Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER 14
Concluding remarks and perspectives on the future
of energy systems using biomass
Erik Dahlquist, Elias Hakalehto & Semida Silveira
Biomass has gone from being more or less the only energy resource used for heating and cooking
on a normally quite inefficient way to be a very valuable energy and material resource used for
all kind of applications.
As a consequence of this, it has become very important to develop the most efficient energy
system for all kind of societies. Some countries like Brazil have high production capacity of sugar
cane for ethanol and trees for pulp and paper while others as China are driving from burning straw
in the fields to starting to use the straw as an energy resource.
The systemsolutions include conversion technologies going towards biorefineries, newmarkets
for biomass like vehicle fuels and to new business models where many different markets compete
for the biomass. With biomass, we have many more actors than for oil industry with a relatively
small number of very big companies. The biomass resources also differ a lot from regions to
regions depending on the needs as well as the climatic conditions. In northern countries, the
heating demand is very high, while in southern countries this demand is negligible.
To promote the development of biomass resources good policy incentives are needed. The oil
industry has in reality been subsidized in many ways by many governments during the last century,
by not having to pay for the negative effects of air pollution leading to acidification, emissions
of neglect able substances, effect of oil spillage from ships and oil production, effect on global
warming etc. Instead, the governments have handled these types of problems using tax money.
In many countries like Iran and Nigeria, the gas-price has been strongly subsidized and thereby
the consumption has become very high. The good is that the population gets a share of the oil
exports, but the negative effect is the vast overuse of energy that is in no way sustainable. Here
the aim to be fair has become a problem. It can be compared to Norway where the price of gas
for private people is among the highest in the world and the income from oil export instead is
invested by governmental companies all over the world to get benefits for the country long term,
but not for individuals short term. This shows very different possible strategies and that there are
good and bad effects of all strategies, but long term the Norwegian is probably much better than
in countries strongly subsidizing the private use. We also can see that in both Iran and Nigeria
the subsidies have been decreased with riots in Nigeria as a consequence 2011-2012. In Iran the
price has increased more than five times 2005-2012, and the goal now is to get a price in the
same range as in many other countries, with the aim to get the oil and gas resources to last longer.
This also will favor use of other resources like biomass, sun and wind in reality.
In Sweden, the government succeeded in getting an agreement between most political parties
to introduce a carbon tax in 1992. This gave an additional tax of approximately 1.6 €cent/kWh for
carbon, which is giving the full cost on coal, and roughly half of it on natural gas with only 50%
carbon and the rest hydrogen of the heating value. This gave a dramatic increase of the use of
biomass and created many incentives to use biomass for replacement of fossil fuels. From 1992
to 2012, the use of biomass has increased from 55 to almost 140TWh/y in Sweden, as a direct
effect of the carbon tax and green electricity certificates, another control mechanism.
This shows how important policy decisions are for driving the business and the system for
how to select where to invest. Wind power and solar power also have been favored and not only
biomass. A difficulty still is to get similar conditions in many countries.
We have both national and international regulatory set of rules and incentives. In Germany, we
have a feed in tariff to promote electricity production using solar power, wind and biomass. Here
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