidated Jackie, I'd say you were spot on with your analysis (with any shaky authority I might claim, which is just thinking about it, like you really). Just so long as you keep remembering to put emissions “reductions” in inverted commas!

There's some interesting rumour trickling out at the moment that DECC are actually realising their accounting is wrong, and though they appear to be sticking with the dogy accounting for the RHI, their accounting for the (completely massive) biomass electricity generation industry may be subtly different. If you want to follow the issue I suggest the very informative Biofuelwatch website http://www.biofuelwatch.org.uk; there are also a couple of posts on my blog site http://www.katedeselincourt.co.uk.

[Author]

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