Is wood burning as carbon neutral as many of us think?

[jatoxico]

Man has been burning wood for thousands of years. Trees have been falling and rotting for even longer. Humans & animals (both carbon based), have been dying and rotting all this time too. So either the planet has been slowly destroying itself from day one, or maybe carbon is not so bad after all.

That's just not accurate. Carbon is sequestered in the form of oil/coal/biomass. The small amounts of carbon released from wood burning and and other natural processes that occurred for the majority of human history cannot be compared to burning of all these resources in a relatively short period of time.

I for one still have some questions about climate science's conclusions but to doubt that we have and are releasing orders of magnitude more carbon that we did before the industrial revolution is frankly ridiculous.

 

[iamlucky13]

The article has a point of view but ts not hard to understand that if you burn more wood than you grow then the process won't be neutral.

Which as I've been trying so say is irrelevant. The Science paper is fine on this point, but the climatecentral.org article is trying to draw readers into concluding that we are burning more wood than grow, which is false.

Wow. Holy long posts batman.

Sorry, but when there's a lot to address, things tend to get lengthy.

Yeah well cutting dead tree's and burning them releases the same as letting it rot on the forest floor.

Technically not quite. When a tree rots, some proportion (which varies depending on conditions) of its carbon is released as methane.

 

[mass_burner]

We're going to do what we do until we can't do it anymore. That's the human way. Everything else is just blah...blah...blah.

 

[jatoxico]

Which as I've been trying so say is irrelevant. The Science paper is fine on this point, but the climatecentral.org article is trying to draw readers into concluding that we are burning more wood than grow, which is false.

IDK the Science article cites several references that question the viability of what they termed "broad scale" bioenergy to remain C neutral. They clearly question whether or not the near term release of C and the simultaneous loss of those same trees to sequester C is preferable given that the regrowth takes many many years. They then say their model agrees with that concern as you ramp up the use of forest for the purpose.

I don't think the article posted by the OP is simply saying we are burning more than we grow but that how C is being accounted for is allowing energy producers to hide how much C they are producing while receiving subsidies that causes money to be diverted from developing other C free energy sources. And it again questions if burning our current stock is worth it given the returns come years later which the Science article says it confirms.

None of this will change my feelings about burning wood for residential heating. Now if every house in the neighborhood wanted to heat 100% with wood I'd probably have to change my tune.

 

[Rossco]

Sorry, but when there's a lot to address, things tend to get lengthy.

Technically not quite. When a tree rots, some proportion (which varies depending on conditions) of its carbon is released as methane.

Iam only pulling your leg about the post length. Plenty longer on here.

Wood releases the same burnt vs down dead, well that's my story and Iam sticking to it. Same as wood burning is a renewable resource.

Gotta push back against the anti's.

 

[bholler]

Burning wood is not carbon neutral at all no. But it is burning a renewable resource which is better for the environment and for those of us that responsibly manage our wood plots or harvest waste that is already down it really is not much of an issue.

 

[woodgeek]

I have read that scientists looking at ancient CO2 in antarctic ice bubbles can see signals from the plagues that swept Europe in the Middle Ages. People cut down trees for fuel and to clear farmland. When they die, the trees regrow. Rinse and Repeat over the centuries.

 

[dougstove]

"Wood releases the same burnt vs down dead, well that's my story and Iam sticking to it. Same as wood burning is a renewable resource."

When wood decays a fraction of the C in the wood is released in the form of methane (CH4), with the fraction depending upon the local environment.
The rest is released as CO2, or enters loooooooong term storage as humic material in the soil, with a turnover time of thousands of years.
Under the right circumstances, a tiny fraction might eventually become something like lignite.

When wood burns there is no methane release; the carbon is released as CO2, or CO + C (soot) if combustion is incomplete.
Methane is 21-24X as good at capturing infrared as CO2.
So if even 5% of the decomposing wood is released as methane, it is better to burn it to CO2.
On the other hand, if a large fraction of the decomposing wood enters stable pools of humic material then there is long term carbon sequestration.
The balances and answers are situational and interesting to estimate.

 

[woodgeek]

The key difference with Methane, Doug, is that (i) if you release it today it will be GONE by 2100 and (ii) it does not acidify the ocean.

 

[beatlefan]

The key difference with Methane, Doug, is that (i) if you release it today it will be GONE by 2100 and (ii) it does not acidify the ocean.

I just released a little methane myself...

 

[jatoxico]

Interestingly the Drax power plant only brought it's first unit online with wood in about June 2013 and has converted others since. The primary motivation was to avoid emission penalties due to how wood C is calculated vs coal. So this play has only been in motion for a short period of time.

Originally intended to move forward as a mixed fuel operation additional govt incentives resulted in full conversion of the Drax plant. I would guess this was only possible if contracts securing pellets were in place. These supplies are coming primarily from North Amer and may explain why your pellets cost so much.

