Alternative Energy Resource: Biomass

Biomass is a biological material derived from living, or recently living organisms. In the context of biomass for energy this is often used to mean plant based materials, but biomass can equally apply to both animal and vegetable derived material. Biomass is considered to be one of the key renewable resources of the future at both small and large scale levels. It already supplies fourteen percent of the world’s primary energy consumption. Growing Biomass is a rural, labor-intensive activity, and can, therefore, create jobs in rural areas and help stem rural to urban migration. Biomass is carbon based and can be composed of different mixtures of organic materials such as, Hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and also small quantities of other atoms, which are mainly metals. For plants, carbon used from biomass is absorbed from the atmosphere as carbon dioxide using energy collected from the sun, during their process of photosynthesis. Plants may be eaten by animals and is then converted into animal biomass. If plant material is not eaten it is generally either broken down by some microorganisms, or burned, such as fossil fuels (coal, oil, and gas), which comes from biologic material. But remember there is a difference between the two, because biomass is not fossilized material (Like oil, coal, and gas) but fresh material that can grow again after being harvested. Today biomass is used to produce power and heat in large-scale facilities: solid biomass, biogas, biofuel, or biodiesel. Biogas is a gaseous fuel, made when methane, produced by the fermentation of organic matter. Biofuel is fuel derived directly from living matter, and biodiesel is a biofuel intended as a substitute for diesel.

Biomass power, or biopower is the use of biomas...

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... wood as a source of heat, or Denmark where a plant burns twenty eight thousand tons of straw to produce 13 megawatts of electricity. Mega Watts are a unit of power equal to on million watts. Which is a lot compared to the product of pollution in Denver. That’s 13 million watts of power…that could possibly be used for a better circumstance!!! Although, this is a great way to generate biomass into electricity…it also pollutes many of the surrounding areas. Every year 335,000 Americans die of lung cancer, which is a direct result of air pollution. The average adult consumes 3,000 gallons of polluted air every day, and as we all know pollution is a major problem in environment today. But if we want to continue to have more electricity, etc., we should use biomass instead, because it is a lot healthier, than any of the other alternate energy resources, used still today!