Wood energy

Wood is considered humankind’s very first source of energy. Today it is still the most important single source of renewable energy providing about 6 percent of the global total primary energy supply.

More than two billion people depend on wood energy for cooking and/or heating, particularly in households in developing countries. It represents the only domestically available and affordable source of energy. Private households’ cooking and heating with woodfuels represents one third of the global renewable energy consumption, making wood the most decentralized energy in the world.

Woodfuels arise from multiple sources including forests, other wooded land and trees outside forests, co-products from wood processing, post-consumer recovered wood and processed wood-based fuels. Wood energy is also an important emergency backup fuel. Societies at any socio-economic level will switch easily back to wood energy when encountering economic difficulties, natural disasters, conflict situations or fossil energy supply shortages.

Wood fuels are a very important forest product. Global production of fuelwood exceeds the production of industrial roundwood in terms of volume. Fuelwood and charcoal production is often the predominant use of woody biomass in developing countries and economies in transition.

Today wood energy has entered into a new phase of high importance and visibility with climate change and energy security concerns.

Renewable and ecological

THE WOOD, HEATING ENERGY

Heritage of nature, ecosystem of the animal and vegetable species, the forest covers, in France, almost one third of the national territory. Each extraction of trees is compensated with a new plantation. Exploitation and consumption included, the carbon footprint of wood is neutral because of the fact that on one hand there are lots of local production, allowing to minimise the transport and so to balance the impact on the environment, and on the other hand the carbon gas emissions during the combustion in a wood stove, are equal to those produced during the state of decomposition of the wood into the forest. Then those carbon gas emissions are assimilated with the photosynthesis phenomenon by trees, for their needs during their growth.

So, to reduce heat losses and to increase efficiency, the single wood heating appliances, stoves, fireboxes and inserts, have faced, since the 2000’s, very important evolutions. They are all equipped with double combustion, which allows to burn again the smokes and gases produced by the first combustion of the wood, and reduce the greenhouse gas emissions.