Quantative and qualitative evaluations of environmentally dangerous wastes emission from burning wood comparing to natural gas and coal

A search for ecologically convenient technologies for energy production is becoming more important due to constant increase in anthropogenic environmental load. Using the renewable resources for energy producing, particularly wood biomass from short rotation tree plantations, is accompanied by less pollutants emission into atmosphere. The techno­logy is popular for a long time in many countries, especially in EU, but in Ukraine it is not widely used. However, there are several important prerequisites for this, particularly lower emission of hazardous substances to environment and existence of significant amount of the soils, unsuitable for traditional crops farming but where planting of short rotation tree plantations is possible. A mathematical model has been developed to evaluate the total pollutants emission to environment from using fossil (natural gas, coal) and renewable (wood biomass) sources of energy production facilities, and a new approach for comparative quantitative evaluation of environmental emission of ha­zardous substances composition has been proposed. It was shown that total pollutants emission in environment from using different fuels types is significantly increased in rank: wood → natural gas → coal, mainly because of increasing carbone dioxide emission. The total emission of pollutants to environment caused by bur­ning of the energy sources for heat production was evaluated, but the negative impact efficiency for each separate component was not taken into account.