‘Tree-Power’ Could be Future Energy Source

A wood-fueled electricity generating plant may be in your future.

In fact, the future is ‘now’ in some Scandinavian countries, said Dr. Darwin Foster, Texas Cooperative Extension forestry program leader.

“In Sweden, they’re already bundling up what we’re leaving in the forest after a timber harvest and using it as bio-fuel,” Foster said.

“Bio-fuel” is all-inclusive term that includes any renewable resource used to generate energy. As with ethanol distilled from small grains byproducts and methane from animal-waste, wood refuse is another renewable energy source.
The key word is “renewable,” Foster said. “As compared to fossil fuels which take hundreds of millennia to create and are not renewable,” he said.

Using forest bio-mass – limbs, bark, tree tops – as a bio-fuel is not unheard of in the United States. Forest product manufacturing concerns already burn wood residue in steam boilers. The steam is used to drive electrical generators and supply part of the energy needed to run the plant.

Other mills use “black liquor” – the lignin-rich residue of the pulp and paper industry – for heat, steam and electric power generation.

More at
PhysOrg.com