Boosting the bioenergy

UK and EU press action buttons on renewable heat and bio-oil

Biomass seems to be flavour of the month. In the UK, the Biomass Task Force headed by Sir Ben Gill has just reported, with recommendations including a ‘strategic plan’ for bioenergy, a national grant scheme to encourage us to install biomass boilers, and a big programme to heat more public buildings by burning the stuff. From Brussels, too, agriculture commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel is promising an EU biomass action plan by the end of this year.

More home-grown matter in the energy mix is one way to cut down on our fossil fuel habit. In 2003 we used enough, EU-wide, to save us importing 68.8 million tonnes of oil a year. Worth saving - but still not much more than a drop in the ocean. Still, skyrocketing oil prices are spurring more demand. Enterprising farmers are already growing more fuel crops - without even remotely approaching the alarmist scenario of a countryside carpeted with coppice willow and miscanthus (elephant grass). But there’s almost no limit to what counts as biomass.

  • Wood pellets, sunflower seeds and palm kernels have already been used in UK power stations including Drax, Fiddler’s Ferry and Ferrybridge.
  • Kilroot power station at Carrickfergus in County Antrim, has been grinding up olive pellets - 4,500 tonnes of the stuff, brought in from Spain - to burn alongside its staple diet of coal.
  • From the parks department’s trimmings to the poultry farm’s chicken litter, it’s been tried - and it works.
  • With Halloween and bonfire night still fresh in the memory, is it time to revisit the productive possibilities of burning witches and Guys?
Nor, it seems, is there much that’s off limits in terms of the organic matter you can use to make bio-oil.
  • In Reynolds, Indiana, they have all the hog manure they need - to make gas to power their homes and businesses. ‘Human waste’ is on the menu too. The 500 residents are up for it - they already live in what’s been styled as the ‘world’s first biotown’, thanks to a project to convert their cars to run off corn-based ethanol or soybean diesel.
  • German inventor Christian Koch makes his biodiesel mainly from household rubbish - but he may now be testing the limits of acceptability, by adding run-over cats to the mix.
Roger East

10 November 2005

Roger East