BIO MESS Don’t judge clean energy by its cover

Biomass, biofuel and bioenergy are the new buzzwords for clean, green energy — but just because a word has bio in it doesn’t make it ecofriendly. Just what bioenergy projects are, and how good they are for the environment are issues that have gotten mixed up in politics and carbon calculations. The Seneca Sustainable Energy cogeneration plant slated to begin burning woody biomass — and perhaps whole trees — on the north side of Eugene at the end of 2010 is a welcome green energy project to some, but an ill-conceived source of toxic air and greenhouse gases to many others.

According to Mark Harmon, an Oregon State University professor of forest science, “the problem is people are using a general term for a specific word use. Wood is a form of biomass,” he says, “but biomass just means ‘living mass.’”

When you’re talking about biomass, Harmon, who studies decomposition and carbon dynamics in forests, says, “Soil is living; dead things are living. They aren’t living in the original sense, but there are living things in them.”

Biomass can be everything from all biologically created stuff to just the living part of that stuff, he says. It includes byproducts like straw from the grass seed industry, manure from cattle, trash at the dump and even human waste.