Last September, the Valencia Provincial Council gave the green light at the beginning of the forest biomass extractions planned within the project’Valencia Biovalorizes‘, which will extend over more than 200 hectares of forest land in Llíria, Serra and Requena.
The localities have been selected thanks to the technical forest management studies that have been carried out since the Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPV), together with the staff of the public company TRAGSA.
This is a pioneering project that brings together the efforts, in addition to the UPV, of the communities of Interior Tierra del Vino and Camp Turiaof the aforementioned municipalities and the Environment Area of the Provincial Institution and the actions have been coordinated with the Department of Environment, Infrastructure and Territory.
The objective of this initiative is, on the one hand, the fire preventionthanks to forest management that will treat areas with a superabundance of this organic matter, responsible for a more accelerated and difficult to control deflagration each year.
On the other hand, the planned extraction of more than 1,000 tons of biomass will also serve as renewable energy sourcewhich automatically translates into notable economic savings for the residents of these locations. Furthermore, this will encourage the promotion of this type of plants, such as the one the population of Serra already has, and to continue researching possible uses of this clean resource.
It is for this reason that they have the support of the Biodiversity Foundation the Ministry for the Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge (MITECO), within the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan (PRTR), financed by the European Union – NextGenerationEU.
A large room for improvement
Biomass is a natural resource that uses organic matter from forest areas to become a renewable energy source. The different types into which it can be converted (natural, residual or produced) can give rise to new components, such as charcoal, biogas, and ethanol, whose use as fuels or electricity producers is very common.
Therefore, biomass is a fundamental element in the ecological transition. However, in our country it still has a long way to go, since, according to data from the Spanish Engineering Institute, Spain only takes advantage of 40% of its full potential. This places us below the European Union average, which reaches 61%.