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Review: In ‘To Bury or Burn ’Metzger et al. (2002) dismiss attempts to assess the cost of managing carbon, and focus instead on assessing the efficiency of reducing net emissions per unit biomass. They argue that it is better to bury a unit of biomass and
burn methane than to substitute biomass for methane as an energy source because the former results in more carbon-free energy per unit of biomass. Consider the use of a unit of biomass, to be specific, assume a unit of biomass containing exactly 1 ton carbon (1 tC) which has a mass of ∼2.3 t and contains ∼35 GJ of energy (here, and throughout numerical values have been adjusted to match the assumptions in Metzger and Benford, 2001 and/or ‘To Bury or Burn’). As presented
in ‘To Bury or Burn’, there are two options for using the biomass: (1) bury the biomass and use 1 tC worth of methane producing 66 GJ of primary energy with zero net CO2 emissions; or (2) burn the 1 tC of biomass producing 35 GJ of primary energy with zero net CO2 emissions.