What is a biomass wood pellet?

What is a biomass wood pellet?
June 29, 2023

Biomass pallets lately have become a popular resource for heating or the production of renewable bioenergy on a far larger scale by compressing organic matter like wood, forest leftovers, and sawdust into energy-dense pellets.

What is a biomass wood pellet?

Organic material that can be utilised to produce energy is known as biomass. It can be used to fuel fires for warmth and cooking, and can also include wood, plant materials, and even animal dung.

What makes pellets so popular for renewable energy?

A benefit of biomass in the form of pellets is their high energy density. This has to do with how much energy a specific amount of a substance can hold.

The biomass that is made up of wood and waste products like wood chips and sawdust does not have a high energy density on its own. For instance, a kilogram of wood retains less energy than fuels like coal, diesel, or uranium.

Nevertheless, biomass becomes substantially more energy dense when pelletized waste from the forest sector. Moreover, wood pellets have a high combustion efficiency, which is crucial for the production of electricity. They might also have very low moisture content.

How are pellets derived from biomass made?

A pelletisation mill creates biomass pellets. The wood that has been collected together here is unsuitable for use as sawmill waste in other industries.

The wood is broken down into chips, tested for quality, roasted to lower its moisture level to under 12%, and then powdered. The solid, brief, dense biomass pellet is created by pressing this material under high pressure through a grate.

How are pellets used to create electricity?

Similar to how coal is used to create electricity, biomass pellets have the potential to replace coal in current coal power plants.

Pellets are transported via conveyor from storage to pulverising mills, where they are ground into a fine powder and blown into the power plant’s boiler. Here, the biomass is burned as fuel, and the heat created during that combustion is used to create steam, which powers the electricity-generating units.

Because of their homogeneous shape and density, biomass pellets are also simpler to transport and store in large quantities. To prevent unintentional burning, it is crucial that they are kept dry while in transit and that the air conditions are properly monitored and controlled when they are housed in biomass domes.

Facts About Biomass Pellets

When burned, biomass pellets emit 80% less CO2 and have lower amounts of sulphur, chlorine, and nitrogen than coal.

According to the International Renewable Energy Agency, wood pellets have an energy density of 11 gigajoules/m3, as opposed to 3 gigajoules/m3 for fresh wood or wood chips (IRENA).
Without China, the total amount of wood pellets used for power and heating in 2018 was 35 million tonnes.

Biomass pellets can provide combustion efficiency as high as 85% when used in high-efficiency wood pellet burners and boilers.

Biomass pellets: are they renewable?

Biomass pellets derived from forests that are responsibly managed and whose trees naturally regenerate or are replanted and grow in a human timescale are renewable.

Biomass pellets must come from sustainably managed forests and other businesses that do not contribute to deforestation if we are to produce energy over the long run. Science-based sourcing choices must not compromise the long-term capacity of forests to store and sequester carbon.

At the time of burning, sustainable wood pellets are thought to be carbon neutral. Forests take in carbon from the atmosphere as they grow. The same amount of ambient CO2 is released when a biomass pellet is burned. The atmosphere’s total concentration of CO2 remains unchanged.

With the addition of carbon capture technology, sustainable bioenergy can become a source of negative emissions due to its low carbon footprint when considering its lifecycle emissions, which also include CO2 from the supply chain.

SRE Energy biomass wood pellets are the answer to your renewable energy requirement. Contact us for the best quality Biomass Wood Pellets

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