Question

Is biomass energy bad?

Answer 1

In simple words, biomass is a natural energy or fuel which is taken from plant or animal matter. Basically biomass is what contains some forms of chemical energy, so when the biomass is burned to make heat or it can just be converted into different forms of energy. This helps one to produce heat and electricity to power homes. Biomass comes from different sources like plant wastes and animal wastes.

Complete answer:
We know that fuel is required to produce heat or electricity. In our daily life we mostly hear that fossil fuels like coal, oil or petrol are used to produce them, but biomass is a more natural and renewable form of fuel production. For example; the energy produced from burning wood, waste from forests or farms; are different forms of biomass energy.

There are many advantages of using biomass energy, like; it is a renewable form of energy, it is not as expensive as fossil fuels, it prevents us from overusing non-renewable fossil fuels and it is also a carbon neutral energy.

We can say that the few reasons why using biomass energy may be bad are that:
- It is not as powerful as other sources like fossil fuels; hence it is not generally considered in urban areas for producing power.
- Even though it is carbon neutral energy, burning animal waste causes the amount of methane in our atmosphere to increase, which leads to global warming and damaging the environment.
- One of the main sources of biomass energy is wood; this is not good for the environment as it leads to deforestation.
- Biomass plants take a lot of room so they are not easy to utilize.
We can say that the harm in using biomass energy is mainly because it is not as clean as we expect, just because it's natural. It has side effects like the pollution may cause suffocation and heart attacks to people, if it's not taken care of or managed properly.

Note: Biomass is not a modern discovery, as the cavemen have utilized these methods to go about their day to day life, many years ago. But today, an inventor whose name is Jens Dall Bentzen has created something called a ‘highly-efficient system’ that has been able to increase the uses of biomass by creating various new fuels using biomass energy. The harms of biomass have been controlled while using his methods, also increasing the total amount of energy produced.