Towards forest sustainability in Mediterranean countries using biomass as fuel for heating

Abstract

The increasing fossil fuels price is a direct result of a growth in worldwide demand of energy and has become a major concern of many countries. The special conditions of Mediterranean countries, with high dependency on energy imports and energy used mainly from fossil fuels, make these countries users of high carbon energy. On the other hand, the mild environmental conditions which do not need high energy demands in heating, together with the progressive abandonment of forest exploitation as fuel source, have provoked environmental problems, such as increased risk of forest fires. In view of the above arguments, the Mediterranean forest use becomes essential in order to reduce the risk fire as well as the dependence on energy imports of fossil fuels, and lower CO2 emissions. Nowadays, Biomass District Heating (BDH) is widely used in the North of Europe. The main objective of this work is to establish a methodology for renewable energy resources integration at small urban areas in Mediterranean countries till now with high-energy consumption, and to asses that this methodology could be applied in Mediterranean areas successfully, and the determination of forest needs. For this purpose, a case study is shown, so a BDH network to cover the energy demand in a small urban area in the south of Spain was studied. The study was done in three phases: energy demand survey, BDH calculations, and assessment of technology for both, savings costs and CO2 emissions. In this case, BDH system offers 100% of CO2 savings and 68.22% of fuel cost savings versus fossil fuels. Using BDH, CO2 emissions to the atmosphere have been reduced by 35 tonnes, which is the equivalent of the annual CO2 sequestration of 700 adult trees approximately. As main conclusion of this work, if used, the available forest biomass, it could be saved more than 68% of the current energy demand in the case study. For this small rural settlement of 3000 inhabitants, 4 ha of forest was found as forest biomass needs every year, this means a total of 40 ha as sustainable energy model based on Mediterranean pine forest. The finds of this work can be used as policy solution that has to be study in the whole Mediterranean areas with forest resources, in order to have more sustainable environment.