Issue Wood in Europe. Is wood the best way to produce energy in Europe?

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1 Issue Wood in Europe Introduction Europe gets lot of its energy from wood because people think it is cheap and pollutes less than other energy sources such as oil and gas. A journalist for The Economist newspaper wrote an article that discusses whether this is true. 1. Get interested Is wood the best way to produce energy in Europe? Europe needs a lot of energy because it has many people living in cities- this means more cars, lights and heating in houses, and other things that need energy to work. The sources that we usually use for energy, like oil and coal, are limited so governments are looking at renewable energy sources that will always be available. Sounds ideal? Maybe not. The renewable energy that is most used in Europe, wood, isn t as cheap and good for the environment as people think. And yet it is getting a lot of money from governments to make it work. Why is wood so popular in Europe? Should it be getting this much support?

2 2. An example article about this issue Here is an article written by an Economist journalist about this issue. On the left, we have shown how the article was written, so you can see how to write a good article yourself. Do you agree with the journalist s opinions? The real price of wood The journalist starts the article by explaining what it is about. The piece of an article that explains what it is about is called the nut graph. The world will eventually run out of coal and oil to burn for energy. So Europe gets some of its energy from sources that will always be available. These are called renewable energy sources. Which renewable source provides Europe the most energy? Power from the sun? Wind? The answer is neither. Europe s biggest renewable fuel is wood. Wood makes up about half of Europe s renewable energy. (The burning of wood boils water, which makes steam. The steam turns big wheels that make electricity, so that your light goes on when you flip the switch.) Wood is especially important for energy in Poland and Finland. Even Germany, which spends lots of money on windmills and solar panels, uses lots of wood. Two-fifths of German renewable energy comes from wood. It seems odd, when solar panels and windmills look so high-tech, that the fuel of the future is one that cavemen once used. Next the journalist explains why wood is so popular in Europe. How is wood-burning thought to be good for the planet? There is too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Carbon-dioxide in the air works like a car s windows on a sunny day. The sun s light gets in through a car s windows but then the closed windows keep all that heat in so the car heats up. That is what carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere is doing it s letting the warm sunlight in and then trapping all that heat in the atmosphere. So the Earth is gradually warming like a car in a hot car park. But trees take carbon-dioxide out of the air as they grow. This is why growing trees for fuel became very popular with people who want to stop the planet from warming. Compared to building expensive windmills, it s cheap to turn a normal power plant, which burns coal, into one that burns some wood, too. (Burning wood and coal together is called co-firing.) And these stations are already built and connected to homes and shops and such through power lines. So it s much easier to use these stations to burn wood rather than build windmills or solar panels and go to all the trouble of connecting up those windmills and solar panels to people s houses. Sometimes the wind doesn t blow, or clouds block the sun, making windmills or solar panels almost useless at times. But wood can always be burned.

3 For these reasons, several groups got together to ask the government to spend money to make burning wood cheaper and easier. Some of those people worried mainly about the carbon in the atmosphere. Some others, who run dirty old coal plants, thought that wood-burning could keep their plants from being shut. And European governments have promised to use more renewable" energy. Wood seemed cheapest and easiest renewable energy source for them to use to keep their promise. Europe wants to get 20% of its energy from renewable sources by the year It could not do this without wood. The journalist explains more why some people are keen on wood as a source of energy. Here the journalist summarises other arguments, this time against wood. The journalist finishes the article by giving opinions. This has made clever people search for new ways to use wood for energy. First, some paper factories used their waste (paper is made from wood) to burn for energy. Then came co-firing, where coal-burning factories started to burn wood as well. Now, big factories can run on wood pellets alone. A big company called Drax has said it would burn wood in some of its old coal-burning factories in England. The British government will pay Drax for doing this, in order to help get carbon out of the air. One expert thinks that Drax could get as much as 550 million pounds a year for this. (That money comes from your taxes.) Big profits like this are a reason wood-burning looks likely to double by Europe doesn t actually produce that much wood. So it will have to buy some wood from other countries with big forests, like Canada and America. Since not only Europe but countries like China want to buy wood, the people selling it can charge more. So wood prices are rising. Other companies need wood too like those that make furniture and paper. Suddenly, they have to pay higher prices for their wood. Some can t afford to. They are shutting down. This might be a fair price to pay, for saving the planet. But does wood-burning really do that? Making all those wood pellets to burn uses lots of energy. So does shipping the pellets to power plants. That wasted energy means more carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere. So all the money the government is spending to promote wood may not save that much carbon-dioxide from the atmosphere after all. In any case, it certainly is expensive. Some scientists even think that clearing fields to grow trees to burn releases more carbon dioxide than the new trees suck from the air. So it may be expensive and bad for the planet, too. What do you think? Europe may have put a big bet on the wrong clean fuel in choosing wood. Do you agree?

