Wood is becoming the new coal as power companies burn trees

Power companies are burning more trees because the renewable fuel can be cheaper than coal and ignited without needing permits to release carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas blamed for global warming.

Vattenfall AB of Sweden, Germany's RWE AG and American Electric Power Inc. of Ohio, the biggest coal-burner in the U.S., have switched a few plants over to wood and more are planned. So far that hasn't driven up paper prices or strained forests, which absorb carbon dioxide in photosynthesis.

“Wood is very quickly becoming a very important part of the energy mix and in a few years will be a global commodity much like oil,” said Heinrich Unland, chief executive officer of Novus Energy GmbH. The German company runs a wood-power plant north of Hamburg that supplies heat to a Total SA refinery.

Using biomass for power and heat — mainly from poplar, willow and pine trees — grew by 25 percent during the past two decades, according to the International Energy Agency, the Paris-based adviser to 28 oil-consuming nations such as the U.S.

Industrialized nations drew 4 percent of their energy from biomass in 2006, the most recent data available from the IEA. That was the equivalent of about 1.1 billion barrels of oil.

Chips of wood stumps and branches, heated to 400 degrees Celsius (750 degrees Fahrenheit) at the Novus furnace, are as efficient as coal and cheaper: European Union rules don¡¦t require carbon-dioxide permits because the trees absorbed a like amount of the gas before harvest, making them carbon-neutral.

Total in turn is able to book a credit for the heat provided by Novus because it's from renewable fuel. The French company avoids buying emission permits for 9,400 tons of gases released a year at the Hamburg-area refinery where it heats crude oil to make bitumen, a component of asphalt, according to Delphine Saucier, a company spokeswoman in Berlin.

The same Novus plant also supplies power to 13,000 homes in northern Germany. Inside its furnace, willow trees combust and a conveyor belt feeds chips of other species into the fire, a scene that can be viewed from a heat-resistant window.

All Vattenfall coal plants in Denmark are slated for conversion to biomass using a technique known as co-firing to ease the transition. The process mixes wood with coal to reduce the CO2 emissions, helping to save on pollution permits and sometimes on fuel, depending on the price of the trees used.

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