Michael Moore’s renewables critique is on the money, but biomass has a place

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Moore, no friend of business, at least to his credit turned his selective eye to the massive illusion that is the renewable energy agenda. While it is rewarding to see that end of the spectrum howling for the video to be banned, Moore didn’t get it all right – biomass has a place, if done right. It can be the focal point of efficient use of materials, something we would all be interested in if we could silence the climate scene madness. Read on…

39 Replies to “Michael Moore’s renewables critique is on the money, but biomass has a place”

  1. Everything has a place, as long as it is not subsidised by the tax payer for the benefit of those promoting an idea.

    1. I used to work in the pulp and paper industry, where the chemicals used to reduce the wood fiber are burnt as part of a recycle process, incidentally producing steam to generate electricity. When the government decided to subsidize “green” energy, they started paying us for something we were doing anyway. In fact, the subsidy made it economically attractive to mix diesel fuel with the chemicals to produce more “green” energy.

  2. A bit off topic, but weather related. I am looking out my patio door at snow falling. I do not recall snow in May here since I moved here in 1964. It may have happened but I sure don’t remember it.

    2. I have seen it snow on the May 24 weekend in1959. Didn’t stop me from letting off fire crackers though. Kitchener Ontario. Back then it was blamed on the Russians.

    3. 85 here on my back door in the shade.. West Coast.. 90 tomorrow.. Hopefully your weather will smarten up in time for final planting 25th May.. Remember last fall when crops were snowed under.. in the midwest, US.. happens a few years in a row it’s what famines are made of.. My garden failed last year.. got a handful of beans.. Don’t know why.

    5. It always snowed in May during my Saskatoon 1970/80… It was fertilizer time just before the Snow…We just went 50 years backwards…

  3. There is a company in Marshall Minnesota that takes the wash water from the corn processing plant and makes animal feed protein supplements out of it. The wash water used to go straight into the creek, but now these guys wring all goodies out of it and then it goes in the creek. They buy the other company’s waste water.

    This is also true in the animal processing business. There is no part of a cow, pig, chicken etc. that goes to completely to waste in the modern supply chain. Even the manure and the water the clean the place with has value.

    This is why I’m not a fan of government forced recycling. If there’s a process that can use a waste product, there’s a company out there BUYING that waste and using it as hard as they can.

    Biomass is no different. In a successful business environment there’s a shortage of the waste product.

  4. Biomass is useless as a fuel. You cannot haul it more than a few kilometres before the diesel burned to move it far exceeds its heat value. It’s just not dense enough. It only works if generation capacity is at the biomass source. Even then there needs to be a lot of biomass to pay the capital and operating costs.

    1. I vaguely remember a project we had in the mid 70`s regarding a Bio Mass boiler plant in PEI. It failed because they did not have sufficient local supply and had to truck it in.

      2. Wood pellets shipped to Europe are created from the destruction of hardwood forests in the Southeastern United States.

        1. Roaddog:

          Interesting. I read back around the 2008-09 housing crunch that wood pellets had jumped in price. It seemed much of the supply came from Quebec, and possibly Ontario, from waste derived from the manufacture of engineered hardwood flooring. As the housing market collapsed so did the supply of the waste.

      3. A lb of wood pellets takes up too much space in a truck. It’s low bulk density. Once you’ve loaded and unloaded the truck you’ve consumed a huge chunk of the cost already. Let alone even moving it. It’s a useless fuel if transport is involved. The wood pellet industry is a complete scam.

    3. Biomass works well in NICHE, SPECIALIZED conditions. Like the electricity generation plants in Grande Prairie, Alberta and Whitecourt, Alberta, which are located next door to large saw mills.

  5. The term ‘Biomass’ is deliberately deceptive. To me, it implies some kind of chemical process, somehow transforming cellulose into fuel. Had the proponents been honest from the start, they would have called it what it is: wood burning. And the energy derived from wood, versus an equal amount of coal makes it doubly inefficient.
    Back in the mid-1960’s, my dad invented and built an industrial-sized charcoal plant using the waste sawdust from sawmills in and around Huntsville, Ontario. It was compromised of two fully-enclosed tubes into which sawdust was dumped by front-end loader (I operated the loader). The sawdust was augered down those giant tubes, ‘cooking’ all the way, until it came out the far end as charcoal. The heating/burning process was first started by loading up the firebox beneath with wood and setting it afire. When the sawdust above began to ‘cook’ and give off vapours, those vapours would be collected and routed into the fire box to continue the process. No additional fuel was required in the process. The charcoal was cooled, water and starch were added and the output was put through a briquette press. The only fossil fuels used in the process were for the trucks bringing the sawdust to the plant and for the front-end loader. I thought it was brilliant. Still do. But we sure as hell didn’t label it ‘Biomass’.

    1. Your dad was brilliant. It made use of what otherwise would be waste. I am all for efficient and ingenious use of resources. Did he charge the sawmills a disposal fee? Sort of kidding on the square. That really would have been brilliant.
      Yeah, that’s what you’ve got to do these days, just invent a fancy name for the oldest source of energy for mankind, burning wood or peat or turf or whatever. So foregoing two hundred years of technological advances to create the most efficient and cheapest energy source in favor of primitive source available to cavemen is somehow the greatest technological advance of our age?
      The only possible argument for “biomass” vs “fossil fuel” is availability, since the product of burning biomass is still CO2. But we now know there isn’t any such thing as “peak oil” until at least the end of the century. I put it to you there is never going to be “peak oil”, because it isn’t “fossil” but made by the Earth as part of God’s providence in providing for us, if only we were smart enough to make use of it, and it sure took mankind long enough.
      Oh, by the way, just a humble observation in case you want to know. I hope you don’t mind. The word is “comprised” and not “compromised.”

      1. OB, thanks for the correction (of the correction) as auto correct had imposed. I failed to catch it. And OWG, yes the briquettes were used in charcoal grills, well before the backyard BBQ became a gas appliance. The sawmills were only too happy to give the sawdust away; the charcoal plant was just a couple of miles down the road.

    2. What did you do with the end-product “wood briquettes”? You loaded them onto trucks to be sent away to customers to burn for energy. In the end they were rather inefficient, IMO. Would it not be much more efficient to incinerate the waste sawdust and cut-offs on site and send out electricity to the grid?

      2. C68’s father’s invention turned waste into a useful commodity. That is a good thing. It created something useful that otherwise would not have existed, and eliminated some waste. It may not be the ultimate good thing, but it is a good thing, and the inventor ought to be commended.
        Turning the waste into electricity and putting it on the grid would be much more complicated. You are so smart, why don’t you invent the machine that would turn sawdust into electricity for the grid. That would be a better good thing, I guess. Or maybe not to the people who make use of the briquettes. Not to mention that back in the ’60s, the concept of a consumer putting electricity back into the grid was inconceivable. The power company would have just laughed in your face if you tried to sell them the idea then.

  7. Several years ago a local cropper told me about an article he had read. It said that farmers would have a market for straw and stover which could be refined into biofuels. I told him that with an unlimited supply of taxpayer dollars there was probably a way to turn cowshit into chocolate cake too.

  8. What is this biomass of which he speaks?
    Firewood?
    The utilization of sawdust for wood pellets was a brilliant idea..until government started subsidizing it and idiots started logging forests and grinding them up to make pellets..
    In the name of reduced carbon footprint..

    1. Exactly John. You hit the nail on the head. I would go one further. Biomass as a by product of the production and manufacture of wood derived products is a lofty goal. Cutting forests down for the specific purpose of chipping them up so they can turn them into wood pellets is not, and should be banned. Better off to preserve wildlife habitat and burn 100 million year old trees and biomass instead, with the added benefit of maintaining and growing natures carbon sinks, for future generations.

    2. And shipping the sawdust across the ocean to be formulated into pellets and then, in some cases, shipped back to Canada (for private consumption).

  9. Photosynthesis might be say, 2% efficient at turning solar energy into stored biomass. 35% gets recovered as electric energy. Sun only shines in daytime so 50%. Trees won’t grow unless it’s warm enough, wet enough, and there is enough fertilizer. Let’s say 10%.

    A small town needs 30 megawatts. Solar energy is 1 kW per square meter at the surface. 30000/1*50*3*2*10 is 90 million square metres of forest working full time to power the town. It takes thirty years to grow a tree so that’s say 2,700 square kilometres of forest reserved to operate a small town. I didn’t allow anything to cut, fertilize, dry, transport, or otherwise. You might want to double that again to 5,000.

    I just did this in five minutes. I had to look up efficiency of photosynthesis on google. I might be out by an order of magnitude either way.

