Jeremy Lovell, PlanetArk 22 Nov 07;
LONDON - Biofuel convert Graham Hilton is a man who can see the wood for the trees in the planet's future.
The former oil man turned sustainable heating businessman is a biofuels advocate, especially wood pellets, as a key part of the solution to cutting emissions of climate warming carbon gases from burning fossil fuels for heat, power and transport.
"Wood pellets are carbon neutral -- burning them only releases carbon that the tree originally sequestered," he told Reuters in an interview on Wednesday. "Not only that. But it is technology we can deploy now to meet demand for heat.
"People are fiddling while the planet is burning. I would prefer to deploy a technology now and rip it out in 10 years when another one comes along than wait 10 years to find a better one. There is no time," he added.
About half of Britain's energy demand is for heat and Hilton calculates that, given the right incentives, biofuels could provide about 10 percent of that, thereby cutting demand for the coal and gas currently used.
"That could mean displacing about four million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year," he said, noting the widespread use of wood pellet fuel in Scandinavia and Austria.
But while the fuel is natural and available either as by-product from sawmills or as wood from forestry management, the capital costs of the boilers needed to burn it efficiently are roughly double those of conventional gas appliances.
"While that is a barrier to swift and widespread deployment it is not insurmountable," said Hilton, proposing a subsidy along the lines of the feed-in tariff that electricity utilities must pay for renewable power from private generators.
"What we need is a feed-in tariff. Around 10 pounds per megawatt hour would be enough," added Hilton, who runs his own wood fuel firm, The Energy-Crops Company, and campaigns widely on the whole biofuels issue.
While the British government has made much about renewable energy to produce electricity, barely any mention has been made of renewable heat -- despite the large role it plays in energy consumption in most developed nations.
WOOD BURNING PLANT IN WALES
But on Wednesday Energy Secretary John Hutton approved plans for a major wood-burning electricity plant in South Wales that, when completed around 2010, will produce enough power for half the homes in Wales.
At the same time negotiations in the run-up to a meeting of UN environment ministers next month on the Indonesian island of Bali have focused in part on prevention of deforestation, which is a major contributor to climate change.
A major uptake of biofuels -- especially wood -- as an alternative to burning fossil fuels could be seen as contradictory if it meant cutting down trees.
But it is a contradiction Hilton shrugs off.
"Managed forestry is not at all the same as deforestation," he said. "Managed forestry gives it value."
Wednesday was the start of Britain's National Tree Week, which this year is focusing on deforestation.
Environment Minister Phil Woolas told a conference he expected Bali to make major progress on the issue.
"A key goal of UK policy is to make forestry part of the process in Bali. After intensive lobbying of key countries across the world, we now expect support from China, Brazil and the US that this should be the case," he added.
(Reporting by Jeremy Lovell; editing by Anthony Barker)
