The population on our planet continued to increase. Villages became towns, which became cities full of people who needed to be fed and kept warm and trees became scarce. Demand for fuel (TREES) was quickly outrunning the supply.
But by the 16th century mankind began turning its attention to another form of energy: COAL
Alberta was "blessed" with an even cheaper and more convenient source: NATURAL GAS
The declining supply of affordable fossil fuels, including NATURAL GAS, and growing ecological and geopolitical concerns linked to their utilization has increasingly focused public attention on renewable energy sources and with that the chances of using wood again, but now it is called "wood-biomass", showing that the wood burning process has become a modern and in all aspects sensible alternative.
The opportunity to see Alberta's and Canada's forests and woodlots as much as the significant waste-wood stream with new eyes is now. Pioneers and woodlot owners alike have long used their deadfall and blown down trees in their fireplaces and wood stoves. The challenge is to expand this thinking see trees and forests in and around rural communities as a source of affordable and renewable energy for the benefit of energy users within the community.

Our report Energy From Wood Biomass Combustion in Rural Alberta Applications explores potential for wood-biomass in Alberta. Authors, Harald Welling and Thom Shaw, show the positive economic and environmental impacts of carbon neutral heat and power, possible from modern wood burning technology. Heat from wood in this context no longer means, chopping, splitting and stacking firewood. The use of mobile chipping other small-scale forestry equipment gets the wood from to the forest floor to the hopper bin with relative ease.

Driven by fuel cost and environmental concerns, wood has become an attractive source of sustainable energy over the past forty years - especially in Western Europe. Wide ranges of technologies have already been developed to utilize the biomass resource, and enhanced technologies continue to evolve. Part of this evolution has been improvements to direct combustion in burner systems this includes pellet and wood-chip boilers. These systems usually achieve a standard efficiency of over 90 percent.
Automatic boilers are equipped with a silo or other storage rooms containing wood pellets or wood chips. An auger or other feeding system matches fuel input with the output demand of the overall heating system. Great advances have been made over the past ten years in respect to higher efficiency and reduced emissions from the chimney. Improvements have been achieved particularly in respect of the design of the combustion chamber, combustion air supply, and the automatic control of the entire combustion process.

Despite an often, simple construction, most of the automatically fired boilers can achieve an efficiency of 80-90%, and a CO emission of under 100 ppm.
For our partner's technology, the figures are 95% and 20 ppm, respectively. An important condition for achieving these high results is that the boiler efficiency during day-to-day operation is close to full load.
The nominal thermal output of various modern boiler systems ranges from 100 kW (341,000 BTU/h)
to 5 MW (17 million BTU/h).
Depending on the size of the system, it is scalable to a variety of scenarios including:

- Local large or small business using heating
- Greenhouses
- Schools, hospitals, seniors' housing
- Farms, homes, shops
- Hutterite communities
- Municipal and county offices
- District heating

When wood is harvested it puts dollars in farmers/forest landowners pocket when they sell their wood to local energy users. In Europe the wood fuel supply is further secured by long-term contracts with local or regional producers. The other win for the local economy is the potential for lower energy prices with long-term price stability.

A little later in time, humans actually figured out how to start a fire on demand.
In order to start a fire you needed kindling and firewood. If you lived near a forest, there were plenty of fallen branches and twigs you could pick up. However, later when there were LOTS of people ALSO gathering branches and twigs for THEIR fires, the fallen twigs and branches soon became a rare commodity. Even though people also used dried animal dung (cow pies), straw, and sometimes-dried peat, wood was the most common fuel for heating, lighting and cooking.

Long ago, when the skies were clear and rush-hour traffic was not even a distant thunder, life was a bit simpler, or was it?
If a wild animal didn't eat you by noon, you were probably fine until nearly freezing to death in a storm that evening while trying to return to your cave in the dark...
Thus humans first needed energy: light and heat.
In those days, fire came in two flavors: lightning strike or molten lava.
If you were lucky enough to be near a tree when lightning struck, you got fire. If you were too close though...well, we get the picture.

Energy from
Wood Presentation

Alberta Wood
Energy Report

KALWA's Project Planning Guide

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