Are Biomass Incinerators Bad For The Environment?

[Kennah]

I ask the question based upon this read in The Seattle Times from Monday.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2014157806_guest08badgley.html

Gut instinct has always made me leery of incinerators.

What's the truth?

[madokie]

1. Duff Badgley

http://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=Duff+Badgley&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8

sounds like a person looking for a reason to be whatever will get him further on down the road.

Me thinks he's full of shit as a christmas turkey and is not to be trusted to say anything even resembling the truth unless there's something in it for him personally.

My gut instinct is he is not the truth.

[Name removed]

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[lfairban]

6. About that article

I believe the article you cited describes the particulate emissions from burning sugar cain in an open field, not burning bio-fuels in a power plant using best practices.

That is like comparing Jack Daniels to moonshine.

[madokie]

8. You thinks he cares

Talks about all the deaths caused from burning biomass all the time when most of those deaths are caused by the burning of biomass in open fires and poorly designed stoves inside dwelling for heat and cooking in third world countries not from burning coal in a power plant. Very little will he post that is factual or relevant if you follow the links he provides. A paid shill for the nuclear industry and nothing more.

[lfairban]

5. OP article seems biased

Are they really saying that burning coal is better by all environmental measurements than biofules?

If so, I would look for confirmation.

Here is an interesting article:

Biomass Can Only Offer Major Emission Reductions if Best Practices Are Followed, New UK Report Says

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/04/biomass-can-only-offer-major-emission-reductions-if-best-practices-followed.php

[saras]

2. It depends - the policy is more the problem than the tools

If they are designed, owned, and operated by multinational corporations, unicorns and rainbows can be bad for the environment.

The Seattle Times is not a particularly liberal paper (it's not teabagger at all, though, just pro-corporate) so I suspect the editorial describes scientific opinion pretty accurately. The enormous QUANTITIES involved seem to be much of the problem than the fact of burning. It's not specifically incinerators as such, it's burning that much of anything that fast that's a problem. Note that the organizations quoted as opposing biomass incineration aren't particularly progressive, they're things like the EPA and the American Lung Association.

By the numbers given, the burning is nowhere near sustainable, no matter what the burning conditions are. Even methane digesters, if they required that much fuel, would strip the Northwest of growing material in short order, probably requiring GMO crops, fertilized with petroleum products, to keep up the planned production rates.

[Name removed]

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[NYC_SKP]

7. Would we rather have CH4 (methane) from rotting biomass or CO2 from combustion?

The biomass will break down into one or the other and one of the two gases will enter the atmosphere.

Methane or CO2.

From what I've read CO2 is less harmful as a greenhouse gas.

And the carbon is part of the terrestrial/ocean/atmospheric reservoir of carbon, not from the lithosphere reservoir like fossil fuels.

So, I'm not going to call it "worse" than coal or natural gas.

But it's not "good" for the environment, either.

The article has the ring of "oh noes" to it, IMHO.

:shrug:

[XemaSab]

9. I think methane only evolves

under anaerobic conditions. :shrug: