As an alternative form of energy, the advantages of biomass are several and not least for the reason that combustion does not add to the carbon cycle in the way that happens when unsustainable fossil fuels are burned. The world is under huge pressure to abate the rising levels of the major greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, given the contribution of this and other gases to potentially irreversible climate change.

As a material drawn from a broad range of organic sources, biomass fits the renewable energy category and can be deployed for generating power. Among the sources available are tree roots, branches, wood chips and shavings together with various agricultural wastes like crop residues, manure and silage. A biomass reactor can also be fuelled by specially grown grasses like miscanthus, switch grass and hemp or from trees like poplar and willow, or using wood pellet by-products.

One of the obvious advantages of biomass is reducing the need to burn fossil fuels to produce heat, steam and electricity in industrial, residential and farming settings. Biomass is also useful in that it has a relatively high availability with the option for continuous replanting and so by definition is renewable, when the carbon released by burning is drawn back during plant photosynthesis, hence the carbon neutrality of this energy source.

Using wastes from crops such as straw and husks as a by-product to produce biomass fuel actually increases the value of the original source crops. When carbon dioxide is released during the combustion process, a carbon sink to sequester this greenhouse gas will start with replanting and oxygen will also be released into the atmosphere as photosynthesis proceeds.

With the ever increasing pressure on landfill sites to absorb municipal waste streams, the use of this source as biomass will see a gradual tailing off of waste heading to these sites, where significant releases of methane, a greenhouse gas over twenty times more potent than carbon dioxide, occurs.

Among the advantages of biomass is the ability to use it in a way that has less intense environmental impact than when there is combustion. This means that instead of burning the biomass, a process which then has to be balanced by sufficient planting of trees to act as a carbon dioxide sink, the process of anaerobic digestion is used to convert the waste into gases which can be used to drive turbines.

The use of ethanol derived from biomass in the various new biofuel mixes increases the efficiency of combustion as well as being cleaner burning than the traditional longer chain carbon fossil fuels. So we see that biomass has applications both in power generation as well as an alternative transport fuel to petroleum and its distillates.

National and regional governments are aware of the need to address environmental as well as energy security issues when granting permission for building new renewable energy sources. There is, however, another area for consideration and that is the need to provide a steady baseload supply as opposed to supplying the peaks of demand. While wind and solar, and even tidal energy, though to a lesser extent, are subject to the problems of intermittency, the advantages of biomass sources is that they have no such constraint assuming a steady supply is available.

The author, David Phillips, comes from the sunny island of Anglesey off North Wales, UK and owns an informative website covering local news and information. When considering the exciting growth potential of biomass Anglesey has a very interesting story to tell.