Leland Palmer: There isn’t enough land surface on earth to replace coal with biomass. You need an additional 2 or 3 Earths.

Thanks for the input and interest.

Not true, I’m happy to say, although you’d never know this listening to the gloom and doom about biomass orginating from the fossil fuel companies:

From Oak Ridge National Labs (ORNL), in their biomass faq:

http://bioenergy.ornl.gov/faqs/index.html#resource

1. How much biomass exists right now?

Worldwide, total “standing crop” biomass (99% on land, and 80% in trees) is a huge resource, equivalent to about 60 years of world energy use in the year 2000 (1250 billion metric tonnes of dry plant matter, containing 560 billion tonnes of carbon). For the U.S. alone, standing vegetation has been variously estimated at between 65 and 90 billion tonnes of dry matter (30-40 billion tonnes of carbon), equivalent to 14-19 years of current U.S. primary energy use. However, the Earth actually grows every year about 130 billion tonnes of biomass on land (60 billion tonnes of carbon) and a further 100 billion tonnes in the rivers, lakes and oceans (46 billion tonnes carbon). The energy content of this annual biomass production is estimated to be more than 6 times world energy use or 2,640 exajoules (2500 Quads) on land, with an additional 2024 exajoules (1920 Quads) in the waters.

So standing biomass in the U.S. is equivalent to 14-19 years of U.S, primary energy use – and we are the most energy intensive society on Earth. I don’t advocate cutting significantly into standing biomass that is actively sequestering CO2, even though trees go through a rapid growth phase when they are young during which they absorb more CO2 from the air. The main source of biomass that ORNL counts in their studies are crop residues such as cornstalks and agricultural waste.

I also don’t propose gathering biomass waste equivalent to our entire primary energy use – just biomass equivalent to our present coal use. I propose to put that entire 1 billion tons of carbon back underground as CO2 deep injected into deep saline aquifers, by transforming the coal fired power plants to more efficient carbon negative bioenergy plants. To do this would require approximately tripling the ORNL 1.2 billion tons of “waste” biomass per year that they located in their “Billion Ton Vision” biomass study a few years ago. I suggest making up the difference by planting biomass plantations, every scrap of carbonaceous waste we can get our hands on, dead trees generated by wildfires, imports, manure, and any other source of biomass we can scrape up without significantly affecting the CO2 absorbing capacity of standing forests.

The main problems with biomass are energy density, water content, and transport. That is what the transformation of biomass into biocarbon on site is about – carbonization into biocarbon makes biomass as transportable and energy dense as coal. Biocarbon should also be able to be a 100% replacement for coal in current coal fired power plants.

I’m very excited about my recent realization that rivers constitute a natural biocarbon transport network in the U.S., and that river transport is actually cheaper (though slower) than rail transport.

Carbonization and pelletization of biomass into biocarbon also makes it as water resistant and decay resistant as coal. It would also be possible to build large stockpiles of biocarbon, for example during the summer, fall, and winter, for river transport during high water in the spring.

AB: Thanks for the info.

Fascinating. You learn something new every day.

I’m back!

When the BART commuter rail system for the San Francisco Bay Area was first being put together in the 1960’s, voters in the south bay (Santa Clara county, which includes San Jose) rejected the proposal, largely (from what I understand) because they felt that it wasn’t good enough, and if they rejected it, another, better one would come along.

Didn’t happen that way. The rest of the Bay Area went ahead with the project, and the south bay still has only poor access to public transportation that can reach San Francisco and the rest of the bay area. There is now talk of connecting San Jose’s light rail system to BART, but rights of way have gotten much more expensive since then, and it can only be done at the cost of billions of dollars.

So I think Joe’s attitude towards W-M is sound: *some* sort of mechanism needs to be set up, even if it has issues. As time goes on, learning will occur about exactly where the problems are, and they can be addressed in an incremental fashion. In the meantime, everyone becomes accustomed to working within the cap-and-trade framework to begin with.

That’s how big things generally get done — take the development of orbit-capable rockets, for example. Von Brown and his partners didn’t sit around arguing how to get to orbit, trying to make it there on the first shot in one big project; rather, they *iterated* on loop of design, test, and redesign to figure out the solutions to all the problems as they became more familiar with the problem space.

Joe, you can do a diary yourself.

Expansion of carbon offsetting and clean development mechanism is locking developing nations into a high-carbon path, report warns
http://www.guardian.co.uk/ environment/ 2009/ jun/ 02/ carbon-offset-friends-of-the-earth