Perception is Reality Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. recent fire at Britain’s largest bio-mass power plant brought an au-dible groan from everyone in the biomass industry. The pellet storage area at the RWE plant in Tilbury, U.K., burned for hours, with specula-tion that the weight of the water used to douse the flames would become a hazard in its own right. Now it looks like much of the plant will be out of commission until July, a four-month shutdown that will undoubtedly af-fect grid reliability. Anti-biomass groups will now have another ex-ample as to why biomass burning is a bad idea, local consumers will have a scape-goat if blackouts ensue and other large utilities have another reason to drag their feet in adopting co-firing strategies. It’s not fair that biomass, or specifically wood pellets, are being measured against an unfair fuel standard – perfection. What they should be measured against is the al-ternative fuel supply, which in this case is coal. Coal hardly has an unblemished record on the safety front. From mining and pro-cessing to storage and combustion, coal needs to be handled very carefully. More to the point, the very RWE plant that is now shuttered suffered a major coal fire just three years ago. It was not seen as a deathblow to coal-fired plants elsewhere, nor were consumers or environmentalists calling for an end to coal combustion. It is an uneven playing field that those in the biomass sector are sadly getting used to, whether it is the demands of immediate carbon neutrality or emission comparisons that contrast apples and oranges. BIOMASS CANADIAN Volume 4 No. 7 Editorial Director/Group Publisher -Scott Jamieson (519) 429-3966 ext 244 [email protected] Associate Editor -David Manly (519) 429-3966 ext 261 [email protected] Contributors -Gordon Murray, Catherine Cob-den, William Strauss, Laurenz Schmidt, Jack Danylchuk, Todd Bush, Silvio Mergner, Hannes Lechner, Mariève Paradis, Christopher Rees Market Production Manager Josée Crevier Ph: (514) 425-0025 Fax: (514) 425-0068 [email protected] National Sales Manager Ross Anderson Ph: (519) 429-5188 Fax: (519) 429-3094 [email protected] Quebec Sales Josée Crevier Ph: (514) 425-0025 Fax: (514) 425-0068 [email protected] Western Sales Manager Tim Shaddick [email protected] Ph: (604) 264-1158 Fax: (604) 264-1367 Media Designer -Brooke Shaw Canadian Biomass is published six times a year: February, April, June, August, October, and December. Published and printed by Annex Publishing & Printing Inc. Printed in Canada ISSN 0318-4277 Circulation Carol Nixon e-mail: [email protected] P.O. Box 51058 Pincourt, QC J7V 9T3 Subscription Rates: Canada -1 Yr $49.50; 2 Yr $87.50; 3 Yr $118.50 Single Copy -$9.00 (Canadian prices do not include applicable taxes) USA – 1 Yr $60 US; Foreign – 1 Yr $77 US Occasionally, Canadian Biomass magazine will mail information on behalf of industry-related groups whose products and services we believe may be of interest to you. If you prefer not to receive this information, please contact our circulation department in any of the four ways listed above.. No part of the editorial content of this publica-tion may be reprinted without the publisher’s written permission ©2011 Annex Publishing & Printing Inc. All rights reserved. Opinions expressed in this magazine are not necessarily those of the editor or publisher. No liability is assumed for errors or omissions. All advertising is subject to the publisher’s approval. Such approval does not imply any endorsement of the products or services advertised. Publisher reserves the right to refuse advertising that does not meet the standards of the publication. A On the latter point, this issue includes a study examining some of the assump-tions on which the controversial but now famous Manomet study was based. Among other things, the study claimed that CO 2 emissions from biomass combustion were higher than those from burning coal, and used that as a basis to portray biomass combustion in a negative light. FutureMetrics, a com-pany out of Maine, took a closer look, making sure that things like moisture content and the entire harvesting cycle were fac-tored in. FutureMetrics found (as anyone with a fireplace can tell you) that wet biomass or coal creates more CO 2 than properly seasoned biomass. In fact, wood pellets, which are made from dried wood fibre, emit fewer emissions than coal, making them a solid choice for co-firing. This presents the biomass sector with several challenges. First, where emissions are a factor, we need to be sure we are doing our best to properly prepare the fuel for clean com-bustion. Second, we need to make sure power consumers are comparing apples to apples in public discussions, whether around renewability, sustainability, safety or emissions. Third, we want to be com-pared to a viable alternative, not Utopia. If we’re replacing coal, oil, or gas, how do we rate in those circumstances against those alternatives in all of the above four categories? In most cases, we’ll rate well. • Scott Jamieson, Editorial Director [email protected] 4 Canadian BIOMASS AUGUST 2008 www.canadianbiomassmagazine.com
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