I found the comparison between the different biomass pathways really valuable. However, I’m struggling to fully understand how you handled the district heating credits, which seem to be the main reason Cases A and C show negative emissions.
Could you walk me through your thinking on how you gave ‘credit’ to the electricity for producing heat? It looks like this step is doing a lot of the work in making the results look so good. Specifically:
– What exactly are you assuming that heat is replacing? Is it a natural gas boiler? An electric heater? The choice here makes a huge difference, but it wasn’t clearly stated.
– Was there a specific reason you didn’t use a more common method, like splitting the environmental impact between the heat and power based on their energy content? The way it’s done now feels a bit like giving all the ‘goodness’ to the electricity and making its footprint artificially negative.
Without a clear and justified method here, it’s very hard to trust the dramatic negative results. It feels a bit like the main conclusion is built on an accounting decision rather than a physical reality.