I know nothing about this subject except that a minority of skeptics don't believe that there is global warming and a depletion of our ozone layer or that humans are in large part responsible. Assuming that GW and ozone depletion are fact, does burning these renewable resources such as wood pellets and pig fat for heat exacerbate these problems? An inquiring but uninformed mind wants to know.
Fritz _____ From: qui...@clearwire.net [mailto:qui...@clearwire.net] Sent: Thursday, March 06, 2008 4:56 PM To: o...@texascavers.com; Fritz Holt Subject: Re: [ot_caving] Re: oil prices I recalled info heard on BBC not long back about Scandanavia and found this info on green fuel. The EU has pushed green fuel. The proportion of oil-heated homes in Sweden has fallen to 8 percent, as many neighborhoods use hot water from central plants that burn biofuels, often wood-based pellets. Since the beginning of 2006, householders have been paid to replace oil-burning furnaces with environmentally friendly heating systems. Such financial incentives already were available to libraries, pools, and hospitals that wanted to switch to more efficient renewable energy. Sweden is not alone. The Danish Crown slaughterhouse uses the fat of 50,000 pigs a week to generate biogas. The entire Danish Crown plant has been redesigned with an eye to saving energy, part of a thirty-year Danish effort to eliminate waste, conserve energy, and reduce consumption of fossil fuels, as The Wall Street Journal reports. Surplus heat from Danish power plants is delivered to nearby homes, via insulated pipes. Large parts of Denmark have undergone a nearly total makeover of basic energy infrastructure. The new system now heats almost two-thirds of Danish homes. Power plants have been radically reduced in size and built closer to people's homes and offices to reduce power loss during transmission. In the mid-1980s, Denmark had fifteen large power plants; it now has several hundred small ones Danish building codes enacted in 1979 (and tightened several times since) also require thick home insulation and tightly sealed windows. Between 1975 and 2001, Denmark's national heating bill fell 20 percent, even as the amount of heated space increased by 30 percent. Denmark's gross domestic product has doubled on stable energy usage during the last thirty years. The average Dane now uses 6,600 kilowatt hours of electricity a year, less than half of the U.S. average, according to The Wall Street Journal. Denmark has become a world leader in wind-turbine technology. Turbines generate electricity that competes in price with oil, coal, and nuclear power, and they provide several thousand jobs. Some wind turbines now have blades almost 300 feet wide--the length of a football field. During January, a very stormy month, Denmark harvested 36 percent of its electricity from wind, almost double the usual. In the United States, the comparable figure is one-quarter of 1 percent. Many Danish companies offer indoor bike parking, as well as locker rooms. Employees ride company-owned bikes to off-site meetings. People tote children on extra bike seats. Members of parliament ride to work, as do CEOs of some major companies. Lars Rebien Sorensen, head of the pharmaceutical firm Novo Nordisk, even conducts media interviews from his bike saddle. http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-166187067.html Sweden and Norway have some of the highest liquor taxes in the world, provoking large-scale smuggling from Denmark. Until recently, gold-and-blue-capped Swedish Customs officers poured the contraband booze down the drain. These days, however, a million illicit bottles a year are trucked to a sparkling new high-tech plant about eighty miles from Stockholm that manufactures biogas fuel. Every busted booze smuggler has been drafted into Sweden's war against oil dependence and greenhouse gases. Hydrogen fuels will be on the road in 2012 Norway, Sweden and Denmark. http://www.fuelcellsworks.com/Supppage5494.html Source - NGV Global Tuesday, 21 August 2007 FuelMaker Corporation of Canada has appointed Gasum, of Helsinki, Finland as its latest new dealer. Gasum will market, sell and service FuelMaker's line of products including Vehicle Refueling Appliances (VRA) and Phill, the home refueling appliance. Gasum is a full service supplier of natural gas in Finland. Since 2004 changes in alternative fuel taxation practices have made the use of natural gas vehicles (NGVs) a much more attractive option in the country. Gasum has built 6 refueling stations and plans to increase infrastructure by building 25 more by 2010. Gasum plans to complement this station infrastructure by using FuelMaker VRAs and Phill where larger stations are not feasible. The company will start first with commercial applications, focusing on areas that already have a natural gas network and are serviced by public transit. This will include replacing their own private fleet with NGVs. Gasum's plans also include working with Finnish car importers to increase the availability and selection of NGVS for the consumer. Gasum believes that Phill will be an important factor in consumer acceptance of NGVs. Home refueling will complement the use of commercial stations, providing a convenient network of infrastructure, which will in turn promote the use and acceptance of NGVs in Finland. The addition of Gasum to the team of international Phill dealers now makes Phill commercially available in the United States, France, Italy, Poland, the Czech Republic and Finland. Phill will soon be available in Switzerland and the Netherlands, and is currently being tested in Germany, Japan, Barbados, the U.K., Australia, Lithuania, and Pakistan. FuelMaker is in negotiations with many other companies from around the world to become dealers.
