Wood for energy : Properties and associated technologies

The use of wood for heating has a long history, and is often reduced to the combustion and manufacture of charcoal. Over the last century, other utilization techniques have emerged, such as gasification. The development of new energy applications for wood is often associated with energy crises, in particular the two oil crises, but today interest is shifting to environmental issues, in particular the depletion of fossil fuel resources and global warming.

Wood energy offers a solution for every problem: charcoal for energy conservation, combustion to maintain thermal comfort, gasification for vehicle propulsion, and so on. At a time when strategic choices are being made for the future, it is important to have an overview of the possibilities offered by wood as an energy source.

In fact, the various wood energy recovery processes are very numerous, and most of them can be implemented with a minimum of effort and financial resources. It's just a shame that the work carried out in the 1980s has not been continued, forcing us to use imported technologies to combat the greenhouse effect.

But let's be realistic: wood is a delocalized raw material that will require reasonably-sized energy recovery processes to produce additional energy.