What is biomass energy?

Biomass is any sort of plant matter or animal wastes. From it, we can extract stored energy.

Biomass energy, or “bioenergy,” is stored in organic matter with the help of the sun. A common example is wood. To create wood, trees manufacture cellulose from sugars, which they make during photosynthesis. Because cellulose is made from sugars, it contains stored chemical energy. This energy is released as heat when wood is burned.

Biomass is one of our oldest sources of energy, having been used for thousands of years, ever since people began to burn wood to cook food, to keep warm or to forge metal. Today fossil fuels have largely replaced biomass as the major source of energy in industrialized countries, but new opportunities for biomass energy are developing as environmental and economic concerns encourage governments, industries and consumers to explore alternatives to fossil fuels, including renewable sources such as biomass. Today biomass is not only used for cooking and heating but also to fuel vehicles and increasingly to generate electricity and heat for industrial processes.

Diverse fuels
Wood remains the world’s largest source of biomass. In fact, it provides the principal fuel in many developing countries for cooking and heating. But wood is not the only biomass fuel. The wide variety of biomass fuel sources also includes:

• wastes from forestry and sawmill operations (bark, wood chips, sawdust and logging debris)
• urban wood wastes (shipping pallets, packing and leftover construction wood)
• agricultural wastes (such as crop residues, sugarcane, rice husks, coconut shells, cotton residues and palm oil residues)
• fast-growing trees and crops (called “energy crops”), such as poplar, willow and switchgrass, grown specially for energy (electricity or liquid fuels)
• other natural resources (such as straw and peat)
• organic wastes (such as animal manure and food processing wastes)
• organic portions of municipal solid waste (found in municipal sewage and landfills)