Essay Example on Bioenergy: Harnessing Solar Energy Through Biomass

Introduction

Bioenergy is the energy obtained from biomass. Biomass is the organic material that has been mostly used as fuel throughout the history of mankind. It is produced by plants by fixing the light, water, and carbon dioxide through the process of photosynthesis. In this process, solar energy is stored in chemical bonds and can be released by processes such as combustion, digestion, decomposition or by hydrolysis and fermentation to liquid or gaseous fuels (Albright, 2012). Other sources of organic materials of biological origin equally important have been an animal waste, particularly manure and waste from human societies, like garbage in its organic component. Although biomass and animal waste maintain their importance as traditional fuels in rural and urban communities, all these organic materials are revealed as alternative fuels for commercial and industrial use, which when produced under sustainability criteria can offer significant amounts of renewable energy, with the advantage that their climate change emissions are neutral (that is, they do not contribute in a net way to increase the number of greenhouse gases that exist in the atmosphere).

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Biomass

Biomass provides useful and feasible energy to take advantage of the economic point of view in the three physical forms: solid, liquid and soda. This confers on bioenergy characteristics of universal energy resource, clean and powerful, taking advantage of the regeneration capacity and if it is exploited with sustainability criteria. According to Albright (2012), bioenergy can make an important contribution to replace the sources of fossil and nuclear energy.

Alcohol

Biofuels such as alcohol (bioethanol), pure vegetable oils, vegetable oils, and waste cooking oil converted into biodiesel, are used in diesel or gasoline engines, buses, cargo trucks, or to produce electricity and heat in generators and mechanical work, from its use in industrial engines. These liquid energies currently come from a wide variety of crops such as sugar cane, corn, beets, rapeseed, soybeans, and palm of oil, among others, but in the near future will come from other inedible crops such as castor, as well as agro-industrial waste and lingo-cellulosic material of forest energy plantations (Albright, 2012).

Biogas or Methane

These are products of the fermentation of waste organic forests, agricultural fields and waste from animals such as cows, pigs, sheep, goats, horses, and birds. This energy production can also be obtained from waste in landfills; the extracted methane is used to produce thermal energy, mechanical or electrical On the other hand, hydrogen, gaseous fuel, can also be obtained by transforming organic waste or by photo-biological processes. Two of the most important advantages of using the bioenergy are that it can replace fossil fuels without causing increased emissions that produce climate change (Albright, 2012). This is the only energy source capable of challenging oil in the liquid fuel market for the transport sector.

It should be noted that bioenergy is the only source of renewable energy that can be stored as easily as oil and gas, which is an economic advantage to establish the balance between supply and demand of energy. In the electricity sector, this same quality makes the bioenergy for the production of electricity completely dispatchable, since the bioenergy plants constitute "firm" capacities of electric power. In the long term, the transition of energy can lead to the use of different types of automotive fuels.

References

Albright, L. (2012). Energy Systems Engineering: Evaluation and Implementation. McGraw-Hill Professional.