air pollution

- by Julia Schmale, November 19, 2014, Nature

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"361","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","height":"223","style":"width: 226px; height: 223px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;","width":"226"}}]]In December, the world's attention will fall on climate-change negotiations at the 20th United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of the Parties in Lima, Peru. The emphasis will be on reducing emissions of long-term atmospheric drivers such as carbon dioxide, the effects of which will be felt for centuries. At the same time, the mitigation of short-lived climate-forcing pollutants (SLCPs) such as methane, black carbon and ozone — which are active for days or decades — must be addressed (see 'Compounds of concern').

SLCPs cause poor air quality and are responsible for respiratory and cardiovascular diseases. Particulate matter in the atmosphere is the leading environmental cause of ill health, and air pollution is causing about 7 million premature deaths annually. Interactions between warming, air pollution and the urban heat-island effect (which causes cities to be markedly warmer than their surrounding rural areas) will raise health burdens for cities worldwide by mid-century. Air pollution also damages ecosystems and agriculture.

Current air-quality legislation falls short. Existing measures would prevent just 2 million premature deaths by 2040. We estimate that around 40 million more such deaths would be avoided if concentrations of methane, black carbon and other air pollutants were halved worldwide by 2030.

- by Bill Hudson, December 17, 2014, CBS Minnesota

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"358","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","height":"183","style":"width: 275px; height: 183px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;","width":"275"}}]]For years, the state’s corn and ethanol industries have touted the environmental benefits of burning the alternative fuel in our vehicles.

But newly released research from the University of Minnesota College of Science and Engineering is raising eyebrows.

The study compared pollution levels from gasoline fuel and 10 alternative energy vehicles, including hybrid electric, natural gas and corn-based ethanol.

One of the most surprising findings is that ethanol might actually be worse for air quality than conventional gasoline fueled transportation.

- by Bob Cleaves, November 23, 2014, Biomass Magazine

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"343","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","style":"width: 198px; height: 198px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;"}}]]On Nov. 4, Americans voted. This election was a decisive victory for Republicans. Senate, House, gubernatorial and even state legislature races across the country saw conservatives prevail. These results were expected, surprising to political types only in the thoroughness of the wins across the board.

What does this mean for biomass? It’s clear that this election signals the need to adjust our interactions with elected officials, but it’s not yet clear what shape that change will take. We will have a better sense of the new Congress’s direction after it is sworn in. The initial signs, however, indicate that there will be a lot we can work with, beginning with an emphasis on the economic benefits of biomass.

We expect that renewable energy, which had been gaining momentum as a key issue among Democratic leadership, will not be as high a priority for this Congress. Rather than focusing on the environmental benefits of biomass, there will likely be a renewed interest in biomass as an energy source that employs tens of thousands of Americans in rural areas.

- by Norma Kreilein, MD, Fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics

[The biomass facility proposed for Jasper, Indiana referred to in this letter was canceled this year thanks to the hard work of Dr. Kreilein and Healthy Dubois County –Ed.]

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"339","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","height":"282","style":"width: 255px; height: 169px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;","width":"426"}}]]I am writing as a concerned pediatrician in Southern Indiana. We live in the heart of the power plant belt of the Midwest. For many years I have suspected that our local pollution is greatly responsible for our high rage of inflammatory processes, malignancies, and increasing rates of autism.

I have been trying to fight the addition of a biomass plant to our city. The city has long been an industrial base with many wood factories, so there has apparently been a high VOC load. In addition, we live near many power plants. There was a coal fired municipal power plant within the city limits and very near a residential neighborhod since 1968. The city has said that the plant has been shuttled for approximately the past 3 years because it isn't "profitable."

They have been planning a biomass refit for the past 3 years, although the plan became more public only less than a year ago.

Strong opposition was voiced from the time it was publicly mentioned, but the city has pushed the plant through, anyway. Much manipulation of emission data has occurred (averaging emissions out over the whole county to make them appear insignificant), but ironically one of the more interesting arguments is that the plant, though polluting and within 1/2 mile of a residential neighborhood, should nonetheless be built because the plant will decrease our dependence on coal fired plants.

