Importing Solar Power with Biomass

Every six hours the sun bathes the lands of the earth in as much energy as the world consumes in a year. If we could just find a way to collect and distribute that energy our energy problems would be solved. Unfortunately, most of our energy consumption is in the places with the least sunshine (see insolation map, below.)

Biomass captures and stores the suns energy for later use. In tropical zones biomass grows year round and can be five times more productive than in the temperate zones. Biomass can be converted to denser forms and shipped to where it is needed surprisingly economically. For example, ocean shipping of coal priced at $73/ton from Australia to China only adds about $12/ton to the final cost. Wood chips are bulkier, but they can be made as dense as coal by heating and compressing them into torrefied pellets.

Ocean shipping is amazingly efficient for long distances. Australia has shipped an average of two million tons of coal per month to China so far this year. Ordinary (untorrefied) wood pellets have less than half the energy density of coal, yet Plantation Energy just signed two contracts to ship $130 million worth of pellets to Europe over the next three years. With torrefied pellets shipping costs could be halved so the economics would work out even better. Torrefaction is like coffee roasting. It requires no external energy but uses about 8% of the biomass energy to drive the process. Some of that energy is recovered because pelletizing energy is reduced because the heat-softened lignin in the biomass makes it easier to compress into pellets.

Renewable Energy World