Bioenergy

Bioenergy is renewable energy made available from materials derived from biological sources. Biomass is any organic material which has stored sunlight in the form of chemical energy. As a fuel it may include wood, wood waste, straw, manure, sugarcane, and many other by-products from a variety of agricultural processes. By 2010, there was 35 GW (47,000,000 hp) of globally installed bioenergy capacity for electricity generation, of which 7 GW (9,400,000 hp) was in the United States.

In its most narrow sense it is a synonym to biofuel, which is fuel derived from biological sources. In its broader sense it includes biomass, the biological material used as a biofuel, as well as the social, economic, scientific and technical fields associated with using biological sources for energy. This is a common misconception, as bioenergy is the energy extracted from the biomass, as the biomass is the fuel and the bioenergy is the energy contained in the fuel

There is a slight tendency for the word bioenergy to be favoured in Europe compared with biofuel in America.

One of the advantages of biomass fuel is that it is often a by-product, residue or waste-product of other processes, such as farming, animal husbandry and forestry. In theory this means there is no competition between fuel and food production, although this is not always the case. Land use, existing biomass industries and relevant conversion technologies must be considered when evaluating suitability of developing biomass as feedstock for energy.

Biomass is the material derived from recently living organisms, which includes plants, animals and their byproducts. Manure, garden waste and crop residues are all sources of biomass. It is a renewable energy source based on the carbon cycle, unlike other natural resources such as petroleum, coal, and nuclear fuels. Another source includes Animal waste, which is a persistent and unavoidable pollutant produced primarily by the animals housed in industrial-sized farms.

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