Do biomass power generating units help combat global warming?
Yes, electricity produced from biomass is considered to be carbon neutral and therefore helps to combat global warming. The CO2 that the facility will release would have been produced as the plants and trees naturally decomposed in the forest without the benefit of electricity production. One way to think about biomass power is that it is harnessing energy that would otherwise be wasted, just like wind energy and solar energy. The burning of conventional fossil fuels such as gasoline, oil, coal, or natural gas results in the release of CO2 that would otherwise remain trapped deep within the Earth’s crust. CO2 is a greenhouse gas and the principal contributor to global climate change. Additionally, to the extent biomass material is buried in a landfill, the decomposition process produces methane gas, which is released to the atmosphere. Methane is approximately 20 times more harmful than CO2 as a greenhouse gas. The following Figure 1 compares the life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions fro