Archive of Topic: biomass

Annelise Gill-Wiehl

At ERG Annelise has con­tin­ued the study of com­mu­ni­ty ener­gy solu­tions, with both cook­ing and com­mu­ni­ty exten­sion ser­vices focal areas for her ana­lyt­ic and field studies.

Annelise Gill-Wiehl stud­ied envi­ron­men­tal engi­neer­ing and inter­na­tion­al devel­op­ment stud­ies at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Notre Dame.  There, she worked with the Keough School of Glob­al Affairs’ Asso­ciate Dean for Pol­i­cy and Prac­tice, Sara Siev­ers, through the Kel­logg Inter­na­tion­al Schol­ars Pro­gram. They inves­ti­gat­ed how to incor­po­rate the pref­er­en­tial option for the poor into pol­i­cy. Gill-Wiehl’s own research inves­ti­gates ener­gy infra­struc­ture and the bar­ri­ers to tech­nol­o­gy adop­tion. Gill-Wiehl and Pro­fes­sor Siev­ers pilot­ed a Com­mu­ni­ty Tech­nol­o­gy Pro­gram in Shi­rati, Tan­za­nia through a Kel­logg Research Grant.

While an under­grad­u­ate she interned for the Foun­da­tion of Sus­tain­able Devel­op­ment in Masa­ka, Ugan­da. Addi­tion­al­ly, Gill-Wiehl con­duct­ed rough­ly 200 house­hold ener­gy sur­veys through an Expe­ri­enc­ing the World Fel­low­ship to inves­ti­gate ener­gy infra­struc­ture in Shi­rati. Her research inter­ests are at the inter­sec­tion of engi­neer­ing and pol­i­cy in the East African con­text. She hopes to pur­sue a PhD to fur­ther inves­ti­gate these issues.

The­sis Title: Pilot of Com­mu­ni­ty Tech­nol­o­gy Work­ers in Shi­rati, Tanzania

Best, Dennis V.

Den­nis has focused his career on tech­nol­o­gy and sus­tain­abil­i­ty pol­i­cy in emerg­ing and devel­op­ing economies. His research inter­ests include tech­nol­o­gy and inno­va­tion pol­i­cy and impacts to resource and rur­al devel­op­ment, tech­nol­o­gy trans­fer and the polit­i­cal econ­o­my of land use man­age­ment. He has led pro­grams with the Paris based Inter­na­tion­al Ener­gy Agency, as an offi­cial of the OECD, work­ing with emerg­ing economies on ener­gy tech­nol­o­gy pol­i­cy and con­tribut­ing to the Agency’s analy­sis of ener­gy, envi­ron­ment and cli­mate poli­cies (specif­i­cal­ly work­ing col­lab­o­ra­tive­ly with Chi­na and oth­er tran­si­tion economies in explor­ing long-term clean ener­gy options, includ­ing advanced bioen­er­gy, car­bon seques­tra­tion and neg­a­tive emis­sions sys­tems.) Pri­or to liv­ing in Berke­ley, he spent five years in France, and sev­en years in Bei­jing, Chi­na – advis­ing gov­ern­ment and indus­tri­al clients on sus­tain­abil­i­ty and tech­nol­o­gy deploy­ment ini­tia­tives. He holds a BA in polit­i­cal sci­ence (inter­na­tion­al rela­tions) and a con­cen­tra­tion in East Asian stud­ies from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Los Ange­les (UCLA).

EU must not burn the world’s forests for ‘renewable’ energy

A flaw in Europe’s clean ener­gy plan allows fuel from felled trees to qual­i­fy as renew­able ener­gy when in fact this would accel­er­ate cli­mate change and dev­as­tate forests

 

The Euro­pean Union is mov­ing to enact a direc­tive to dou­ble Europe’s cur­rent renew­able ener­gy by 2030. This is admirable, but a crit­i­cal flaw in the present ver­sion would accel­er­ate cli­mate change, allow­ing coun­tries, pow­er plants and fac­to­ries to claim that cut­ting down trees and burn­ing them for ener­gy ful­ly qual­i­fies as renew­able energy.

Even a small part of Europe’s ener­gy requires a large quan­ti­ty of trees and to avoid pro­found harm to the cli­mate and forests world­wide the Euro­pean coun­cil and par­lia­ment must fix this flaw.

