FW: home space or water heating with wood
Jeffrey Morris
Norm,
With all due respect to you, if you had your wood stove smokestack tested to determine its respiratory, toxic and carcinogenic pollutants emissions profile per input Btu and then compared that profile to the emissions profile per input Btu from a natural gas fired furnace, you’d be singing a different tune. If the natural gas furnace was one of the super efficient ones that doesn’t even have a smoke stack the comparison would be even worse for your wood stove.
This comment is based on both empirical and personal experience. For a while in the 70s I lived off the grid on Cypress Island in northern Puget Sound. We did all our cooking and provided all our heat and hot water by burning wood, while building a log house with mostly hand tools, except for the chain saws we used to cut trees and rough saw our dimensional lumber.
Those were the days prior to my learning the techniques and data of life cycle analysis and assessment, which quickly taught me how inefficient and destructive it was to use whole logs for the walls of a house. They were also the days prior to moving back to the city and living in neighborhoods in which some of the houses were heating with wood. Because I spend lots of time outside bicycling, walking and working, I soon learned that there were times of the day/evening when I couldn’t go outside without noticing the nasty feeling in my lungs induced by the smoke from my neighbors who heat with wood.
In Washington State our communities that have air quality issues are those with concentrations of homes heating with wood stoves. I can send you the emissions profiles for wood stoves and natural gas furnaces that have been developed by our Department of Ecology. Or for emissions profiles for wood versus natural gas at an industrial scale you can check out US EPA’s AP-42 emissions data (http://www.epa.gov/ttnchie1/ap42/ ).
Your posting compares heating with wood to heating with electricity, or at least that’s what I infer. I don’t think you provide your electric power for lights, etc. from your wood stove. So you should be comparing your wood fuel against other on-site combustion fuels, such as natural gas, or against solar water and space heating. In either case a comprehensive life cycle assessment (i.e., one that covers a number of environmental and public health impacts including climate change, acidification, human toxicity and carcinogenicity, human respiratory, ecosystems toxicity and eutrophication impacts, to name several) will bear out Mike’s blanket condemnation of using wood as a source for heat or power.
Norm Ruttan
Thanks. You make some good points.
I used the wood pellet stove eg only to illustrate that biomass is not
all black and white, and was not completely black and white in the
1990's when I bought my stove.
Please note that wood stoves, and wood pellet stoves have a very
different emissions profile. http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/04/ask_treehugger_12.php
And if we were going to compare natural gas to locally produced wood
pellets, smokestack emissions are just one part of the equation.
For the wood pellets, we need to look at the whole sawmill/wood chip
industry to tally up the gross and net effect on the earth. And we
need to know if the wood pellets are a byproduct, or a direct source.
In my case, my pellets are hardwood sourced from the Quebec hardwood
mills. However last winter I ran out of pellets, and the source was
pine beetle killed standing wood from British Columbia, which I assume
came cross country by train. Different source, different energy
profile, different conservation profile, different assessment.
Ditto for the natural gas industry, so for eg. we need to include the
gas drilling industry, the pipeline industry, etc.
For eg. the folks who live near natural 'sour gas' wells in Alberta
would not compare natural gas so favourably to wood.
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/edmonton/story/2009/11/13/ercb-lifts-sour-gas-suspension.html
Then we need to understand that the natural gas is finite, and will in
a few (dozen? hundred?) years run out as the gas accumulated by the
earth of its history is exhaustible. Whereas wood is renewable, to the
point that we use it in a sustainable way (not clearcutting
Massachussetts for eg).
http://www.eponline.com/Articles/2009/11/11/Massachusetts-Studies-Biomass-Sustainability-before-Setting-RPS-Criteria.aspx
In my case, it's a moot point. I don't have access to natural gas.
So I would need to look at propane, fuel oil, electrical, or solar
(which industry has its own emissions from manufacturing,
transportation, installation, etc). In 1997 when I bought my wood
pellet stove, none of the others were attractive to me. Solar is good,
except I live in Canada and cold winter nights don't work well for
solar except in a super-insulated house (mine is a solar house built
in the 70's).
Again though, I'd have to do a complete 'full cost assessment' for
each of the above, not just look at local emissions.
It will be good for the industry/EPA to do/publish some of those
assessments.
In any case, the cat is out of the bag. Wood waste from New York is
currently travelling by ship across the Atlantic, to co-fuel coal
fired electricity plants in Europe (to reduce Greenhouse Gas
Emissions). Expect a lot more of this. Co-generation at pulp and paper
mills is common.
The trick will be to steer it in a more, rather than less sustainable
direction.
Norm
On Nov 21, 3:07 pm, "Jeffrey Morris" <jeff.mor...@zerowaste.com>
wrote: