The numbers from NRC's calculator seem a bit off to me, but I'm far from an expert. For one I always assumed new-growth forests would be a lot more efficient at sequestering carbon than old-growth forests. The conspiracy-minded part of me wonders if there might be some dark money from the fossile fuel industry involved in fudging the numbers. NRC manages some of the world's largest forests, but also some of it's richest coal and oil fields.
Still, large-scale power production from wood pellets probably isn't a sustainable solution for solving global warming. I think there's a good place for it at a smaller scale though, primarily burning wood waste, especially if we can ever get CCS to work at industrial scales.
Reading about biofuels is always so frustrating. Ending these insane subsidies should be such an easy bipartisan issue.
I had no idea about this. There definitely seems to be a lot of greenwashing going on, and creative accounting.
The numbers from NRC's calculator seem a bit off to me, but I'm far from an expert. For one I always assumed new-growth forests would be a lot more efficient at sequestering carbon than old-growth forests. The conspiracy-minded part of me wonders if there might be some dark money from the fossile fuel industry involved in fudging the numbers. NRC manages some of the world's largest forests, but also some of it's richest coal and oil fields.
Still, large-scale power production from wood pellets probably isn't a sustainable solution for solving global warming. I think there's a good place for it at a smaller scale though, primarily burning wood waste, especially if we can ever get CCS to work at industrial scales.