What can you use biomass energy for

It also plays a role in reducing our dependence on imported oil, extending the supply of U. The aviation industry is also taking biofuels to new heights. BETO sponsored an award-winning research project that involved the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and Skokie, Illinois-based LanzaTech, which can recycle industrial waste gas from steel making and other heavy processes and convert it to a revolutionary form of jet fuel with dramatically reduced levels of emissions.

The project received awards from the Innovation Research Interchange in and the Federal Laboratory Consortium in Biobased feedstocks can be used to produce a range of personal care products, such as skin cream, shampoo, mascara , and more.

For example, the acetone in your nail polish remover can be produced by fermenting plant sugars, while the palmitic acid that gives your hair that glossy shine after you condition is one of the most common saturated fatty acids found in microorganisms and plants.

Public demand has renewed industry interest in biobased cosmetics, and innovations in biotechnology are making these products cheaper and more efficient to manufacture. Algae are big-time oil producers capable of generating up to 5, gallons of oil per acre.

Biomass, on the other hand, releases carbon dioxide that is largely balanced by the carbon dioxide captured in its own growth depending how much energy was used to grow, harvest, and process the fuel. However, studies have found that clearing forests to grow biomass results in a carbon penalty that takes decades to recoup, so it is best if biomass is grown on previously cleared land, such as under-utilized farmland. The use of biomass can reduce dependence on foreign oil because biofuels are the only renewable liquid transportation fuels available.

Biomass energy supports U. The main biomass feedstocks for power are paper mill residue, lumber mill scrap, and municipal waste. For biomass fuels, the most common feedstocks used today are corn grain for ethanol and soybeans for biodiesel. The first step in using biomass energy actually happens on its own, when plants absorb and store the energy they get from the sun during photosynthesis. From this point, there are five ways we can access this energy.

We can get it directly from the plants or use the waste left behind after the plants have been consumed by animals. We can also get it from garbage, alcohol fuels, and gases from landfills. There are three distinct types of biomass fuels , and they mirror the three states of matter you learned in school: solid, gas, and liquid. Solid fuel sources include things like wood, fruit and vegetable pieces we have discarded, or other types of food and agricultural waste.

These can be burned to create heat or generate electricity. They can also be converted to liquid or gas forms of biofuel. Gas fuel sources, or biogas, come from human and animal waste or byproducts manure, fish oil, etc , and from rotting or decaying organisms. Biogas is produced as these things decompose in landfills or are processed in digesters. Examples of liquid forms of biomass fuel include ethanol and biodiesel. Sterman — who is keen to point out that his bioenergy research is independent, funded neither by the forestry or bioenergy industry, nor environmental groups — says he was initially optimistic about biomass energy.

But the more he looked into it, the more concerned he became. Using a lifecycle analysis model, Sterman and his colleagues calculated the payback time for forests in the eastern US — which supply a large share of the pellets used in the UK — and compared this figure to the emissions from burning coal.

Under the best-case scenario, when all harvested land is allowed to regrow as forest, the researchers found that burning wood pellets creates a carbon debt, with a payback time of between 44 and years Environ. Sterman stresses that he is not advocating a return to burning coal. But Sterman argues that the opposite is actually true.

The faster a forest is growing, the greater the future carbon storage is lost. It had been assumed that young trees mop up more carbon than old ones because they are fast-growing, but recent studies have revealed that ancient woodland growing in temperate regions takes up more CO 2 than young plantations.

This is because in some cases, growth accelerates with age and CO 2 absorption is approximately equivalent to biomass Nature But even if old trees are continuing to draw down CO 2 , what happens when a tree dies? Current carbon accounting assumes that all the carbon from dead wood is released back into the atmosphere again.

Removing forest thinnings and burning them to produce energy is therefore viewed as better than leaving them on the forest floor to rot. However, Sterman argues that this fails to take account of the entire system.

In she used a model to calculate the net emissions impact — the difference between combustion emissions and decomposition emissions, divided by the combustion emissions — when forestry residues are burned for energy. Booth was so concerned by what she found that she co-ordinated a lawsuit against the EU in March eubiomasscase. Currently she is waiting to hear if the court will accept the case. Currently around two-thirds of renewable energy in Denmark is provided by biomass, and it plays a vital role in keeping district heating systems running, particularly when the wind fails to blow.

In Scott Bentsen in Copenhagen calculated the carbon debt and payback time for a combined heat and power generation plant in Denmark.

His results suggested that the carbon debt was paid back after just one year, and that after 12 years greenhouse-gas emissions were halved relative to continued coal combustion Energies 11 These numbers are vastly different to the plus years of payback time estimated by Sterman, so what makes Danish biomass energy different to the kind of process seen at Drax? Calculating the carbon payback time for a specific supply chain can play a significant role in helping to fine-tune management practices and minimize emissions.