 

[georgepds]

We're going to do what we do until we can't do it anymore. That's the human way. Everything else is just blah...blah...blah.

Oh that's not true

Back in the 70's, up here in Boston, if you fell in the Charles you got discharges that resembled the clap. If you swam in Boston harbor, you swam with the brown carp. Now both river and harbor are cleaned up.. thanks to an activist judge enforcing the law

Back in my hometown, the local pond was a cesspool, now a dozen breeds of ducks make there living in clean water.. thanks to the local officials clamping down on polluters upstream

Near where I live, a couple of eagles make their nest.. thanks to getting DDT out of the waste stream ( I remember when they used to spray DDT on us kids in the street)

Remember the ozone hole, it's almost gone now.. thanks to banning CFCs

Things have changed for the better; we have the enviromental movement and the EPA to thank for it. It may be Blah Blah Blah to you, but to me its the voice of the community saying we don't S**t where we sleep, and backing it up with action and law

 

[dougstove]

Well said.
It seems difficult for us to get the concept of not pooping in our bed.
Maybe because we evolved in trees.

 

[mass_burner]

Oh that's not true

Back in the 70's, up here in Boston, if you fell in the Charles you got discharges that resembled the clap. If you swam in Boston harbor, you swam with the brown carp. Now both river and harbor are cleaned up.. thanks to an activist judge enforcing the law

Back in my hometown, the local pond was a cesspool, now a dozen breeds of ducks make there living in clean water.. thanks to the local officials clamping down on polluters upstream

Near where I live, a couple of eagles make their nest.. thanks to getting DDT out of the waste stream ( I remember when they used to spray DDT on us kids in the street)

Remember the ozone hole, it's almost gone now.. thanks to banning CFCs

Things have changed for the better; we have the enviromental movement and the EPA to thank for it. It may be Blah Blah Blah to you, but to me its the voice of the community saying we don't S**t where we sleep, and backing it up with action and law

ction and law[/QUOTE]

I meant we as humans, across the world. I'm not familiar with the local politics one of the most left Ieaning cities in the country, but what happens in the Charles river doesn't have much of an impact globally, or nationally for that matter.

If there's so much goodwill around, why isn't China/India/Indonesia etc on board? Or nationally, why are there dozens of super fund sites still uncleaned. Or BP, why were they allowed to write off most of their fines from their taxes, whete was the EPA on that one?

 

[begreen]

The key difference with Methane, Doug, is that (i) if you release it today it will be GONE by 2100 and (ii) it does not acidify the ocean.

If the methane being released is from the deep ocean then acidification can be a byproduct. The Univ. of Washington has been studying this off the coast of WA. We don't have a handle on the scale of this yet. It could be large.
"If methane bubbles rise all the way to the surface, they enter the atmosphere and act as a powerful greenhouse gas. But most of the deep-sea methane seems to get consumed during the journey up. Marine microbes convert the methane into carbon dioxide, producing lower-oxygen, more-acidic conditions in the deeper offshore water, which eventually wells up along the coast and surges into coastal waterways."
http://www.science20.com/news_artic..._ocean_may_be_releasing_frozen_methane-157603

 

[woodgeek]

If the methane being released is from the deep ocean then acidification can be a byproduct. The Univ. of Washington has been studying this off the coast of WA. We don't have a handle on the scale of this yet. It could be large.
"If methane bubbles rise all the way to the surface, they enter the atmosphere and act as a powerful greenhouse gas. But most of the deep-sea methane seems to get consumed during the journey up. Marine microbes convert the methane into carbon dioxide, producing lower-oxygen, more-acidic conditions in the deeper offshore water, which eventually wells up along the coast and surges into coastal waterways."
http://www.science20.com/news_artic..._ocean_may_be_releasing_frozen_methane-157603

Makes sense, but most AGW-related acidification is in the top 50m of the ocean, which had a few decade mixing time. CO2 dumped below that would be less of a concern. The ocean, not surprisingly, has a huge potential for buffering heat and CO2, but as I understand it, on human timescales it is not well mixed.

 

[spirilis]

I don't think they actually made that specific claim, and if they did, it's false. US timber growth is outpacing the harvest rate and has been for a decade or two. Currently, net growth is about 18% higher than the harvest rate, according to the Forest Service, and has been trending upwards lately, in part due to better forest management.

Page 23 here:
http://www.fia.fs.fed.us/library/brochures/docs/2012/ForestFacts_1952-2012_English.pdf

Thanks for that link. That paints a much rosier picture of our forestlands here in the US.

 

[Highbeam]

I was checking out windhager's site and a couple of others too about wood burners and they are quite certain that burning wood is carbon neutral. Sure, it's marketing but believing it is not a large leap.

 

[DBoon]

My wood lot has downed trees that if not cut for burning would decompose and release carbon dioxide anyways. I would guess that this is mostly true for small-scale users and scroungers of firewood for heat, but not true for industrial-scale pellet fuel and wood chipping operations.