Not long ago I was talking to a friend who is doing an academic course in renewable and sustainable energy. He is a physicist who acts as a reviewer for a couple of learned journals and also has his own instrument manufacturing company that he has built on the research that earned him his PhD. Not surprising he has a very good mind that has been enhanced by the combination of academic distinction and the more practical problem solving skills required in the commercial world.
When we had last met, he was worried. His company was going through difficult times – no fault of his own – and he had a wife and family to consider. He was well aware that government cutbacks in funding for his field would make it very difficult, if things went seriously wrong with the business, to find work in the only profession for which he was qualified; as a research scientist. Jokingly I suggested that he should dream up some spurious application that his instruments might have in climate research, and then sit back while the grants rolled in. That was when he said that he was doing the renewables course, just as insurance against hard times.
When we met again, the other day, we talked about the course. An essay he was writing interested me as it dealt with the use of biomass, in this case burning wood chips, to provide energy for electricity generation. He had analysed a project that had recently gone into production and was being hailed as a breakthrough in carbon saving. When he looked at the figures, he noticed that the carbon footprint of transporting wood pellets to the plant had not been taken into account. Worse, these were being imported from South America. It had not been difficult to calculate the amount of carbon that would be released during the voyages from the southern hemisphere, and this cast considerable doubt on any net carbon saving.
I asked if the imported wood pellets were produced from a by-product of some kind, perhaps waste from a saw mill? No, he said, they were specially produced for biomass consumption so far as he could make out. Now wood, even softwood, is a remarkably tough and resilient material and, as anyone who has worked with it knows, requires a considerable amount of energy to reduce it to smaller dimensions. Planking a trunk is bad enough, reducing it to pellets must be quite an undertaking. So I asked whether the carbon footprint of producing the pellets was also left out of the calculations. There was a pause before he answered. The information available for the purpose of his essay only extended to the pellets being loaded onto a ship for its long journey across the Atlantic Ocean.
We decided that it was probably best to assume that the energy used to produce the pellets was derived from an entirely renewable, sustainable and carbon neutral source, and leave it at that.
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