ABSTRACT
As the damage wrought by reliance on fossil fuels becomes ever clearer – manifest in the form of climate change, air pollution, the release of carcinogens and more – the appeal of a biomass-powered energy system is obvious. In some respects, biomass-powered energy is not new: people have gleaned and cultivated energy from the biomass around them for millennia. They have burned wood and dung, kept draft animals to pull their ploughs, made candles from wax, and used compost to provide heating and cooling. Billions of people around the world currently rely on these forms of biomass to meet their energy needs. Yet, the recent love affair with biofuels in many of the world’s industrialized, as well as developing, countries – demonstrated in the tripling of global biofuel production between 2000 and 2007 – has little in common with those traditional biofuel practices.
