Forest Restoration will only cut Emissions if the Carbon dioxide is stored underground. What is also needed is faster Growing Trees.

With biomass energy, weighing forest restoration and carbon emissions

When state utility regulators held a workshop last month about increasing the use of forest biomass for power, one topic did not make it into the discussion: the emissions produced from burning small trees, branches and treetops hauled from Arizona's forests.

Compared to coal, burning biomass emits lower amounts of key pollutants like sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, but it generally equals or surpasses coal in the amount of carbon dioxide it emits per unit of heat.

 Arizona already has one utility-scale biomass power plant in Snowflake, on the east side of the state.

The facility uses up woody biomass from 15,000 to 20,000 acres per year, Novo BioPower CEO Brad Worsley said. In addition to the fact that trees grow back, Worsley said his fuel source is renewable and carbon-neutral because it’s using carbon, stored in the tree, that is already part of the carbon cycle and would otherwise burn up or decay in tens or hundreds of years. Fossil fuels, on the other hand, are reintroducing carbon that has been buried for millions of years.

Worsley said that what he burns in his power plant is the bark, limbs and small trees that can’t be made into many other wood products that would sequester carbon, as Bahr had mentioned.

While his plant does burn forest material and produces emissions, it also helps make the forest less prone to catastrophic wildfires that would burn through, and emit, much more, Worsley said.

But Harmon said that math doesn’t work out if one thinks about a single forest. In a simplistic scenario, if half of the trees in a forest are harvested and burned for biomass energy and it takes two years for the forest to grow back to its original capacity to sequester carbon, its per-year sequestration average will be less than a forest where all of the trees remained for all three years. Even though the trees grew back, there was a period when carbon sequestration was reduced, bringing down the average.

And in thinning projects where the idea is to reduce tree density in the long run, total carbon storage will permanently be lower than pre-thinning, also challenging the notion of carbon neutrality, he said.)

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Me, "What is not considered in this article is to Sequester the Carbon Dioxide, from burning the trees, in this plant, underground, and not allow it to enter the atmosphere to begin with. Also, it might make sense to genetically engineer faster growing trees to plant and take up the slack for cut down trees. 

If Grass can grow tall enough on a home lawn to need to be cut back every two weeks, by lawnmower,  I can't see an obstacle to bio-engineering faster growing trees. Faster growing trees benefit loggers, and benefit forests that have been over cut. The trees would grow back to take up the space of severely depleted forests. 

  Right now, tree farmers plant christmas trees and harvest them when they get big enough. This can take a few years. So, it is not uncommon to see rows of farms with different size, age, trees. In the future loggers may become like these farmers. They plant a bioengineered fast growing forest on a farm and by the end of the growing season have big trees to cut down mill or burn."