Essentially the argument is to build more so we are not as dependent on the ones we can't seem to shut down. Many of the arguments against coal-fired plants are used by manipulative entities to justify continuing to poison the population. In our particular city, the greed for development appears to take precedence over the consideration of air quality.

Until the EPA begins to mandate states to use more accurate exposure models (better than averaging concentrated pollution over a county), states like Indiana and cities like Jasper will continue to actually increase pollution.

Biomass combustion is being sold to communities around the country by high pressure, ambiguous, unscrupulous carpetbaggers who promise "jobs" and "green energy" but are vacuuming precious federal funds to produce expensive energy that will never solve our dependence on foreign oil nor make our air any cleaner. Worse yet, they use existing knowledge about coal-fired plants and aggressive manipulative mathemathics to convince communities that the particulate/dioxin emissions will be nonexistent or "minimal."

The ultimate problem is that the same monitors and regulators that fail to close down coal plants will do no better with biomass. We will just spend more and think we feel better about it. 

- by Shira Schoenberg, December 1, 2014, Mass Live

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"320","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","style":"width: 333px; height: 221px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;","title":"Photo: John Suchocki"}}]]A new law that goes into effect in January will make it cheaper to use renewable energy to heat a home – and could provide a boost to the wood industry in rural parts of Western Massachusetts.

"This is going to help (renewable) technologies compete with and replace oil-fired furnaces and other fossil fuels for use for heating ... and cooling," said David O'Connor, a former Massachusetts Commissioner of Energy Resources who is now senior vice president for energy and clean technology at ML Strategies and who lobbied for the law on behalf of the Massachusetts Forest Alliance.

The new law builds on an existing law that requires electricity suppliers to buy a certain amount of electricity from renewable energy sources. The electricity suppliers can fulfill this requirement by buying "renewable energy credits" from companies that produce electricity through renewable means. The new law creates renewable energy credits for the production of thermal energy – energy used for heating and cooling. This could include the use of solar panels, wood pellet stoves and boilers, geothermal heat pumps, and a range of technology that uses hot water, solar, biomass or other renewable energy forms to generate heat.

- by Michael Mccord, November 26, 2014, New Hampshire Business Review

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"318","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","style":"width: 320px; height: 480px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;","title":"Photo: New Hampshire Business Review"}}]]New Hampshire’s recently released 10-year energy strategy acknowledged an ongoing fact of life for the state’s commercial and residential sectors: New Hampshire imports 100 percent of its fossil fuels and natural gas. According to the NH Wood Energy Council, New Hampshire pays more than $1 billion annually to import heating oil, with a large chunk of that paid for by businesses, since the state’s commercial sector is the second most dependent on heating oil in the nation, just behind Maine.

As energy customers realized again last winter, this dependence makes the state vulnerable to wild market swings and, in the case of natural gas last winter, shortages due to limited pipeline infrastructure.

That’s why, among its many recommendations, the state’s energy strategy calls for a greater use of wood as a fuel source. Wood, the energy report says, “offers a promising alternative to home heating oil and other petroleum products, providing a much needed option to extend fuel choice to rural areas of the state. Since New Hampshire is one of the most forested states in the nation, wood also presents an opportunity to capitalize on locally‐produced resources, keeping money in state while promoting land conservation efforts.”

In fact, the growth of a wood/biomass heating alternative for commercial use has been an ongoing under-the-radar trend taking place in more rural areas of New Hampshire. Like the wood stove heating the general store a century ago, biomass heating in the forms of wood pellets and wood chips has become an economically viable option for larger-scale municipal, school and commercial operations.

- by Bobby Zipp, November 20, 2014,  Swarthmore Phoenix

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"311","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","style":"width: 333px; height: 189px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;"}}]]Two weeks ago, a group of the Green Advisors conducted a waste audit of Kohlberg Hall and the Science Center. The purpose of the annual audit is to create a visual representation of the amount of waste produced by those buildings and test how well the Swarthmore community knows what to compost, recycle and put in the trash. Spearheaded by Green Advisor coordinators Kelley Langhans ’16,  Indy Reid-Shaw ’17 and Laura Laderman ’18, a team of GAs spent a day sorting through the 347 pounds of waste that was produced by Kohlberg and the Science Center on a single day and recorded the amount of waste in each of the three categories that was incorrectly disposed of. They found that out of everything that had been placed in trash bins, 35.3 percent of it was actually trash, and the rest could have been composted or recycled. Trash at Swarthmore is burned at Covanta Waste facility in Chester, the largest energy-from-waste incinerator in the country, which is located about eight miles away from the college.

