[Stoves] Off-topic: "Wood pellet CEO claims biomass carbon neutrality, despite science"

[Anderson, Paul]

Nikhil,

Short reply because I am not home from  India until Tuesday evening and am now without time to read the key article.

IF what you say is correct, do the numbers improve if the stoves produce charcoal (containing about 50% of the carbon atoms of the biomass)?   Improve sufficiently to justify the shift to those stoves?     Improve sufficiently to make a difference if the number of those stoves would be in the hundreds of millions?

I think that this topic is not “Off-topic” for a Listserv focused on cookstoves.



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From: Nikhil Desai <pienergy2008 at gmail.com>
Sent: Saturday, December 14, 2019 7:32 AM
To: Anderson, Paul <psanders at ilstu.edu>; Crispin Pemberton-Pigott <crispinpigott at outlook.com>
Cc: Discussion of biomass cooking stoves <stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org>
Subject: Off-topic: "Wood pellet CEO claims biomass carbon neutrality, despite science"

[This message came from an external source. If suspicious, report to abuse at ilstu.edu<mailto:abuse at ilstu.edu>]
COP25: Wood pellet CEO claims biomass carbon neutrality, despite science<https://news.mongabay.com/2019/12/cop25-wood-pellet-ceo-claims-biomass-carbon-neutrality-despite-science/>, Mongabay 13 December 2019

Paul, Crispin:

I address this to you because I know you two have worked with carbon credits and fNRB under CDM and Gold Standard farce for high-priced consultants.

This is on-topic because Kirk Smith did point out that uncontrolled biomass cooking is indeed NOT carbon neutral. But the myth pervades. Some others on the list presume that by calling biomass "renewable", it is also "carbon neutral"`.

That is a lie and, worse, it compromises the professed interests of the designers and promoters of biomass cookstoves. You all have been taken for a ride by the IPCC cooking a poison pie of national GHG inventorying.

I have a longer post on the history of IPCC accounting loopholes and shenanigans. In short, I do not believe that more efficient biomass stoves do not deserve "carbon credits" unless the fuel supply is "non-renewable."

If at all, cookstoves that sharply reduce PICs even as they increase CO2 - i.e., unit emission rate per TJ useful - should get "carbon credits" even as they INCREASE CO2 emissions. The CDM rules on "fNRB" (fraction non-renewable biomass) is stupidity married to ideology. (I think I was the first person ever to compute country-level "fuelwood deficit" - the fNRB - back in March 1982).

Bill Moomaw - an academic whose proclamations I often find irrelevant - is on the mark here, referring to biomass co-firing of dendrothermal power: “From an emissions standpoint, the UK would be better off burning coal and leaving those trees standing as long as possible.”

Moomaw is predictably obsessed by CO2. If at all, power plants have a sharply lower carbon emissions footprint when ALL carbon emissions are compared in CO2-equivalent terms (I prefer 20-year GWP because it implies a 3% real discount rate).

That is, compared to uncontrolled combustion of biomass - where fuels of lower quality (heating value) have even worse emission footprint - biomass power in a large-scale power plant is better, from health and climate points of view (borrowing Kirk Smith's phrase).

And, if Moomaw is correct, pellet power is worse than coal.

Go figure.

1. Compared to uncontrolled biomass combustion for household cooking, even coal power is superior from both health and environmental viewpoint. (I did some rough global computation back in 2005 and revised it in 2012, using emission factors from Kirk and Tami. I have no reason to revisit this conclusion. I am glad Moomaw and others have pointed out the accounting flaw which is actually a political charade.)

2. All that design and promotion of clean biomass stoves need to do is demonstrate that, in actual use, their stoves have a better CO2e performance than coal power plants (including credit for avoided line losses).

3. Crediting for emission reductions should be in GROSS CO2e terms, WITHOUT any deduction for "renewable biomass". (Renewed biomass - i.e., carbon sequestration - is a matter of local soil and moisture, species, duration and yes, even CO2 concentrations and local temperatures.)

The hundreds of millions of dollars of EU subsidies for wood pellet industry should be available for lower-CO2e biomass cooking. (Or LPG and electric cooking, which too are lower CO2e than the mythical Three Stone Fire.)

Even if \US wood pellets in UK power plants don't meet Kyoto rules, wood pellet cookstoves as in the Ci-Dev finance for Inyenyeri in Rwanda should be protected under the Paris Agreement Article 6 under the presumption that all CO2e reductions compared to the baseline are "sustainable development". No deduction of "fraction renewable".

IPCC accounting rules are NOT "science". They were politically engineered. I know because I was in the wings as the distinctly anti-poor methods were baked into the poisonous pie. (Started with the nuclear godfather Al Weinberg's accounting of fossil CO2 using false emission factors, but that is another story. Weinberg's team did not bother with biomass, and CO2 is reasonable proxy for century long modeling of atmospheric carbon. To me, the short term matters more than the long term, and the lives of the poor more than the coastal mansions of the rich.)

N

PS: I cannot resist this comment. Moomaw says “It’s all about the money.  The wood pellet industry is a monster out of control.”  The same is true of the academic bureaucratic consultant donors complex of the Global Alliance of Clean Cookstoves and now the Clean Cooking Alliance. They should all be ashamed, as also Moomaw for his hysteria.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Nikhil Desai
(US +1) 202 568 5831
Skype: nikhildesai888
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