    Biomass power plants are stupid. Let’s try another idea: look up how many primitive cultures with a low energy signature denuded their entire country to light campfires while subsistence farming. I forget the name of the island with the two different governments that is a stark example.

    Seriously, it is a stupid idea. Ignorance can explain this proposition exactly once. After that it is malicious, fraudulent, stupidity.

    2. That right there is what I wanted to address. Terry is a fine, astute writer, but the trees from interchanges and medians would never be enough to even cover the energy costs of moving the harvesting exuipment in and out to cut and transport a couple of acres of trees.
      And waste wood? No such thing anymore. In my BC hometown the pulp mill used to truck in wood chips from dozens of sawmills all over the interior. Most of those have shut down due to deforestation by logging or fire, pine beetle kill, environmentalists getting huge chunks of BC designated as parks, and so on, so the mill had to set up a big chipping plant and haul in whole trees to grind up. To make paper, for a society that was supposed to be paperless with all the computerization. At least newspapers use a whole lot less paper now. Now it’s flyers that waste it. Maybe someone should set up a biomass plant to burn junk mail.

  10. Entirely theoretical, and since it will never be implemented, unhelpful.

  11. Always thought petroleum was & is the product of BIO MASS…. The huge Green Vegetation buried for Billions of Years….Coal Etc…. Fossil fuel is a misnomer… It’s animal matter that produces Nat GAS

    JMHO

  12. Every time an energy source is transformed, there are losses (2nd law of thermodynamics). So when I burn wood from my acreage in a fireplace, I am using it as efficiently as I can because there is only one conversion (wood – chemical reaction – heat). Biomass involves a lot of other things, but setting aside the transportation issue for the moment (as I did in the first example), the wood is used to heat a fluid to drive a turbine to drive a generator to produce electricity into a hydro line to your house and into a furnace to heat your house (at minimum, 5 transformations). Each transformation is less than perfect and losses ensue. Yes, it can work, but for each loss, you need more energy input at the beginning to achieve the same result – keeping your house at 20 degrees C (or whatever you need).

    And all the narrator in Moore’s film did was start to appreciate what technology is – to go from simple usage to a bit of understanding and in his case, surprise. He actually thought that that Green technology somehow avoided the physical laws of the universe (as did Moore who remarked that he had never thought about where electricity came from and how it was produced). When ignorance is bliss, tis foolish to be wise.

  13. What a sleazy BS article.

    “..The term ‘Biomass’ is deliberately deceptive. To me, it implies some kind of chemical process, somehow transforming cellulose into fuel…” I could not agree more. and that particular process has shown to be prohobitively expensive, taking nearly the same Amount of energy input as its eventual output. 1:1.3 bls equivalent (See USN Capt. Ike Keifer’s paper on the subject.)

    Its one thing to do some kind of boutique power plant that actually uses WASTE wood product, its altogether a whole different Scenario having 300+ Generating stations 100% relying on the wholesale Destruction of Entire Forests.

    There is NOT ONe Damned thing WRONG about using COAL – used in a CLEAN MANNER as what we had here in Alberta – since destroyed by those ASSHOLES in the NDP and continued by those ASSHIOLES in the UCP.

    And if the so called environment movement TRULY wanted “clean” energy, we would be building Nuclear power plants….but, “the environment” has never been central to the Agenda has it….???

  14. If you were to replace Alberta’s current generating capacity with wood fired plants, you would consume about 53 million cubic metres or the entire annual allowable cut of Alberta and half of that of the BC interior and be grinding up logs worth multiple times the equivalent cost / MJ of coal or NG.

  15. On a “lighter” note.
    Canada would benefit massively from a huge mirror in fixed orbit above Hudson Bay.
    Same idea as Pournelle’s Fallen Angels.
    The ice age is coming,every 100 000 years so we had better get organized now.
    Turning Hudson bay into a brackish tropical style swamp,would do wonders for our agricultural prospects.
    And ever since I heard about this “Global Warming” thang I can’t wait..
    For how cold should Canada be?

    1. Such numbers are not hard to find, but they don’t figure prominently in reports on energy derived from the unreliables lobby (solar and wind). Their trick is to hide behind the statement that close to 14 per cent of the world’s energy is renewable, with the implication that this is wind and solar. In fact the vast majority — three quarters — is biomass (mainly wood), and a very large part of that is ‘traditional biomass’; sticks and logs and dung burned by the poor in their homes to cook with. Those people need that energy, but they pay a big price in health problems caused by smoke inhalation.

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