this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2024
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Technically, the carbon came from the air and returns to the air, but taking the pellets from where the tree died and turning them into pellets and transporting them to the furnace costs energy too.
Also all the tree carbon that doesn't make it into the pellets goes into the air. So the cost is greater than the gain.
If we grew trees and then buried them it could be a form of carbon capture. But we need to get the energy to do that from somewhere.
The key thing about this is that when you build a power plant which burns wood pellets, it takes a whole lot of mature forest, and converts it into CO2; you go from a whole bunch of mature trees to a mix of trees of varying ages. So something like half the carbon in the forest is in the atmosphere for as long as the power plant is in operation.
Better to grow trees to build housing, that's carbon capture as well and a well built house can keep the same wall studs for a very very long time... Hundreds of years even, more than enough time to grow back the trees required to build it a couple of times.
Yes, wood houses is carbon capture but a trivial amount.
Growing trees to burn them is basically the original solar energy. As with all forms of energy, there are various details about how it is conducted that determines how effective it is or not.
Headlines like "burning trees emits a lot carbon" are as much misinformation as headlines like "burning trees is carbon neutral". Because the reality is that neither of those statements are correct or even genuine to the issue at hand, even if humans are just looking for a simple answer.