Euro­pean pro­duc­ers of wood prod­ucts have for decades gen­er­at­ed elec­tric­i­ty and heat as ben­e­fi­cial by-prod­ucts, using wood wastes and lim­it­ed for­est residues. Most of this mate­r­i­al would decom­pose and release car­bon diox­ide in a few years any­way, so using them to dis­place fos­sil fuels can reduce the car­bon diox­ide added to the atmos­phere in a few years too.

 

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the direc­tive mov­ing through par­lia­ment would go beyond wastes and residues and cred­it coun­tries and com­pa­nies for cut­ting down addi­tion­al trees sim­ply to burn them for ener­gy. To do so has fun­da­men­tal­ly dif­fer­ent con­se­quences because the car­bon released into the air would oth­er­wise stay locked up in forests.

The rea­son­ing seems to be that so long as forests re-grow, they will even­tu­al­ly reab­sorb the car­bon released. Yet even then, the net effect – as many stud­ies have shown – will typ­i­cal­ly be to increase glob­al warm­ing for decades to cen­turies, even when wood replaces coal, oil or nat­ur­al gas.

 

The rea­sons begin with the inher­ent inef­fi­cien­cies in har­vest­ing wood. Typ­i­cal­ly, around one third or more of each tree is con­tained in roots and small branch­es that are prop­er­ly left in the for­est to pro­tect soils, and most of which decom­pose, emit­ting car­bon. The wood that is burned releas­es even more car­bon than coal per unit of ener­gy gen­er­at­ed, and burns at a low­er tem­per­a­ture, pro­duc­ing less elec­tric­i­ty – turn­ing wood into com­pressed pel­lets increas­es effi­cien­cy but uses ener­gy and cre­ates large addi­tion­al emissions.

A pow­er plant burn­ing wood chips will typ­i­cal­ly emit one and a half times the car­bon diox­ide of a plant burn­ing coal and at least three times the car­bon diox­ide emit­ted by a pow­er plant burn­ing nat­ur­al gas.

 

Although regrow­ing trees absorb car­bon, trees grow slow­ly, and for some years a regrow­ing for­est absorbs less car­bon than if the for­est were left unharvested.

Even­tu­al­ly, the new for­est grows faster and the car­bon it absorbs, plus the reduc­tion in fos­sil fuels, can pay back the “car­bon debt”, but that takes decades to cen­turies, depend­ing on the for­est type and use. We con­ser­v­a­tive­ly esti­mate that using delib­er­ate­ly har­vest­ed wood instead of fos­sil fuels will release at least twice as much car­bon diox­ide to the air by 2050 per kilo­watt hour. Doing so turns a poten­tial reduc­tion in emis­sions from solar or wind into a large increase.

Time mat­ters. Plac­ing an addi­tion­al car­bon load in the atmos­phere for decades means per­ma­nent dam­age due to more rapid melt­ing of per­mafrost and glac­i­ers, and more pack­ing of heat and acid­i­ty into the world’s oceans. At a crit­i­cal moment when coun­tries need to be “buy­ing time” against cli­mate change, this approach amounts to sell­ing the world’s lim­it­ed time to com­bat cli­mate change under mis­tak­en claims of improvement.

 

The effect on the world’s forests, car­bon and bio­di­ver­si­ty is like­ly to be large because even though Europe is a large pro­duc­er of wood, its har­vest could only sup­ply about 6% of its pri­ma­ry ener­gy. For more than a decade, the increased use of bio­mass has been sup­ply­ing rough­ly half of Europe’s increase in renew­able ener­gy. To sup­ply even one third of the addi­tion­al renew­able ener­gy like­ly required by 2030, Europe would need to burn an amount of wood greater than its total har­vest today. This would turn a like­ly 6% decrease in ener­gy emis­sions by 2050 under the direc­tive through solar and wind into at least a 6% increase.

Europe’s own demand for wood would degrade forests around the world, but if oth­er coun­tries fol­low Europe’s exam­ple, the impacts would be even more dan­ger­ous. Instead of encour­ag­ing Indone­sia and Brazil to pre­serve their trop­i­cal forests – Europe’s present posi­tion – the mes­sage of this direc­tive is “cut your forests so long as some­one burns them for ener­gy”. Once coun­tries are invest­ed in such efforts, fix­ing the error may become impos­si­ble. To sup­ply just an addi­tion­al 3% of glob­al ener­gy with wood, the world needs to dou­ble its com­mer­cial wood har­vests at great costs to car­bon and wildlife.

 

Nei­ther a require­ment that forests be man­aged sus­tain­ably nor any oth­er “safe­guards” in the var­i­ous work­ing drafts would stop this. For exam­ple, the direc­tive would ban wood if har­vests under­mined “the long-term pro­duc­tiv­i­ty capac­i­ty of the for­est”. Although that sounds good, pre­serv­ing the capac­i­ty of trees to grow back still leaves more car­bon in the air for at least decades. Restrict­ing wood har­vests to coun­tries with net grow­ing forests – anoth­er idea – would still take car­bon that forests would oth­er­wise add to their stor­age and instead put it in the air with­out mean­ing­ful glob­al limits.

 

The solu­tion is to restrict eli­gi­ble for­est bio­mass to its tra­di­tion­al sources of residues and waste. Leg­is­la­tors will like­ly be able to vote on such an amend­ment in the parliament’s plenary.

By 1850, the use of wood for bioen­er­gy helped dri­ve the near defor­esta­tion of west­ern Europe even at a time when Euro­peans con­sumed rel­a­tive­ly lit­tle ener­gy. Although coal helped to save the forests of Europe, the solu­tion is not to go back to burn­ing forests. As sci­en­tists, we col­lec­tive­ly have played key roles in the IPCC, in advis­ing Euro­pean gov­ern­ments, and in for­est and cli­mate research. We encour­age Euro­pean leg­is­la­tors and oth­er pol­i­cy­mak­ers to amend the present direc­tive because the fate of much of the world’s forests is lit­er­al­ly at stake.

 

Prof John Bed­ding­ton, Oxford Mar­tin School, for­mer chief sci­en­tist to the UK gov­ern­ment; Prof Steven Berry, Yale Uni­ver­si­ty; Prof Ken Caldeira*, Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty and Carnegie Insti­tu­tion for Sci­ence; Wolf­gang Cramer*, research direc­tor (CNRS), Mediter­ranean Insti­tute of marine and ter­res­tri­al bio­di­ver­si­ty and ecol­o­gy; Felix Creutzig*, chair Sus­tain­abil­i­ty Eco­nom­ics of Human Set­tle­ment at Berlin Tech­ni­cal Uni­ver­si­ty and leader at the Mer­ca­tor Research Insti­tute on Glob­al Com­mons and Cli­mate Change; Prof Dan Kam­men*, Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia at Berke­ley, direc­tor Renew­able and Appro­pri­ate Ener­gy Lab­o­ra­to­ry; Prof Eric Lam­bin, Uni­ver­sité catholique de Lou­vain and Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty; Prof Simon Levin, Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty, recip­i­ent US Nation­al Medal of Sci­ence; Prof Wolf­gang Lucht*, Hum­boldt Uni­ver­si­ty and co-chair of Pots­dam Insti­tute for Cli­mate Research; Prof Georgina Mace FRS*, Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege Lon­don; Prof William Moomaw*, Tufts Uni­ver­si­ty; Prof Peter Raven, direc­tor emer­i­tus Mis­souri Botan­i­cal Soci­ety, recip­i­ent US Nation­al Medal of Sci­ence; Tim Searchinger, research schol­ar, Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty and senior fel­low, World Resources Insti­tute; Prof Nils Chris­t­ian Stenseth, Uni­ver­si­ty of Oslo, past pres­i­dent of the Nor­we­gian Acad­e­my of Sci­ence and Let­ters; Prof Jean Pas­cal van Yper­se­le, Uni­ver­sité Catholique de Lou­vain, for­mer IPCC vice-chair (2008–2015).

 

Those marked * have been lead authors on IPCC reports.

 

For more on Pro­fes­sor Kam­men and the Renew­able and Appro­pri­ate Ener­gy Lab­o­ra­to­ry’s work on bio­mass, click here and search ‘bio­mass’

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