What are the problems?
The timber industry believes it has had a big win with the NSW
Government proposing to change the Protection of the Environment Operations
Regulation, so that “waste from land rehabilitation activities involving
the removal of invasive native scrub and logging debris from approved forestry
operations on State forest or private land may be burnt to generate
electricity”.
Some timber mills have long been using waste material from the milling
process, to kiln dry timber and generate electricity. Sugar mills have also
operated co-generation plants, burning a mixture of cane trash, mill waste, and
noxious trees like Camphor Laurel.
However, building power stations specifically to burn logging residues
is fraught with financial danger, because tree crowns and stumps, what most
people see as forest waste, cannot be economically field chipped and
transported large distances to power stations. Wood-fired power stations cannot
compete with coal-fired generators, built adjacent to a mine where coal is fed
straight from the pit into the furnaces by conveyor belt.
Environmentalists fear that, in the same way the wood-chip industry
gained a foot-hold, claiming it would only use logging waste, biomass proponents
will end up burning enormous quantities of logs from native forests when they
find that 'waste' simply isn't an option.
Other than the fact that there are no convenient mountains of logging
waste available, burning wood, as with coal, emits greenhouse gasses and
toxins, with some 90 different compounds released during the burning process. A
2008 Canadian Government report identified 45 that are seriously detrimental to
human health, including formaldehyde, hydrogen sulphide, cadmium, hexavalent
chromium, cobalt, lead arsenate, phosphorus, mercury, hydrochloric and
sulphuric acids, and sulphur dioxide.
The crunch is that while it's possible to filter out those compounds,
it's prohibitively expensive. Even an adequate filtration system, one that
reduces emissions to acceptable levels, costs about the same to run as the
generation plant itself. Therefore, in order to make a wood-fired power station
economically viable, we need solid logs sourced nearby, and a filtration system
that filters out enough of these toxins to comply with whatever some bureaucrat
proclaims to be “safe levels”.
- J Edwards
