geo444 wrote:Ahmed wrote:I am "downright Biomass-Skeptic!" In what way a process whatever it is and assuming that it is virtuous from the point of view CO² ...
It's extremely simple :
la biomass - especially if nothing is done = the Current Case ...
anyway ends up degrading into CO2 and CH4 = GHG 100 times more powerful!
Methanization is an almost free production GHG issue
... and Downright Free versus Oil + Gas imported from "Democratures / Autocracies"
and paid from ~ 40 à ~ 80 Billion $ per year!
la biomass is infinitely renewable ...
-vs- Oil + Gas are Fossil Energies that Increase GHGs!
Don't get too many illusions, Geo, biomass is already the first source of renewable energy, in France as in the world, and the available balance is much lower than what your figures say… I refer you to what is happening in Germany (Friends of the Earth has already widely denounced the ecological catastrophe that this sector represents in Germany) and I also refer you to the exact state of the availability of the forest in France (see here: http://www.lutopik.com/Lutopik_8web.pdf ), well below what some say…
We can probably get a little more energy from wood (the use of which in France has dropped since 1990), probably in the form, very diluted, of fuel for small dispersed installations (this is one of the processes of most polluting heating); but it won't la miracle energy source, and especially not for transport, which represents more than a third of the energy consumed in France (more than 500 TeraWh / year); we are not in the same order of magnitude.
I also remind you that the earth, which carries and nourishes this "infinitely renewable biomass", needs to be given back part of what it has produced to remain fertile; what seem to care very little about the German "bio-gas" industrialists, extracting from the ground all they can draw from it, the time that will last the public subsidies which support them; nothing to do with sustainable agriculture concerned with preserving the soil ... ( http://www.amisdelaterre.org/Mais-metha ... icite.html ).
All this not out of "biomass skepticism", but only for the sake of realism, and not to systematically err on the side of the road to take.