- by Erin Voegele, November 14, 2014, Biomass Magazine

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"310","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","style":"width: 300px; height: 233px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;"}}]]The U.S. Energy Information Administration has released the November issue of its Short-Term Energy Outlook, which includes updated forecasts for the use of wood and biomass fuels in U.S. heat and power production.

The EIA predicts that wood biomass will be use generate 118,000 MWh electricity per day in 2015, up from 116,000 MWh per day in 2014 and 109,000 MWh per day in 2013. Waste biomass is expected to be used to generate 58,000 MWh of electricity per day next year, up from 54,000 MWh per day this year and 55,000 MWh per day last year.

The electric power sector is expected to consume 0.262 quadrillion Btu (quad) of wood biomass and 0.277 quad of waste biomass next year, up from 0.25 quad and 0.259 quad this year, respectively. The industrial sector is expected to consume 1.198 quad of wood in 2015, down from 1.25 quad this year. The industrial sector is also expected to consume 0.0169 quad of waste biomass next year, down from 0.172 quad this year. The commercial sector is expected to consume 0.091 quad of wood biomass and 0.046 quad of waste biomass next year, compared to 0.079 quad and 0.046 quad this year, respectively. The residential sector is expected to consume 0.571 quad of wood next year, down slightly from 0.580 quad this year. Across all sectors, the U.S. is expected to consume 2.123 quad of wood biomass next year, down from 2.164 quad this year. The U.S. is also expected to consume 0.492 quad of waste biomass next year, up from 0.478 quad this year.

- by Seth Slabaugh, November 11, 2014, The Star Press

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"307","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","style":"width: 200px; height: 115px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;","title":"Photo: randolph-county.org"}}]]Cardinal Ethanol has paid a $9,600 fine to settle a complaint that it violated its Clean Air Act operating permit.

The penalty is insignificant in light of the grassroots, investor-owned company's profitability — $26.4 million net income for the fiscal year ended Sept. 30, 2013.

President Jeff Painter said revenue and income data for fiscal year 2014 are not available because an independent audit has not been completed.

But according to Securities and Exchange Commission information, the company's net income for the third quarter of fiscal year 2014 totaled $29.4 million.

Until now, Cardinal Ethanol had been the only biofuels plant in East Central Indiana that had not paid a civil penalty for alleged air or water violations. Those violations usually occur during planned shutdowns for maintenance or start-ups.

"We paid the assessment in order to expedite this settlement," Painter said.

According to the Indiana Department of Environmental Management, the company did not take reasonable steps to restore an air pollution scrubber's operation to normal operation as soon as practical during planned shutdowns in 2011-13.

The complaint also accuses the company of failing to record visible emissions of bag house exhaust around Christmas time in 2012.

-  by Andy Balaskovitz, November 10, 2014, Midwest Energy News

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"305","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","style":"width: 255px; height: 164px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;"}}]]Developers from metro Detroit have plans to build a $100 million, 34 MW biomass plant in the central Upper Peninsula, about 20 miles south of an aging coal plant that is the ongoing focus of the region’s energy crisis.

The company building the plant, Marquette Green Energy LLC, says it would run on a combination of biomass and tire-derived fuels and a smaller amount of natural gas to start. The developers say it’s a step forward as the region scrambles to figure out how to avoid major rate increases in the short term and build new generation for the long term.

“I call it stealth development,” said Barry Bahrman, a partner in the project and a fifth-generation Upper Peninsula native. “It’s developed to a point now when we can let people know there’s part of an answer in place. … Local generation is what the U.P. needs.”

The project has received an air quality permit from the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, which Bahrman said makes it the first tangible generation project to surface since the Presque Isle Power Plant closure started making headlines.