Green Energy Times Staff

The Sixth Annual Bioenergy Day is on October 24, 2018. It is a day for the industry to let everyone know what bioenergy is all about.

Bioenergy is not just logs and wood chips. The industry includes processing and using waste products from industries relating to forest products, including paper and woodworking waste. But it also includes processing all sorts of organic products from agriculture, food waste, and municipal waste. Also, bioenergy does not necessarily imply direct combustion of products.

Wood pellets and chips can be burned directly for electricity or heat. They can also be used in a gasification process, in which they give off gas that can be run into a gas turbine. The gasification process can be very clean, with almost no particulate emissions. It can also be extremely efficient. GE subsidiary, Jenbacher, claims that for cogeneration, its engines can be about 90% efficient, and they can use gas from a gasification process for fuel.

Another process that delivers bioenergy is anaerobic digestion (AD). It processes by-products that would otherwise require treatment, such as food waste, manure, or sewage. Old-fashioned ways of dealing with these materials were expensive and environmentally problematical. Using AD renders them into energy and compost, turning a problem potentially into a profitable process.

Organic waste materials can also be used to make liquid fuels, and these can be substitutes for petroleum fuels. Clearly, there are a lot of bioenergy technologies, and many of them have the potential to become much more important.

Most of us know bioenergy for its use at home and in buildings of all sorts. Anyone with a wood stove is using a bioenergy for heat.

On Bioenergy Day, there will be events all over the country. Readers can look them up online at www.bioenergyday.com. The participants who are putting on events for the day can be found in the “2018 Participants” link at the top of the web page. Many events are not yet posted, so we suggest looking after mid-September. We do notice that Froling Energy of Peterborough, New Hampshire, is listed as a participant.