Environmental Impacts:

Biomass Can Be CO2 Neutral:

Several environmental impacts are directly related to biomass energy production and consumption. The first is obviously the environmental benefit of displacing fossil fuel usage and a reduction in any adverse environmental impacts that are caused by fossil fuel consumption. In addition, the use of a fossil fuel and biomass together in certain applications, such as electric power generation with coal and wood or coal and RDF in dual-fuel combustion or co-combustion plants, can result in less undesirable emissions.

The substitution of fossil fuels and their derivatives by biomass and biofuels also helps to conserve depleting fossil fuels. Another environmental impact is more complex. It concerns the growth and harvesting of virgin biomass for use as dedicated energy resources. By definition, sustainable, biomass energy plantations are designed so that the biomass harvested for conversion to energy or fuels is replaced by new biomass growth. Finally, there is the related issue of the causes of increasing concentrations of atmospheric CO2, which is believed to be the greenhouse gas responsible for most of the climatic temperature increases observed in recent years. Many specialists who have studied the problem portray atmospheric CO2 build-up to be caused primarily by excessive fossil fuel usage.

Biomass, when displacing fossil fuels reduces these emissions and is considered to be a carbon neutral energy source, absorbing the equivalent amount of carbon from the atmosphere during growth as is emitted during combustion.