I'd love to see an energy budget for heating with pollard wood.
I was taken aback some years while playing with various ideas for heating my house ago to realize that natural gas was significantly cheaper than wood. Here is a table that illustrates that.
- Coal – Powder River Basin1 – $0.56
- Coal – Northern Appalachia1 – $2.08
- Natural gas2 – $5.69
- Ethanol tax credit3 – $5.92
- Propane4 – $13.28
- Petroleum5 – $13.43
- #2 Heating oil4 – $14.74
- Jet fuel4 – $15.48
- Diesel4 – $15.59
- Wood pellets6 – $17.33
- Gasoline4 – $17.81
- Corn ethanol7 – $23.46
- Electricity8 – $26.31
- Cellulosic ethanol from corn cobs9 – $30.92
I also spent a bit of time looking at coal as an alternative. As a child I lived for a period in Pittsburgh and the house had an unused coal bin in the basement. But we heated that house with natural gas. It turns out we have burnt all the good coal. What is left is harder to burn and it stinks. You need to have a lot of scale to handle it well.
That natural gas is so dominate says something about housing density. Quarter acre plots are probably the upper limit of when it’s worth running the pipes. Of course that distribution infrastructure is a tempting target for monopolists.
Those numbers are US based. Natural gas is less reliable and more expensive in Europe. I mention monopolists didn’t I? Ben recently did an wrote something similar, looking at biomass, for rural Britain and he too make the point the author of that table makes, that “there just isn’t enough biomass to meet present energy demands.” While that point is right on, I don’t think we are going to find the one solution; or at least not for quite a while.
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