Tough Times for Biomass?
At about the same time federal environmental officials have decided not to exempt biomass from the same carbon dioxide regulations that are proposed for fossil-fuel power plants, now come proposed rules for carbon monoxide (CO) and particulate matter that could cripple the industry.
That's at least the views of a member of the Biomass Thermal Energy Council (BTEC), a trade organization.
"It would appear that if those regulations were adopted, then the biomass industry would be fatally injured," said Scott Nichols, president of Tarm USA Inc., a New Hampshire-based company that primarily sells residential boilers but which can be configured for commercial operations.
When I contacted BTEC, I was referred to Nichols as the organization's point man on the subject. He said the order books of members have dried up with the uncertainty of the rules, with the EPA now receiving public comments, with a final rule adopted in mid-December.
"It would be hard for me to believe that the rule would remain the way it has been proposed, with so many parts of the industry affected by it," Nichols told me this week.
He rattled off not just power producers and energy companies, but manufacturers and the forestry products industry. Retrofits for existing power plants may not be cost-effective.
The proposed rules call "large" boilers as those that can produce more than 10 million Btus per hour and "small" boilers produce less than 10 million Btus per hour. For example, the stoker boiler technology would have limits 0.02 pounds of particulate matter for 1 million Btus produced, and 560 parts-per-million of CO.
When I asked what the "best case" of the current proposal might be and he said that the final rules would not be as harsh and that the parts of the industry that need to be cleaned up will do so. He declined my offer to speculate on the "worst case."
The proposed rule was published in the Federal Register last Friday, with a 45-day comment period to follow. The public comment period on the rule is technically open until July 19, but the EPA is encouraging comments to be submitted by July 6.
After mid-July, the industry then waits for a few months, waiting to see how "green" environmental regulators truly believe it to be.
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Comments
Wood Biomass Supporters Can't See the Forest for the Trees
While I believe that wood biomass does need to have a role in our energy future, it is not the panacea that many claim it to be. One can calculate carbon offsets in ways to make it look attractive, but in the end burning wood or wood waste in a stoker fired boiler, CFB, or other boiler is not an efficient way to produce energy. Thus, we are taking an available product (that has other benefits and other uses) and using it in a very inefficient way to produce power. Small scale wood biomass projects in certain regions can be part of the picutre - for example, burning pine beetle damaged trees in Colorado but we should never expect that this will be a large part of our energy profile. Our country desperately needs a longer term national energy policy that is not swayed back and forth by every little special interest group. Utilities also need certainty to help them be efficient. What we are currently doing (and even projecting to do in the near term) is not sufficient or sustainable. We will need highly efficient large scale energy projects (including gas, coal, and nuclear) to replace the older base load plants currently in operation supplemented with the right renewable resources to help us through this period. The "doing nothing major now" strategy that we will likely see become more prevalent is only digging us deeper into a longer term economic recession. We also need to start learning from our past. The recent ethanol craze needs to be remembered as we consider our biomass options. Anyone that believes that planting large amounts of switchgrass won't have an impact on crop prices, land prices, water availability, etc... needs to take a bigger picture view. We all need to step back and try to see the forest for the trees. If we don't we won't have any forests and we will be asking ourselves why we didn't see this coming.