What the Fireplace Police don't want you to know

[handy]

The "spare the air" folks need to "spare us" their IGNORANCE !

WOOD FUEL IS THE ANSWER ITS CARBON NEUTRAL , NATURAL GAS IS NOT!

read, get educated and WAKE UP! Tell everybody you know about this.

Hot New High-Tech Energy Source Is … Wood?

Mason Inman
for National Geographic News

Burning trees for power may seem backward, dirty, and environmentally hostile. But a high-tech new way of wood burning holds great potential to save energy, cut costs, and even fight global warming, a new study says.

For example, in the United States wood could sustainably supply “enormous amounts of energy, comparable to power production from hydroelectric [dams],” says the study, to be published in tomorrow’s issue of the journal Science. Already, “advanced wood combustion” is powering a U.S. college and cities across Europe, such as Joensuu, Finland. Joensuu’s “air quality has improved greatly,” said city resident Antti Asikainen, a forestry expert at the Finnish Forest Research Institute. “It’s a really clean technology.” The city of roughly 58,000 “is heated with a wood and peat mixture, which has replaced small fireplaces and oil burners—they’re the worst generators” of pollution, Asikainen said.

To get these wood-burning benefits, cities can’t rely on ordinary furnaces. In advanced wood combustion power plants, intense heat and carefully controlled conditions ensure that nearly all the carbon in the wood is broken down into flammable gases. Then the gases are ignited, burning much more cleanly than a typical smoky home fireplace. The heat from burning the gas can be used directly for heating or to generate electricity. The power plants also have filters that remove many of the small particles that come from burning the wood, greatly reducing pollution.


Wood Is Green?

Another early adopter of advanced wood burning is Middlebury College in Vermont, which opened a wood-fired power plant last month. Middlebury wants to be carbon neutral—eliminating its emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2)—by 2016 (interactive graphic: how greenhouse gases cause global warming). Trees suck CO2 out of the air as they grow and then release roughly the same amount of CO2 when they’re burned in the advanced power plants, said Jack Byrne, director of the college’s Sustainability Integration Office. So the process of growing, harvesting, and burning wood is close to carbon neutral, Byrne said. By switching to advanced wood power, “we have a 40 percent reduction in carbon emissions,” Byrne said.

And, the Finnish Forest Research Institute’s Asikainen said, wood power is possible without depleting forests. Large amounts of wood can be harvested sustainably from forests, as long as the forests are managed correctly, he said. Furthermore, if wood harvesters leave nutrient-rich leaves and needles on the forest floor and return leftover ash to forest soils, then “we’re not endangering the productivity of the forests,” Asikainen added.

Not that all the wood has to come from forests. U.S. cities produce about 30 million tons of wood from trees that have been trimmed or otherwise removed every year, according to the new study. This debris could be fed into power plants instead of being mulched or sent to landfills, the authors say. St. Paul, Minnesota, for example, already heats and powers much of its downtown by burning about 250,000 tons of wood collected each year from city trees.

(Related: “Hardy Plant May Ease Biofuels’ Burden on Food Costs.”)

Fuel Savings

Increased use of wood furnaces can also have financial benefits, said study co-author Dan Richter, a Duke University forest ecology professor. “In the [U.S.] Northeast, it can help communities move beyond their potentially crippling dependence on fossil heating oil,” which has had a wildly fluctuating price, Richter said.

At Middlebury, Byrne expects wood power to save $600,000 in 2009 by cutting the college’s fuel oil use by about a million barrels. “We’re quite confident that it will pay for itself” in about 13 years—”less than half the power plant’s lifetime,” Byrne said.

[The image above shows the new biomass power plant at Vermont's Middlebury College, It was Opened in February 2009 and is expected to burn 20,000 tons of wood chips each year to provide heat and electricity for the campus. The plant uses an "advanced wood combustion" system. Such plants hold great potential to save energy, cut costs, and even fight global warming, a March 2009 study says.]

Burning wood could be carbon neutral – if done the right way melange

But wait there's MORE !

Wood is a renewable resource. In the United States, 33 percent more trees are grown than are
harvested. Every year two billion trees are planted, about six and a half million every day. The value of wood as a renewable resource is seen in the fact that the same forests in Maine that produced wood for the Continental Navy are still providing wood today.

Wood is energy efficient. It takes nine times more energy to produce a steel stud than to produce a wood stud. Five times more energy is used for aluminum siding than wood siding. Steel, both new and recycled, uses 4,000 times more coal, oil, and gas in its refining, manufacturing, and fabricating process than does wood. Wood has eight times the thermal resistance or insulating capability of concrete, 413 times that of steel and 2,000 times that of aluminum.
Wood is an environmentally friendly resource. It is recyclable and biodegradable. The forests
from which our wood is derived provide for wildlife habitat. They also act as natural air filters,
absorbing unwanted carbon dioxide gas contributing to global warming—and release breathable oxygen.

Indeed, from its first recorded use 4,000 years ago to its continued use today, wood has become an integral component of everyday life.


Make the planet friendly choice! Canadian wood is:
Renewable
Wood literally does grow on trees! With proper sustainable forest management, our Canadian forests will continue to produce more wood indefinitely.
Reusable
After decades or even centuries of use, wood can still be reused in new buildings. Wood from barns, timber frames, etc. can be reclaimed for new purposes.
Recyclable
There is virtually no waste in wood product manufacturing; bark, sawdust and chips are used for the manufacturing of MDF or finger-jointed lumber or are burned as carbon-neutral biofuel in place of fossil fuel.
Sequestering carbon
As trees grow, they absorb carbon dioxide and store it, preventing it from being released back into the atmosphere. Carbon remains stored in wood and even in some paper products.
From sustainable forests
Canada has the most protected forest in the world. Over 500 million seedlings are planted each year across the country, and harvested forests are promptly regenerated.
Abundant and available
Since 1990, Canada’s rate of deforestation is virtually zero (NRCan 2008a). Canada retains nearly 90% of its original forest cover (CCFM 2006b, WRI 2007).

Cost effective
Wood products require less energy to extract, process and transport than steel or concrete, and wood-framed buildings are more energy-efficient, costing less to construct and operate over time.
A natural insulator
Wood is 400 times better than steel and 10 times better than concrete in resisting the flow of heat. Wooden buildings require much less insulation to retain their warmth.
Beautiful
Wood is a warm and comforting material that creates a welcoming environment and provides a tangible connection to nature and the outdoors. Wood offers an authentic aesthetic appeal that no other material can produce.
Biodegradable
Wood is an all-natural product. Not only can a wood product be reused and recycled in many ways, but at the end of its life it will return to the earth with minimal environmental impact.
Lightweight and strong
The strength and durability of wood is evident in the many wooden heritage buildings worldwide. Wooden buildings like Norway's beautiful Stave churches are still structurally sound and are still in use today, centuries after being built.


Zero Waste
Besides being adaptable, wood is a practical building material. Mills make wise use of wood, for both economic and environmental reasons. Nearly the entire tree is used. Bark is removed and used for mulch and decorative landscaping. First cuts and unusable board feet are recovered or culled for use in engineered wood products. Board ends are cut up and sold as hobby wood. Sawdust and shavings are packaged for animal bedding. In some mills, scrap wood is even used to produce energy or steam to keep the mill and kilns running. "All these lumber companies are looking at ways to have zero waste," Gervais explains. Whether it's low-waste mill management, engineered lumber solutions, culled wood programs, or scrap recovery, economical use of timber and all of its products makes sense in today's world.

[Braggi]

... Wood products require less energy to extract, process and transport than steel or concrete, and wood-framed buildings are more energy-efficient, costing less to construct and operate over time.
...

Actually, wood is a pretty terrible building material in a lot of ways. Bugs eat it, it burns easily, it rots quickly without heavy doses of chemical treatment (paints, stains and other preservatives) and it's naturally inconsistent, having knotholes, grains that can weaken it, and as it dries it can twist, bow and check.

An even more obvious building material we seem to have forgotten about is the oldest in the world: adobe. When I was a kid in southern CA there was an adobe brick plant right outside of town. Adobe buildings don't need to be air conditioned in summer and require minimal heating in winter. Adobe buildings can be made any shape including round and hexagonal which provides novel decorating options and challenges. Adobe need not be painted and is lasts practically forever if the roof is built with wide eaves and is well maintained. Bugs won't eat it and the sun won't degrade it.

The best, most efficient home building materials are determined by locality which is something out petroleum guzzling civilization has forgotten. We're all about transporting materials when often the best thing to use is what we're standing on.

The article above was obviously an advertisement from a timber company, and while I agree with a lot of what was said, it makes little sense to keep blinders on while we plan the construction of our dwellings.

The notion that it's a carbon neutral fuel is mostly correct, but even that must be tempered with the honesty that it's petroleum powered tools that transport loggers, cut the trees, split the wood, transport the split wood, load the wood back into trucks, and deliver it to the end customer. There are a lot of dinosaurs burned to deliver that carbon neutral fuel to the final customer.

I like the notion of modern "wood gas stoves" (do a google search on them). I own a wood gas camp stove that allows me to camp (nearly) anywhere and use local twigs for fuel. Nice not to have stinky, dangerous fuel along on my camping trips. I await this technology scaling up to home heating duty. That will be a good thing as it reduces most of the pollution from wood burning dramatically.

In the mean time, the "Spare the Air" folks are trying to save children suffering from asthma. What they're asking is reasonable until we have better wood burning stoves available. (I know there are a lot of "less polluting" wood stove options. Hopefully there are some that will please the AQMD people.)

-Jeff

PS. We heat our home exclusively with a wood stove. We live out in the forest so we're not bothering our neighbors much.

[someguy]

The "spare the air" folks need to "spare us" their IGNORANCE !

Logging is pretty shitty and Im way against that, but I do think growing Hemp is the way to go!!!

It can be used for fuel, weed control, water and soil purification, paper, cordage, animal bedding, fabric, composite material, construction material, fiber, medicine, dietary supplement, and food.