50 biomass plants on cards in china, page-6

OK, Yellowcake isn't biting, so I had to do my own research - doggarn! The following numbers are just indicative for the sake of getting a feel for this thing (so it's only worth arguing if you think I'm way off).

1 t of coal produces 2 MWh of electricity and 3.5 t of CO2 (Wikipedia - must be right).

According to no less a source than China's Wuhan Kaidi Electric Power Engineering Co. Ltd., 1 t of biomass produces 0.88 kWh of electricity. If we assume that this 1 t of biomass consists of dry wood (mallee perhaps?), then it also releases 1.8 t of sequestered CO2.

So rounding off for the sake of easier numbers, it would appear that 1 t of coal plus 3.5 t CO2 is equivalent to 2.5 t of wood biomass plus 4.5 t CO2 in terms of power output.

After some further head scratching, this suggests that it pays to burn wood for electricity, provided you can buy it for less than about $70 per dry tonne (I accept YC's $200/t for coal and $30/t for CO2, for the sake of argument).

So what does this have to do with the price of bread (or fire wood, for that matter)? I can't see dry land wheat farmers digging up their mallees and carting them off to the neighbourhood biomass-fuelled power station just yet. On the other hand, if they can generate some modest income while serving as a wind break, that might just work.

I certainly don't see COZ as the answer to climate change. However, they should be able to bring in a few bob while we come up with a better solution. Also, mallee plantings will not make commercial sense everywhere. For example, a conventional plantation in Tassie should rather think about $700 per tonne of pulp (or whatever the latest price of pulp is). Neither would I expect a sensible farmer like Yellowcake to plant mallees in place of wheat on land that is likely to produce good wheat crops over the next 100 years.

A final thought from the above analysis is that $30 per tonne of CO2 is probably not going to be high enough to do what it is supposed to do in the long run. Ouch...