Greenhouse Gases
Posted by Ellie08
A major benefit of substituting biomass for fossil fuels is that, if done in a sustainable fashion, it would greatly reduce emissions of greenhouses gases. The amount of carbon dioxide released when biomass is burned is very nearly the same as the amount required to replenish the plants grown to produce the biomass. Thus, in a sustainable fuel cycle, there would be no net emissions of carbon dioxide, although some fossil-fuel inputs may be required for planting, harvesting, transporting, and processing biomass. Yet, if efficient cultivation and conversion processes are used, the resulting emissions should be small (around 20 percent of the emissions created by fossil fuels alone). And if the energy needed to produce and process biomass came from renewable sources in the first place, the net contribution to global warming would be zero.
Similarly, if biomass wastes such as crop residues or municipal solid wastes are used for energy, there should be few or no net greenhouse gas emissions. There would even be a slight greenhouse benefit in some cases, since, when landfill wastes are not burned, the potent greenhouse gas methane may be released by anaerobic decay.