Guest opinion: Forest biomass offers Montana promise, pitfalls

[Fledermaus]

The recent closure of Smurfit-Stone’s paper mill in Missoula has loggers and sawmill operators wondering who will buy their small logs, sawdust, chips and other residues — an important stream of revenue. These questions have prompted suggestions that creating a new market to burn these and other woody fuels for energy offers solutions to overgrown forests, high fossil fuel prices and a struggling wood products industry.
Done right, woody biomass can replace some coal and natural gas, provide new industry for rural communities, create good jobs, and contribute to a prosperous wood products industry. Most important, woody biomass energy can help us to engage in an ambitious campaign to address deteriorating forest conditions caused by past logging, 100 years of fire suppression, and the spread of housing into forestland.
Although biomass plants can burn wood wastes from sawmills, those wastes alone will not provide enough fuel. The majority of the fuels will come from small diameter trees originating from two sources. The first is hazardous fuel treatments designed to make communities safer from severe fire. The second is restoration harvests on overgrown, low-elevation forests suffering from past, high-grade logging and fire suppression. A Montana biomass energy market would, in some cases, help pay the costs of doing good restoration and community fire protection work.

http://billingsgazette.com/news/opinion/guest/article_1e5741de-0d54-11df-8383-001cc4c03286.html

[wtmusic]

1. "Biomass" = Greenspeak for "Trees"

Chips, sawdust, and "residues" (whatever the hell that is) are inconsequential. We're talking about cutting down trees and burning them.

[sandnsea]

3. These trees need to come out

They're not really trees, they're little matchstick forests that burn hot and spread into the healthier forests and burn them too. This is a much better approach then logging old growth to offset the expense of thinning in other areas, which is what we're doing now.

[Fledermaus]

5. DU ask that we not post whole articles.

Its a balanced article.

It can be done. In some states, its all ready been done for decades now.

[wtmusic]

6. The problem is that burning trees is not carbon-neutral

It's true the carbon in trees has been largely trapped from the atmosphere. If we were to take a cut tree and burn it slowly over a period of 50 years as another took its place, there would be no net gain in atmospheric carbon. But burning mature trees and replacing them with seedlings takes sequestered carbon and releases it abruptly - at a time when we can least afford it. Eventually an equilibrium will be reached, but it will be far too late.

Two points by way of illustration:

- Currently the largest contributor to GHGs is the burning of "carbon-neutral" rainforest for agricultural purposes in equstorial regions.

- In a similar light, burning oil and natural gas could be considered carbon-neutral, as the carbon sequestered within was the result of the decay of prehistoric plants.

Not to mention the carcinogenic chemicals released from burning wood, the soot, the sulfur dioxide, the nitrous oxides, etc. Although that can be significantly reduced through filtration and gasification.

Financially-strapped states need to resist the urge to capitalize on this tempting resource - it would be a disastrous exacerbation of a problem that is all too formidable already.

[kristopher]

7. Your understanding of carbon cycles is as poor as your understanding of nuclear's total value

The issue isn't just "burning trees" that "happen" to come from the Amazon rainforest as they convert the land to agricultural uses.

The issue is that they CLEARING ESTABLISHED OLD GROWTH FORESTS AND ECOSYSTEMS AND CONVERTING IT TO AGRICULTURE.

There is a net difference in CARBON LOCKED AWAY by the DIFFERENT LAND USES.

Biomass (yes that includes but is not limited to trees) CAN BE harvested and used in a manner that is, as described above, CARBON NEUTRAL.

I know you've been corrected (with documentation from the IPCC) when you made this SAME false assertion before; so it is dufficult to conclude that you are making false statements unintentionally - and we all know what the common term is for intentionally making false statements.

[jpak]

8. Umm...the major contributors to greenhouse gases are combustion of fossil fuels - not deforestation

or other land use practices.

...and using sustainable forestry practices biomass IS carbon neutral - as the rates of forest growth (biomass additions) are equal or greater than biomass removal (harvest).

just sayin'

[wtmusic]

9. About half as much as all fossil fuels combined is attributable to land use practices

and your equation ignores the contribution to GHGs of plants which die and decay unharvested.

[sandnsea]

2. Good. If they are willing to stop logging

and fix the forests that are so horrifically screwed up, then we need to be doing everything we can to help in the transition. It's taken them long enough to figure out that they've got to change.

[xchrom]

4. This is where fed authorities could work with localities

And produce some positive results -- there are 'young' forests
that present some problems.