Re: Coal Sweetened Biomass

BTW: If greenhouse warming is the issue, CO2 is CO2 it doesn't care
where it came from. A lb of carbon from wood is the same as coal, oil
or gas. I know you know this already, but others may have different
notions.

True

Not so much

This is a non sequitur. Just because the CO₂ doesn't know where it came from does not mean that they are equivalent to the system taken as a whole. There is currently no methodology in use today for taking the the CO₂ released from buring coal, oil or gas back underground into the "carbon input pool" it came from.

If I burn a tree for fuel, and I plant a tree for fuel, in 25 or 50 years or so I've 'recaptured' that carbon back to the original pool it came from. Better yet, a biomass crop like Miscanthus that has a rapid turnaround with little man-made input required, where the CO₂ released from buring this years crop is recaptured for next years.

That is the fallacy of this argument: CO₂ itself is like a coin that's been flipped doesn't know where it came from, however like the person that bet 'heads' and the coin came up tails, it does indeed matter to us.

Why? Well, you release a bunch of CO₂ from one pool into the system and it can't go back into that pool, it has to go somewhere else: either by staying in the system or by increase the size of one of the other absorbing pools.

In answer to your questions, there are a significant number of coal-fired plants in the US, and there are more 'on the way' in the planning and building stages. They are not going to be decomissioned at the drop of a hat. Finding ways to make them 'more green' by co-firing biomass is an imperitive half-step to reduce the amount of carbon released from the underground source. Studies have shown that Miscanthus can be co-fired up to 50% with coal in coal-fired power plants.

See photo of Miscanthus bales outside a coal plant in the UK, scroll down to the second 'page':

http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/story?id=51557

This is a -good- thing.

Your question revolved around adding a bit of coal to burning biomass; the real brass ring is to get the opposite to happen-- all the existing coal plants to addition in as high a percentage of biomass possible.