The Great Lakes Zephyr - Wind Energy & Hydrogen Journal

Also from ENN, some tactics being thought of to combat global warming in Europe that I think could be very readily adapted here in the USA. More on that after the story link.

Tuesday, September 23, 2003
By Rajiv Sekhri, Reuters


TORONTO — European countries could help meet their Kyoto emissions requirements by using forestry waste products like leftover tree stumps and foliage to produce energy, scientists said this week.

Stumps, branches, tree tops, and other foliage left in forests by logging firms release carbon dioxide over time as they decompose. Using the material as fuel to produce electricity or processing them into pulp and paper could cut down on greenhouse gas emissions, the scientists said in a report released before a World Forestry Congress meeting in Quebec City.

"The idea is economically feasible and has a lot of potential," said Pekka Kauppi, a professor of environmental science and policy at the University of Helsinki. Kauppi is one of about 150 scientists worldwide who have have worked on a report on global forest issues for United Nations University, which, in collaboration with the Finnish Forest Research Institute and the European Forest Institute, started the project in 1996.

"It's already clear that a number of countries will have great difficulty meeting their Kyoto emission targets," said Professor Hans van Ginkel, U.N. undersecretary-general and rector of Tokyo-based United Nations University.

The report shows that using just one-third of the leftover wood from logging could allow the European Union, for example, to cut its carbon dioxide emissions by...(Read on in: Forestry waste could help meet Kyoto targets, says study)

Now about using such things here. Several years ago I had the idea that one could make fire logs out of tree leaves (which we all know are very plentiful in the fall) by compressing them into paper bags after harvesting and then drying them like firewood on racks outside over a couple of years. I'm sure macjhinery could be developed that was yard tractor sized to do something like this fairly automatically, sort of a cross between a yard tractor with a leaf sweep, and a cylindrical trash compactor and an industrial packaging machine. On a larger scale, leaves could be harvested, ground to a fine powder, and blown through a hot air tunnel as leaf dust into a combustion chamber and burned pretty efficiently. The heat generated could produce steam to drive turbines as in a conventional power plant and then the "waste" heat could be used to dry the leaves for grinding and the remainder captured by Stirling cycle engines, yielding a pretty high efficiency. the resulting ash could be returned to the soil as fertilizer so that the soil wasn't deprived of all the nutrients the leaves yield to it as well, and the cycle could be alternated so that an area was only harvested maybe once every three years and each year a different area was harvested. Leaves are extremely plentiful and totally untapped as a power source in most of North America as we all know. I'd encourage thoughts on this idea.