The R.E. Burger power plant is making the switch from coal to biomass. Photo: FirstEnergy
Echo recently covered the prospect of the Great Lakes states supplanting their steady diet of coal with biomass — that’s trees, crop waste and other plants that can be burned for energy.
It’s an attractive but tricky plan. If done right, it could be a “carbon-neutral” fuel because crops can be managed to absorb carbon dioxide and the vegetation would theoretically decompose and release its carbon anyway. If done wrong, we’ll rack up a carbon debt from still-recovering forest resources instead of fossil fuels.
If it wasn’t already complicated enough, try figuring out how biomass emissions ought to figure into Senate climate legislation released this month by Sens. John Kerry, D-Mass., and Joe Lieberman, I-Conn. As the bill stands now, biomass energy sources get a free pass in the cap-and-trade system meant to limit the nation’s greenhouse emissions.
But there’s still time for that to change, and that’s just what a group of 90 scientists across the country recently advocated for in a letter to the Democratic leadership in Congress (PDF). The signatories include 18 scientists from universities in every Great Lakes state but Ohio.
If biomass energy sources are assumed to be carbon neutral and their greenhouse gas emissions aren’t accounted for, “this approach could eliminate most of the expected greenhouse gas reductions during the next several decades,” the letter says.
And this isn’t just a Great Lakes problem, or even just a national one:
“U.S. laws will also influence world treatment of bioenergy. A number of studies in distinguished journals have estimated that globally improper accounting of bioenergy could lead to large-scale clearing of the world’s forests.”
For much more on the issue and the letter, check out this blog post by Nathanael Greene, the NRDC’s director of renewable energy policy.