4 3. Work out your opinion Here are two different points of view about wood. Which do you agree with? Wood is the best renewable energy source for Europe Europe has more wood than any other renewable energy source so European countries might as well use it. Wood helps slow global warming, by capturing carbon-dioxide (carbon-dioxide pollutes the air and helps make the planet get hotter). It s quite cheap to turn power plants which burn coal into ones that burn wood too, which means we save money as we don t have to build new power plants. Wood does more bad than good to Europe Even though Europe has more wood than any other energy source, it still doesn t have enough wood so it needs to buy it from other countries, who know they can charge a lot. This means wood prices are rising. If wood prices rise, it will become more expensive to make things like furniture and paper. Even though wood captures carbon-dioxide, it releases some too and still pollutes.

5 4. The article from The Economist newspaper Here is the grown-up version of the article, which was published in The Economist newspaper in April The fuel of the future Environmental lunacy in Europe WHICH source of renewable energy is most important to the European Union? Solar power, perhaps? (Europe has three-quarters of the world s total installed capacity of solar photovoltaic energy.) Or wind? (Germany trebled its wind-power capacity in the past decade.) The answer is neither. By far the largest so-called renewable fuel used in Europe is wood. In its various forms, from sticks to pellets to sawdust, wood (or to use its fashionable name, biomass) accounts for about half of Europe s renewable-energy consumption. In some countries, such as Poland and Finland, wood meets more than 80% of renewable-energy demand. Even in Germany, home of the Energiewende (energy transformation) which has poured huge subsidies into wind and solar power, 38% of non-fossil fuel consumption comes from the stuff. After years in which European governments have boasted about their high-tech, low-carbon energy revolution, the main beneficiary seems to be the favoured fuel of pre-industrial societies. The idea that wood is low in carbon sounds bizarre. But the original argument for including it in the EU s list of renewable-energy supplies was respectable. If wood used in a power station comes from properly managed forests, then the carbon that billows out of the chimney can be offset by the carbon that is captured and stored in newly planted trees. Wood can be carbon-neutral. Whether it actually turns out to be is a different matter. But once the decision had been taken to call it a renewable, its usage soared. In the electricity sector, wood has various advantages. Planting fields of windmills is expensive but power stations can be adapted to burn a mixture of 90% coal and 10% wood (called co-firing) with little new investment. Unlike new solar or wind farms, power stations are already linked to the grid. Moreover, wood energy is not intermittent as is that produced from the sun and the wind: it does not require backup power at night, or on calm days. And because wood can be used in coal-fired power stations that might otherwise have been shut down under new environmental standards, it is extremely popular with power companies. Money grows on trees The upshot was that an alliance quickly formed to back public subsidies for biomass. It yoked together greens, who thought wood was carbon-neutral; utilities, which saw co-firing as a cheap way of saving their coal plants; and governments, which saw wood as the only way to meet their renewable-energy targets. The EU wants to get 20% of its energy from renewable sources by 2020; it would miss this target by a country mile if it relied on solar and wind alone. The scramble to meet that 2020 target is creating a new sort of energy business. In the past, electricity from wood was a small-scale waste-recycling operation: Scandinavian pulp and paper mills would have a power station nearby which burned branches and sawdust. Later came co-firing, a marginal change. But in 2011 RWE, a large German utility, converted its Tilbury B power station

