Other Civil and Environmental Engineering Commons^™

The Embodied Transport Energy Analysis Of Imported Wood Pellets, Aidan Duffy, Michael Conroy

Conference Papers

The Irish Government has recently introduced a series of capital grants to boost the uptake of domestic wood-pellet technologies in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. These have proved popular and have encouraged a significant number of people to switch from gas- and oil-fired boilers to the cleaner fuel. The demand for wood-pellets has, however, greatly exceeded the national capacity for production. The market for wood pellets elsewhere in Europe is also tight and, consequently, a large proportion of Irish pellets are sourced in Canada. This presents possible problems: the carbon emissions associated with long-distance transport may significantly offset the …