Biomass

Biomass technologies include a range of techniques for obtaining useable energy from plant and animal materials, including crops, trees, woody wastes, grasses, or animal wastes. These materials can be converted into liquid fuel (biofuels), methane (biogas), heat, or electricity (biopower). Biomass technologies range from simply burning wood for home heating to new high-tech processes for creating ethanol from fast-growing energy crops. Thus, these technologies run the gamut from inefficient and potentially polluting to quite efficient and clean.

Because there is such a range of biomass approaches, New York's renewable energy policy expressly excludes certain technologies, like the burning of municipal solid waste. Though trash burning can be used to produce electricity, it is not truly a renewable technology. It also produces significant air pollution, including dioxin and other toxics. For this reason, trash burning should not be put forward as a clean, renewable technology.

Clean biomass energy does have great environmental potential. For example, combustion of biomass releases almost no sulfur, the pollutant that causes acid rain. This combustion does release carbon dioxide, the major global warming pollutant, but an equal amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) was absorbed during the growth of the trees or crops that are burned. So biomass energy is "carbon neutral" as the CO2 is merely recycled, minimizing the impact on global warming.

One type of biomass energy is biogas - the gas produced by waste. Methane is produced when waste decomposes at landfills, sewage treatment plants, or farms. This gas can be collected, processed, and used as fuel. When this natural decomposition process is enhanced using new technologies, such as methane digesters for manure or advanced gasification techniques for other wastes, the process becomes more efficient and clean.

In New York, the State's Energy Research and Development Authority conducts research and commercialization projects in this area, under its Biomass Resources Program, and to a lesser extent, under its Agriculture Program. Some types of biomass energy -- but not all -- are included in New York's Renewable Energy Portfolio Standard Program.