6 in eastern England to run entirely on wood pellets (a common form of wood for burning industrially). It promptly caught fire. Undeterred, Drax, also in Britain and one of Europe s largest coal-fired power stations, said it would convert three of its six boilers to burn wood. When up and running in 2016 they will generate 12.5 terawatt hours of electricity a year. This energy will get a subsidy, called a renewable obligation certificate, worth 45 ($68) a megawatt hour (MWh), paid on top of the market price for electricity. At current prices, calculates Roland Vetter, the chief analyst at CF Partners, Europe s largest carbon-trading firm, Drax could be getting 550m a year in subsidies for biomass after 2016 more than its 2012 pretax profit of 190m. With incentives like these, European firms are scouring the Earth for wood. Europe consumed 13m tonnes of wood pellets in 2012, according to International Wood Markets Group, a Canadian company. On current trends, European demand will rise to 25m-30m a year by Europe does not produce enough timber to meet that extra demand. So a hefty chunk of it will come from imports. Imports of wood pellets into the EU rose by 50% in 2010 alone and global trade in them (influenced by Chinese as well as EU demand) could rise five- or sixfold from 10m-12m tonnes a year to 60m tonnes by 2020, reckons the European Pellet Council. Much of that will come from a new wood-exporting business that is booming in western Canada and the American south. Gordon Murray, executive director of the Wood Pellet Association of Canada, calls it an industry invented from nothing. Prices are going through the roof. Wood is not a commodity and there is no single price. But an index of wood-pellet prices published by Argus Biomass Markets rose from 116 ($152) a tonne in August 2010 to 129 a tonne at the end of Prices for hardwood from western Canada have risen by about 60% since the end of This is putting pressure on companies that use wood as an input. About 20 large saw mills making particle board for the construction industry have closed in Europe during the past five years, says Petteri Pihlajamaki of Poyry, a Finnish consultancy (though the EU s building bust is also to blame). Higher wood prices are hurting pulp and paper companies, which are in bad shape anyway: the production of paper and board in Europe remains almost 10% below its 2007 peak. In Britain, furniture-makers complain that competition from energy producers will lead to the collapse of the mainstream British furniture-manufacturing base, unless the subsidies are significantly reduced or removed. But if subsidising biomass energy were an efficient way to cut carbon emissions, perhaps this collateral damage might be written off as an unfortunate consequence of a policy that was beneficial overall. So is it efficient? No. Wood produces carbon twice over: once in the power station, once in the supply chain. The process of making pellets out of wood involves grinding it up, turning it into a dough and putting it under pressure. That, plus the shipping, requires energy and produces carbon: 200kg of CO2 for the amount of wood needed to provide 1MWh of electricity. This decreases the amount of carbon saved by switching to wood, thus increasing the price of the savings. Given the subsidy of 45 per MWh, says Mr Vetter, it costs 225 to save one tonne of CO2 by switching from gas to wood. And that assumes the rest of the process (in the power station) is carbon neutral. It probably isn t.

7 A fuel and your money Over the past few years, scientists have concluded that the original idea carbon in managed forests offsets carbon in power stations was an oversimplification. In reality, carbon neutrality depends on the type of forest used, how fast the trees grow, whether you use woodchips or whole trees and so on. As another bit of the EU, the European Environment Agency, said in 2011, the assumption that biomass combustion would be inherently carbon neutral is not correct as it ignores the fact that using land to produce plants for energy typically means that this land is not producing plants for other purposes, including carbon otherwise sequestered. Tim Searchinger of Princeton University calculates that if whole trees are used to produce energy, as they sometimes are, they increase carbon emissions compared with coal (the dirtiest fuel) by 79% over 20 years and 49% over 40 years; there is no carbon reduction until 100 years have passed, when the replacement trees have grown up. But as Tom Brookes of the European Climate Foundation points out, we re trying to cut carbon now; not in 100 years time. In short, the EU has created a subsidy which costs a packet, probably does not reduce carbon emissions, does not encourage new energy technologies and is set to grow like aleylandii hedge.