Montana's Deer Lodge schools gets biomass boiler

[Fledermaus]

The Deer Lodge School District with the help of a program called Fuels for Schools now has the tenth wood biomass boiler system in Montana.

The system uses a central boiler to heat many types of wood with environmentally friendly emissions.

Throughout the 10 school districts using the new technology, nearly $730,000 is being saved annually.

"You're saving the school money compared to burning fossil fuels, it's carbon-neutral so it's a really good source of renewable energy that is environmentally-friendly," Department of Natural Resources and Conservation forestry administrator Bob Harrington said.

http://www.montanasnewsstation.com/Global/story.asp?S=10079728

[excess_3]

1. burning garbage for heat, is not new .n/t

[Fledermaus]

3. Garbage? Do you know what your are talking about?

There is no garbage being burnt.

[AlecBGreen]

2. environmentally friendly emissions

:crazy:

[Fledermaus]

4. Carbon neutral emissions

Being carbon neutral, or having a net zero carbon footprint, refers to achieving net zero carbon emissions by balancing a measured amount of carbon released with an equivalent amount sequestered or offset.The carbon neutral concept may be extended to include other greenhouse gases (GHG) measured in terms of their carbon dioxide equivalence -- the impact a GHG has on the atmosphere expressed in the equivalent amount of CO2 .
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_neutral

[NickB79]

5. Burning wood releases emissions other than CO2 that can be bad for your health

That said, I love the smell of a good wood-burning stove or furnace :-)

[Fledermaus]

6. Sorry, modern wood chip boilers emit no smoke or smell

and less particulate matter than a diesel truck.

The Fuels for Schools and Beyond program promotes healthy forests by encouraging schools and other public and nonprofit facilities to use biomass heating systems that burn waste wood. It is a partnership between the Montana DNRC Forestry Division; USDA Forest Service; the State Foresters of Montana, Idaho, Nevada, North Dakota, and Utah; and the Bitter Root Resource Conservation and Development Area.

The program provides a way to dispose of dead wood and brush that have built up in western forests, putting them at risk for catastrophic wildfires. This waste wood can be processed into chips or pellets that can be burned in state-of-the-art boilers, which release far fewer pollutants than open burning or wildfires.

http://apps1.eere.energy.gov/state_energy_program/project_brief_detail.cfm/pb_id=1146

Gasification is a process that converts carbonaceous materials, such as coal, petroleum, biofuel, or biomass, into carbon monoxide and hydrogen by reacting the raw material at high temperatures with a controlled amount of oxygen and/or steam. The resulting gas mixture is called synthesis gas or syngas and is itself a fuel. Gasification is a method for extracting energy from many different types of organic materials.

The advantage of gasification is that using the syngas is potentially more efficient than direct combustion of the original fuel because it can be combusted at higher temperatures or even in fuel cells, so that the thermodynamic upper limit to the efficiency defined by Carnot's rule is higher or not applicable. Syngas may be burned directly in internal combustion engines, used to produce methanol and hydrogen, or converted via the Fischer-Tropsch process into synthetic fuel. Gasification can also begin with materials that are not otherwise useful fuels, such as biomass or organic waste. In addition, the high-temperature combustion refines out corrosive ash elements such as chloride and potassium, allowing clean gas production from otherwise problematic fuels.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasification