This has been a pretty crazy summer so far. My place has experienced ridiculous heat, torrential downpours, small amounts of flooding and a bunch of newborn rabbits eating dandelions and my vegetable garden. Science seems to be saying that all of these extreme weather conditions are due to climate change that we’ve caused with our abuse of the environment. Although Alberta’s forest industry has done a good job managing the forests to sequester carbon and lesson the environmental footprint on the forest, I understand that it takes a lot of energy to manufacture trees into forest products. Today I want to talk about how forest companies are decreasing non-renewable energy use.
WHY BIOENERGY?
Bioenergy is a major buzz word in Alberta these days. There are lots of definitions of bioenergy on the interwebz, but I think the first one is the best:
Useful, renewable energy produced from organic matter
So I guess the answer to why bioenergy is pretty easy. It’s useful and renewable. The other benefit of bioenergy is it’s reliable. Did you know during Calgary Stampede when it was 30 degrees every day, and everyone needed to keep their houses and cold beverages icy, electricity prices MAXED OUT at $999 for a megawatt hour?!! Sure, a megawatt is a lot of power to use, but if you ran a central AC constantly for those 10 days of Stampede it would probably be somewhere close to a megawatt. If that price stays the same, so everyone could ride the rides and keep the bevvies cold, you would spend over a grand on JUST YOUR AC in those 10 days. That’s a lot of dough. One of the reasons the price of electricity skyrocketed is because there was almost no wind during those blistering hot couple weeks. All those wind turbines in Pincher Creek were just glorified bird perches. There was also a severe lack of rain in Southern AB so the hydroelectric dams down there weren’t at maximum capacity either.
We were almost entirely dependent on coal and bioelectricity for two weeks of intense energy use. One product is seen as environmentally friendly, the other as quite harmful. Bioelectricity is really the only consistent source of renewable energy we have in Alberta right now. There’s just not that much of being produced yet.
WHY NOT BIOENERGY THEN?
There’s actually a few reasons we don’t have a bunch of bioenergy in Alberta yet:
1) Cost. It’s really expensive to build large scale plants, and although the return can be high, it’s not yet high enough to have people building them everywhere.
2) Secure biomass supply. This is only the case for large farms and to a lesser degree forest companies in Alberta, limiting the number of investors.
3) Public perception. Some people think turning trees into energy is archaic and awful. Also, use of biofuels increased costs of food around the world so something similar could happen with forest products. It was quite the Hot Corn scenario (see above).
4) Distribution. A lot of the biomass is a long way away from the people that use it for energy.
BIOENERGY AND FORESTRY
Not too long ago, most of the trees we cut down were used for dimensional lumber (like a 2×4) with some going into pulp and paper. When you’re turning a cylindrical object like a tree into something rectangular like a 2×4 there’s a lot of waste. This waste used to just be burned. Now, instead of burning wood waste we can use it for energy. We really can use an entire tree unlike ever before. Not only does this allow companies to make more money, but provides green energy for the population. Some people may say that creating energy from trees is a slippery slope. Would it be possible to over-harvest just for energy (please see the Lorax for a similar story)? In Alberta this is not really a possibility. We continue to make 200 year management plans that show our harvesting is sustainable and renewable. These plans are also certified by external third parties to ensure we’ll have a healthy public forest forever. Bioenergy is really about using the leftovers that were once burned or put in landfills.
I think if done correctly, bioenergy could really help to diversify the types of energy we consume. Over 60% of the energy used by forest companies comes from renewable sources. That’s a huge number and it’s good to see the forest industry not rely too much on non-renewable resources. Talk about a green career choice!