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Old 10-06-2022, 07:39 AM   #2507
Fuzz
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Originally Posted by opendoor View Post
It sort of depends what logs they were using. If they logged a forest for pellets, that's one thing. But if a forest was logged for lumber and they took the leftover logs that sawmills wouldn't buy for, that's another matter. People who sell firewood in BC often do a similar thing. A logging company clear cuts an area and leaves the junk trees, and then rather than burning them or letting them rot (both of which releases carbon), they let businesses come in and chop up the wood for firewood.

I mean, simple economics would dictate that these were probably not high-quality logs. No one's going to use good trees for pellets when you could sell the logs for lumber at 5-10x the price.
I dunno, after reading this ...

Quote:
"The greenwashing of the pellet industry needs to stop," Bob Simpson, the mayor of Quesnel, a town in B.C.'s Interior whose fortunes rise and fall with the forestry sector, told The Fifth Estate.
Quote:
More than 500 scientists and economists also wrote a letter demanding an end to those subsidies, calling burning wood a "false solution" to the climate crisis, and saying "trees are more valuable alive than dead, both for climate and for biodiversity." Drax was recently dropped from the S&P's green energy index.
Quote:
"Now that we understand so much more, we can't any longer think 'Oh well, that means [burning wood pellets is] better than coal … better than gas.' The reality is that we know it's not," he said.

"We've just got to say, 'We got it wrong.' "

Brack said scientific studies show that burning wood produces more carbon emissions than coal.

"If you burn wood in the presence of oxygen, it generates more carbon dioxide per unit of energy generated than if you burn almost all types of coal."
Quote:
In the heart of one of B.C.'s most forest-dependent regions, Simpson said he understands the allure of potential pellet industry investment for hard-hit logging towns. But he said there's better uses for the province's timber, whether it's bioplastics or engineered wood products like fibreboard, and it just takes creative thinking and government leadership.

"You can take wood waste in the bush and wood waste in the mills and you can turn them into really high-value products that still store the carbon in them," Simpson said.

"Pull the subsidies, stop the silly math of disappearing the greenhouse-gas emissions today from this. It becomes self-evident that it's not an industry that we should be supporting."
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/wood-...ergy-1.6606921

I'm not at all convinced wood pellets are a good use of trees.
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