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GrahamH
Joined: 23 May 2015 Posts: 523
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Mistress Rose
Joined: 21 Jul 2011 Posts: 15837
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Posted: Tue Feb 28, 17 7:25 am Post subject: |
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Good question Graham. I am sure I don't know the answer.
Treacodactyl, if you get your scientific information from the Daily Wail I am afraid you won't get a very high level of information. Reading that my general opinion was So?
Thinning is when you cut some trees in a stand down so that the remainder will have more room to grow. In completely natural woodland a lot of trees will grow up together, some will die because they can't get the light, and sometimes too many will get too tall and thin and blow over. In plantation and managed woodland a thinning is done every 10 years or so in the UK. This allows the remaining trees to grow to their full potential. No, the plantation in many countries wasn't grown for woodchip; in the wood we are working, the beech trees were planted for paper pulp (would now have to be sent to Scandinavia to be processed), and the larch for pit props (a lot less call for that now). We are now thinning the beech for firewood mainly, although some good trunks are being milled, and the larch is mainly going for outdoor structural use and some for woodchip for various purposes.
I can see that the 'shock horror' cutting of those trees in the US that the environmentalists trecked through bog to see cutting could easily be suitable for pelleting. They don't seem to be of much commercial use for anything else and if the owner wants to replace them with a more suitable species, or a commercially useful one, that is up to him, although I would hope that there was state or federal rules that he has to conform to. In the UK, if it wasn't a sensitive site, the general rule these days is native hardwoods, but no idea what it would be there.
I would much prefer to send our brash for pelleting than leave it on the ground where it is a hazard to us working, and incidentally isn't popular with people walking in the wood because it 'looks untidy', but the stuff that we can't take is very bulky and wouldn't be worth while energetically to extract. |
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Treacodactyl Downsizer Moderator
Joined: 28 Oct 2004 Posts: 25795 Location: Jumping on the bandwagon of opportunism
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Mistress Rose
Joined: 21 Jul 2011 Posts: 15837
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Posted: Wed Mar 01, 17 8:27 am Post subject: |
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The vast majority of trees in heavily populated regions are grown for a crop, whether that be honey, saw logs or wood chip. Yes, it would be better to say that some trees are grown for wood chip/pellets, but what would be the alternative there? Either let the trees grow naturally and fall down into the boggy ground, or plant crop trees there? Either way you end up with trees being burnt or rotting. I would dispute trees rotting not producing methane. Near here anything that rots in the clay turns to methane.
Yes we should have concerns about importing wood chip, perhaps slightly less about pellets from the risk of pests and diseases. Otherwise, as Slim and I have been pointing out, it is probably less bad than importing millions of tons/cu m of coal or gas from politically unstable countries. These also need machinery to extract them, and a lot of fuel to transport them, and as Slim has been saying, we are then releasing carbon that has been stored for millions of years, not just a few decades. The ideal of course would be to use something like water or wave power as the base load, but that just isn't possible at the moment. |
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Treacodactyl Downsizer Moderator
Joined: 28 Oct 2004 Posts: 25795 Location: Jumping on the bandwagon of opportunism
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Mistress Rose
Joined: 21 Jul 2011 Posts: 15837
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Ty Gwyn
Joined: 22 Sep 2010 Posts: 4603 Location: Lampeter
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Mistress Rose
Joined: 21 Jul 2011 Posts: 15837
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Ty Gwyn
Joined: 22 Sep 2010 Posts: 4603 Location: Lampeter
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Slim
Joined: 05 Mar 2006 Posts: 6595 Location: New England (In the US of A)
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Treacodactyl Downsizer Moderator
Joined: 28 Oct 2004 Posts: 25795 Location: Jumping on the bandwagon of opportunism
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Slim
Joined: 05 Mar 2006 Posts: 6595 Location: New England (In the US of A)
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Posted: Fri Mar 03, 17 11:37 pm Post subject: |
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I'll be honest that I didn't read the whole thing thoroughly.
But the only numbers they presented didn't suggest anything all that bad about biomass, it was just tone in which they were presenting them.
No one is being quoted, they're all "admitting" and "claiming" things. Sounds like this paper would try to make postal delivery sound like scandal.
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Pressed by The Mail on Sunday, Enviva yesterday admitted it does use whole trees in its pellet process. But according to spokeswoman Elizabeth Woodworth, it only pulps those deemed ‘unsuitable for sawmilling because of small size, disease or other defects’. She claimed such trees, no more than 26 inches in diameter, make up a quarter of the wood processed at Ahoskie. Another 35 per cent comes from limbs and the top parts of trunks whose lower sections went to saw mills. To put it another way: 60 per cent of the wood cut by the loggers who supply Enviva is turned into pellets. |
If that's not a B.S. presentation of information than I don't know what is.
I never said the North Carolina logging operation was necessarily god's gift to earth. But I also don't think they're likely to be breaking any rules or standards.
When you're saying 35% of the wood going through the mill is waste from trees that are actually used for lumber and/or furniture, and then turning around and using that to say 60% of the wood cut by loggers is turned into pellets, you may be technically correct, but in a stupid annoying way.
So why get all in a huff that they're turning the slash (limbs, etc) in to pellets? Isn't that where you want the pellets to be sourced from?!
If you want to dispute some of the practice, dispute the small trees that make up 25% of the mill's activities and go to pellets in their entirety. (though as the article suggests, they're at least purported to be processed in that manner because they've been deemed unsuitable for other purposes, and/or unlikely to grow to become suitable. I can pretty much guarantee you that they're not cutting down saplings with potential to become nice valuable saw logs) |
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Mistress Rose
Joined: 21 Jul 2011 Posts: 15837
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Posted: Sat Mar 04, 17 7:30 am Post subject: |
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I would love to know how the rubbish can be used to make something that will lock in the carbon Tre. Perhaps we could find a use for our brash that way.
I agree with Slim; you can't use all trunks for saw logs as they are unsuitable. Have you ever seen a bit of timber for furniture (apart from art furniture) that has a knot the width of the whole thing in it? It would fall apart. Sorry, but we have trees that we fell, mainly for firewood, and very few are suitable for saw logs. It will be the same in the US.
No, they are probably not using best practice, but if you replace the wood, as the article suggest, with gas, or coal, you are burning 100% fossil fuel. Exaggerated claims about carbon neutrality are not the same thing as burning gas or coal. Do you want to go back to those, and if not, what is your alternative? |
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Treacodactyl Downsizer Moderator
Joined: 28 Oct 2004 Posts: 25795 Location: Jumping on the bandwagon of opportunism
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Treacodactyl Downsizer Moderator
Joined: 28 Oct 2004 Posts: 25795 Location: Jumping on the bandwagon of opportunism
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