Biomass. Look at Europe, they are about 20 years ahead right now. Between wind, solar, and biomass we could provide as much power as we need. The unintended consequence would be wood utilization on a massive scale, helping to solve problems like pine beetle epidemic, EAB, etc... Probably even less forest fires if foresters could manage fuels more effectively and there were markets for the timber.
Video on some of the work I do with global warming, wood utilization, and livestock.
Wow that's an awesome video, with all the crazy back and forth rhetoric about climate change it's pretty refreshing to see hard working people working on pragmatic solutions.
My college had a biomass plant for our power generation, and I was always slightly skeptical from a CO2 perspective, mostly because of the far left rhetoric that was used to laud the station. Do you have any idea about what the difference in emissions of a NG plant versus biomass. I think certainly you have a lot of environmental impacts from OG dev, including but not limited to massive water use, but I'm curious how the two stack up against each other and then versus wind and solar.
A couple of the engineers at work and I did kinda a deep dive on wind a couple weeks ago, I posted some of what we came up with in the windmill thread, but basically after crunching the numbers we kinda realized how comically bad wind power is for the environment.
I'm curious what the arguments about biomass are and the best counters to them. I think strategically thinning forest, so they don't burn thus limiting CO2 that way is a great argument... but do the plants of some sort of scrubers? Is the CO2 released via energy production versus forest fire the same, or is it just considered net neutral because your "feed stock" is organic and assumed to be removing CO2 as it grows?
Seems like one argument for OG over bio is transportation costs both $$ and CO2, we pipe all of our gas and a lot of our liquids. That is a lot more efficient than having armies of trucks driving around full of wood, you could likely optimize, routes maybe get some electric trucks that are charged at the biomass plant itself... but at the end of the day you can't eliminate the trucks.
Scale also seems to be an issue,
this list seems to suggest total commercial US biomass power is 6,374 MW, for perspective we calculated how much energy would be produced from all our hydrocarbons (assuming all were being used for power generation) and it was around 4,750 MW which is more energy than the largest nuclear station in the US, total nuclear being 100,000 MW.
