It is probably irresponsible to burn coal on an open fire . 25 percent efficiency is probably overstated.
They are reopening the mines in South Wales because the price of imported stuff has gone up to the extent that it is now economic to dig the British coal.
We are committed until alternative sources of power generation catch up and I indeed wonder if they ever will.
So I expect coal and nuclear will satisfy a large proportion of demand for the foreseeable future.

I would be happier to see coal burnt in power stations than on open fires. At least the products can be scrubbed of many of the pollutants and hopefully carbon capture will become a reality soon.

The biggest factor in making power plant more efficient would be to move generally toward CHP. The heat wasted at the back end of the generation process is criminal and cannot go on. Expect the next generation of power stations to be urban ones with district heating from a number of heatbanks distributed around the district. Anyone with surplus capacity will be encouraged to distribute it into the system.

We seem to have to have our Cumbrian fells surrounded by Aerogenerators. I am looking forward to the debate about siting a Large CHP plant in Windsor or Richmond

Hi

I haven't managed to get quite the figures I wanted but I have got quite close. I have prepared a page with a graph to compare co2 outputs of various fuel types: http://www.stovesonline.co.uk/fuel-co2-emissions.html
Some of the data are from the biomass energy centre and some from SAP figures (for part L1A building regs).

Burning wood is not carbon neutral - but if and only if it from a sustainable source (as John mentions) is very low carbon.

Cheers

I have been getting data from a few sources and do not have all the basic calcultions myself.

Wood chips
For wood chips the data comes via the biomass energy centre from a paper from Sheffield Hallam university - I can forward it to you if you so wish. Just email me your email address. Mine is s u n e * stovesonline .co.uk replace the * with an @ - hopefully that will thrawt the dredded spam! The figures from the paper assume road transport of 90km.

Logs
I could not get a figure for logs but the asumption that wood chips create more co2 through processing than logs was verified by the biomass energy centre so I chose the highest figure for the wood chips as a figure that logs should be below.

Wood pellets
For pellets the figure is based on 100kWh of electricity / tonne plus the Co2 processing and transport costs associated with wood chips - this figure will be too high as wood pellets are generally made from manufacturing waste material not chipped by a machine.

Coal - the figure is based on the SAP figures from BRE. I do not know where they assumed that the coal was from. I have another figure from the Biomass Energy centre for the CO2 created from the burning alone of 0.342 kg CO2 / KwH - so this suggests that the SAP figure of 0.317 kg CO2/kWh for the lifecycle emissions of anthracite is actually too low.

I do not really have any more detailed info than that I am afraid - If you have any extra data I would be interested.

I agree there are no hard and fast results - all the figures are based on various assumptions. But hopefully I have made our figures as transparent as possible (without being full of too much explanatory text that would put off a layperson).

: )

John11668, yea 20 quid a month that's all it costs me in coal - though I might add it's costing me nothing but the immersion heater at the moment (solar to come...)

Sune, that's a great summary, many thanks. I'll link to it from my blog. I'm looking at heat logs from Agrol or similar at the moment for a coal replacement. They are manufactured, but like your chart demonstrates so well - there is little 'new' carbon emissions involved and they are a waste product.

Look out for all biomass + fossil fuel (coal) burning cast iron stove with 30litre boiler coming out in August in South Africa:
1. It burns smokelessly(all biomass + low grade coal)
2. Uses up to 60% less fuel than any alternative
3. Boils 30 litres of water within 30 minutes(boiler part of stove)

Will be implemented in households in RSA as environmentally friendly device; health improvement and sustainable development project.

Unique concept - no electricity.