The New Black (Green?)

By Simon Bird

As the delegates are meeting in Cancun for COP 16, the vast majority of the talk has been on the many failings in our attempts to manage and mitigate global climate change. This comes on the heels of the U.S.’s failed attempt to develop comprehensive energy and climate legislation in 2010. However, throughout the landscape there are bright spots and areas of important work on carbon management and environmental protection. This includes the incredible amount of groundwork that has been completed to create functioning carbon registries, standards and protocols.

A major accomplishment is the new carbon offset protocols for improved forest management, reforestation and avoided conversion of forests. These forest-based protocols required finding extensive common ground to adequately balance the need for credible standards and methodologies (including issues such as additionality, permanence and leakage), while keeping them both workable across a broad area and financially feasible.

Models versus Common Sense

By Jeffrey Frost

When the models we use generate answers which violate common sense, it is time to check the prevailing assumptions within.  The Manomet study for Massachusetts, “Biomass Sustainability and Carbon Policy Study”, essentially concludes that global warming will be exacerbated by substituting forest biomass energy for fossil fuels for the production of electricity.  I do not have to think very hard or long to conclude that digging up ancient carbon from coal, oil, and natural gas is unlikely to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as compared to growing renewable biomass in our forests and harvesting it for energy use.  Yet, this is exactly what the Manomet study tells us, wrapped in massive amounts of very sophisticated analysis.

I have no wish to invalidate the strong work product produced by a stellar team regarding an analysis of prime importance:  Will renewable forest biomass or fossil fuels best serve our needs for a low-carbon energy future[1]?  I do suggest a need to examine the logic behind some of the prevailing assumptions – explicit and inherent – in this extensive analysis.  Here then are the questions which need to be answered:

1. How do you choose the point in the growth and harvest cycle for forest biomass at which to begin the analysis?  Manomet chose to begin the life cycle analysis with the day of harvest.  If they had taken the other extreme and started the analysis the day after harvest (the first day of sequestration), the results would have flipped entirely and showed the huge benefits of biomass over fossil fuels instead of the reverse finding.  Intuitively, the biomass must be grown and the carbon sequestered before it can be combusted anyway.  The most defensible answer is probably to begin the analysis midway between harvests which will improve the relative status of biomass substantially.

The Pyrolysis-Biochar Bioenergy Pathway for Agriculture

By Jeffrey Frost

Pyrolysis is a form of controlled combustion of biomass.  It yields bioenergy in the form of bio-oil.  It also yields a soil amendment coproduct, biochar, with remarkable carbon sequestration properties of indefinitely long duration.  In other words, this is a bioenergy pathway which utilizes biomass in a manner which not only produces energy, but simultaneously produces the coproduct biochar which enhances soil quality and agricultural yields. Moreover, this pathway concurrently sequesters large quantities of carbon in a manner expected to earn valuable carbon offset credits.