Biomass Energy Resource Enhancement : The move to modern secondary energy forms .

Income growth and industrialization of the developing countries is driving their economies towards the use of secondary energy forms that deliver high efficiency energy and environmentally improved end-uses for biomass. Typical of these secondary energy forms are electricity, distributed gas systems, and liquid fuels. This trend suggests that the hitherto separate biomass energy technology development pathways followed in developing and industrialized countries will eventually share common elements. While in the U.S. and the E.U. the majority of the bioenergy applications are in medium and large-scale industrial uses of self-generated biomass residues, the characteristic use in developing countries is in rural cook-stoves. Increasing urbanization and investment in transportation infrastructure are leading to the possibility of an operational change of scale in developing countries. One factor driving this trend is diminishing individual and household biomass resource demands. This occurs as rural incomes increase and households ascend the energy ladder towards clean and efficient fuels and appliances. Scale increases and end-user separation from the biomass resource require that the biomass be converted at high efficiency into secondary energy forms which serve as energy carriers. Increasingly, in the middle-income developing country economies such as Brazil, secondary energy transmission is in the form of gas and electricity in addition to the existing transmission of liquid transportation fuels. Unfortunately, the biomass resource is finite. Further, in the face of competing food and fiber uses and land constraints, it is difficult to substantially increase biomass availability. As a result, development must emphasize considerably increased conversion efficiency and end-use applications of bioenergy. Moreover, as a consequence of economic growth, biomass resources are increasingly to be found in the secondary and tertiary waste streams from urban and industrial operations. If not utilized for energy production, this potential resource will require disposal in some other manner on account of its negative environmental impacts. The development cycle for biomass thus moves in a step-wise fashion. The first step is the self-use of wood and agricultural residues for cooking, heating, and lighting. Next, investments are made in anaerobic digesters (to simultaneously address energy, environment, and hygiene needs) and in efficient wood and straw fired stoves (to improve the indoor air environment and reduce the depletion of forests for fuelwood). The final stage is village-scale operation of digesters and gasifiers that provide distributed gas resource to households and enterprises that are not necessarily associated with the agricultural or forestry activities. Simultaneously, it is possible for industries that process biomass into pulp, paper, lumber, and sugar (from sugar cane) to move from being merely self-sufficient in process heat needs to becoming significant