This fundamental question keeps coming back to me again and again from many people.
Is burning “Biomass” carbon neutral?
FYI: The EIA Greenhouse Gas reporting protocol treats “Biomass” particularly wood or wood-chips carbon neutral.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/1605/coefficients.html
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: Biomass, CO2, Global Warming
In some cases, burning organic material to produce CO2 is a net reduction of the greenhouse effect, defying intuition. Methane, for instance, is a much worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide (per carbon atom) in terms of the quantity of solar radiation it traps— some feature of the relative infrared transparency of the two gasses. Cow dung contains a lot of methane, which, left on the ground, would escape into the atmosphere and worsen the greenhouse effect. But if the cow dung is burned for fuel, the CO2 it ouputs is not as bad as the methane would have been, and it yields useful energy as well. Clearly, we should be burning all our poop.
(Source: I heard this from a guest on NPR’s Science Friday.)