Why is burning wood not considered Zero Emissions?

Question

Trees when growing convert CO2 to O2, and when burning the wood it simply balances the equation. Meaning, no additional CO2 is generated/released. So why is this not considered Zero Emissions (aka "green")??

Also, why are we not encouraging power plants to burn wood for use in their steam turbines generators?? Firewood even in large volumes is exceptionally cheap and very renewable... In fact, large amounts of smaller "non-ideal" trees are just left to rot in the fields many times by loggers...

Answer 1

I have wondered the same thing.  Instead of feeding wood chips to bacteria to make a fuel, it might make sense feeding the chips into a furnace.  It sure seems that some people really aren't looking for solutions.  It is certainly carbon neutral.  If you cleaned up the emissions, it would seem to be a pretty readily renewable source of fuel.  It naturally burns and the atmosphere is pretty effective at removing the particles anyway.

Answer 2

Wood burning emits carbon monoxide and soot.  It causes cancer, heart disease and asthma.  It's not a CO2 issue.

Answer 3

If we express the whole scenario, growing trees to provide wood to burn, the total would be zero emissions but for the energy used to grow, harvest, transport the wood.

Because we need a lot of water to grow trees, there may be extra carbon costs involved in storing and delivering water.

Wood can be processed in a pyrolitic process that allows us to capture wood gas, largely the equivalent of natural gas, plus a large number of important industrial chemicals, then leave the carbon (charcoal) unburned,  to be used as a soil enhancer that lasts for many decades.  This returns to the soil not only the sequestered carbon, but also the plant nutrients, phosphate potassium, and trace nutrients that may have taken millenia to be weathered from the rock.

Wood burning is not always done with this much care for the  whole process, so it is far from a clean energy, and does pollute the immediate area when done poorly.

Edit: part of our concern has to be delay. All the plants on earth are not absorbing all the CO2 they already have available to them. We cannot think it carbon neutral to release carbon dioxide on the assumption that the trees will absorb it.

This is the delay concern. Delay in recapture is the single reason that earth's CO2 concentration has tripled.

What is happening is that we are seeing drought restricting the amount of CO2 that trees around the world are recapturing, and increased incidence of wildfires. We need to clean up scrub wood from  forest floor not just to prevent forest fires, but to reduce total use of fossil fuels.

But we need to return the nutrients back to the forest soil. It is best to leave the carbon sequestered as charcoal in the soil.

Soot is not potash. Ash is mostly potash. Soot is mostly unburned carbon. If you look at what collects on the inside of a stovepipe, it is largely  soot. When soot is in microfine particulate form it is very hard on our respiratory system.

We can uses a catalytic process to burn off the soot. But fly ash is not further combustible, it is mineral that is needed by plants growing in the earth, but does our lungs no good at all.

Conventional wood stoves burning with input air restricted always, always produce soot and carbon monoxide. Whenever the stovepipe is being coated with black soot, it is predictable that the fire is putting out carbon monoxide.

This is why better wood stoves attempt to slow the rate of combustion by introducing secondary air rather than just restrict the input air. Catalytic cleaning of smoke is entirely dependent on secondary air. (air inserted in the fire above the fire so that it does not increase the rate of burning of the wood.)

Answer 4

Zero emissions means... NO C02... Doesn't matter if the trees "Balance it out" That's kinda... well I don't even have to say.

Answer 5

A)  wood is not cheap.

B)  coal and oil has more energy per pound than wood.

C)  there isn't enough.

consider, part of the reason that railroads converted from (free) wood to (paid for) coal and oil, was that they ran out of wood near their tracks.

that was 100+ years ago.

when large scale energy use was way less than 1% of what it is today.

even paper mills are having trouble getting wood.

Japan has to import wood.  they can't grow enough.

maybe you'd like to guess again?

Answer 6

Firewood is not that cheap anymore.   Decent wood that won't clog up a chimney costs over $200 per cord for tree length wood.   Pay for cut, split and dried wood and its much more.   Most people use 5-15 cord of wood a year along with another source of heat in the north.    The pulp mill near where I live does use the bark chips (along with tires) to help fuel their boilers.   The non ideal trees you mention just aren't worth hauling so many miles to the mill with fuel prices over $4/gal.   All the close trees have long ago been cut and they don't grow back as fast as weeds.    

I burn such trees in my stove cut and hauled from the woods behind my house and also feel I am not adding to the CO2 level.

Answer 7

the second part if we cut down tree to burn then we would lose tree and that would be bad eventuly run out of trees and die

Answer 8

Try to look at this way. All plants take in CO2 and the plants give us the O2 but keep the C which deteriorates into oil & gas. So the more CO2 for the plants the more fossil fuel they produce.