Justin Catanoso is no stranger to wood pellet plants, as he lives near four of them in the U.S. state of North Carolina, where biomass giant Enviva has several facilities. While that company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy this year, it remains the single largest producer of wood pellets globally. This firm is one of […]
If we are looking at just the carbon though, that carbon is collected by the 2 year old trees, right? So it’s net carbon-neutral in that sense.
The tree itself would in theory have consumed as much carbon as it releases when burned, but when you take into consideration harvesting and processing, then it’s still a net producer.
It should also be noted that the order of magnitude is very different to fossil fuels. And at least in theory the harvesting and progressing can be done using renewable energy sources (at least for large parts of it). We are very far from actually doing this though.
The main issue in practice is the combustion byproducts and fine particulates.
is it from the machinery using fossil fuels?
Depends on what would be there if those trees weren’t grown/cut for wood. Old-growth forest stores more carbon than young forest. This perhaps would have been a more important point for the author to have made.