Comment by pjc50
4 days ago
This consumes far more land area than we have available.
The first blast furnaces were indeed fuelled this way, from locally sourced charcoal, but coal/coke took over due to requiring far less effort (energy!) to extract.
Going by https://www.drax.com/uk/sustainability/sustainable-bioenergy... , the UK's single large scale biomass power plant is fuelled by over sixteen million hectares (160,000km^2) or approximately one Wisconsin. If we wanted to power the whole UK electricity from biomass, we'd need ten Wisconsins. (Wisconsin, presumably, would have to find some other source of power in this scenario)
(of course, Drax wasn't built to burn imported biomass, it was built to burn locally extracted coal ...)
Drax uses about 12,000km^2, not 160,000km^2.
A slightly more useful land area is the United Kingdom itself, which is 243,000km^2. With this technique, it takes an area 1/19th the size of the UK to produce 4% of its energy.
This isn't a feasible approach to energy production, but it's an order of magnitude less bad than your figures have put forward.