Wood Won’t Save Us
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Will wood be a significant source of power for our nation in the twenty-first century? Wood chips and sawdust have long been burned at lumber and plywood plants to generate electricity and provide the heat necessary to dry lumber and cure plywood. For more than 100 years, the University of Oregon, just a few blocks from here, heated its main campus by burning sawdust in huge boilers to create steam that was piped underground to the buildings’ radiators. But in 1992, as wood chips became harder to come by, the university switched to natural gas to fire its boilers. In Vermont, however, Middlebury College has gone the opposite direction. Earlier this year, the small liberal arts school replaced its fuel oil boiler with a wood-fired steam plant. The $12 million facility uses wood left over from regional logging operations. Middlebury, long known for its progressive politics, made the switch to reduce its carbon footprint. Skyrocketing fuel oil prices, which doubled from 2005 to 2008 (but, during the past year, have plummeted to earlier levels) no doubt also influenced its decision. Middlebury isn’t alone. Many utilities are adding wood to their energy portfolio as they seek to comply with renewable energy requirements in twenty-seven states. The state-by-state rules require utilities to produce an increasing fraction of their electrical power from solar, wind, geothermal, wood and other renewable options, not including nuclear. These mandates, which act in concert with federal and state tax incentives and grants, are boosting wood and other renewable energy production, even in the face of a global economic recession that is battering energy prices. When compared to solar, wind, geothermal or hydropower, woody biomass is an expensive electricity source. The problem lies not in the cost of generating power from the wood—boilers and steam turbines are well-understood, nineteenth-century technology—but in the cost of getting the wood from the forest to the boiler. (Some entrepreneurs want to take the boiler to the forest, but that begs the issue of stringing transmission lines through the woods.) Gathering up twigs, branches, brush and small trees with no lumber value is an expensive task. Unlike a farmer’s field, where corn is grown for ethanol, many forests (and most national forest acreage) are steep and rocky, making them costly to access. The wood that grows on these forests wouldn’t be profitable for electricity unless the most ambitious carbon dioxide reductions are enforced. Only a dramatic drop in fossil fuel use would increase energy prices enough to make national forest biomass economically competitive. According to many climate scientists, reducing fossil fuel use by 80 percent is necessary to prevent further increases in greenhouse gases—which have seen a rise unprecedented during human civilization. It is an understatement to say that won’t be easy. Three-quarters of the United States’ energy use comes from fossil fuels. Only twice since the Industrial Revolution has energy consumption declined—during the 1930s Great Depression and the current recession—and in both cases the decline was by only a small fraction. In fact, energy use is a pretty good proxy for economic growth. Wood energy has been declining steadily in the United States since 1985. Since the early 1980s, renewable sources of energy have declined from 9 to 6 percent of the country’s total energy use. The road to renewable energy dominance will be steep and unlikely to pass through our national forests. |