What is more environment friendly burning oil or burning wood?

Question

thanks!

Answer 1

Burning oil is bad fro the air.

Burning wood is bad for the trees.

But Burning wood is more better because wood can be replaced and oil cannot.

Plus I THINK that the smoke given off by wood burning is just temporary pollution so it really doesn't do anything in the long run, but oil does.

Answer 2

Burning wood is better, you can recapture the released carbon by growing new trees, but once you burn oil you cannot recapture the released CO2 by forming new oil.

Answer 3

It depends how you see it. Burning petroleum is quite a bad way to use it. However, it has a better efficiency. When trees are dying, most of the CO2 will whatever be capture by other plants and an infinite part will be stored as organic matter in the ground.

Wood has a poor calorific value, it means one needs to burn a lot to get heat.

If one looks at the calorific value of various items, we get that :

Dry wood (less than 15% water) : 16 MJ/kg

Petroleum products : around 45 MJ/kg

Coal : around 35 MJ/kg

Ethanol : 30 MJ/kg

Practically it means that to get the same heat, one needs to burn 3 times more woods. So for 1 kg of petroleum burned, one needs to plant 3 kg of trees.