Propane vs wood burning

[1bigvegan]

Hello all,

Just curious to know other peoples take on the use of outdoor cooking with propane vs wood burning. The main idea for this is using an outdoor oven to cook pizzas and such but I'm sure this could pertain to plenty of other methods.

Propane is clean burning in that it doesn't release nasty chemicals into the air or particle debris but it is mainly produced from non renewable sources.

Wood burning is renewable but it also releases a handful of chemical compounds into the air and twice as much CO2 as propane.

My theory is that propane is the better choice because it burns cleaner, also the efforts for more large scale production of bio propane is coming around year by year (more so in Europe than US). Wood burning is nice because it gives food like Neapolitan pizzas (vegan of course) a light smokey taste and the only CO2 it gives off is what the tree took in but it is just such a dirty burn...

Thoughts?

 

[Nekodaiden]

Wood can be burned cleanly, with little to no smoke.

Two ways of doing this are:

1) Top down fires. Also known as upside down fires. They are basically the opposite of how most people build a fire and take a little more work to set up but if done right they typically emit a lot less smoke than conventional fires.

2) Rocket stoves that are properly built (many I've found on youtube aren't) emit little to no smoke, as all the wood is efficiently burned.

 

[David3]

Hello all,

Just curious to know other peoples take on the use of outdoor cooking with propane vs wood burning. The main idea for this is using an outdoor oven to cook pizzas and such but I'm sure this could pertain to plenty of other methods.

Propane is clean burning in that it doesn't release nasty chemicals into the air or particle debris but it is mainly produced from non renewable sources.

Wood burning is renewable but it also releases a handful of chemical compounds into the air and twice as much CO2 as propane.

My theory is that propane is the better choice because it burns cleaner, also the efforts for more large scale production of bio propane is coming around year by year (more so in Europe than US). Wood burning is nice because it gives food like Neapolitan pizzas (vegan of course) a light smokey taste and the only CO2 it gives off is what the tree took in but it is just such a dirty burn...

Thoughts?

The Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources commissioned this wood/biomass production/combustion sustainability report in 2010. More than you ever wanted to know on the subject, but very interesting.

https://www.mass.gov/doc/manometbiomassreportfullhirezpdf/download

.

 

[Tom L.]

The Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources commissioned this wood/biomass production/combustion sustainability report in 2010. More than you ever wanted to know on the subject, but very interesting.

Absolutely! I'll have to check it out later to digest it when I have more time.

 

[Jamie in Chile]

If this is just for an occasional cookout (less than 5 times per year cooking for a small number of people), then this hardly matters in the grand scheme of things. If it's a business that will be cooking all the time that's a different matter.

Wood burning is better than propane for global warming, and global warming is the most important factor to me since its negative consequences are higher, therefore wood is better. That was my basic conclusion after a lot of research and thought.

The thing is, yes wood burning does produce more CO2 than propane. However, propane is CO2 being taken out of safe underground storage and burnt into the atmosphere, end of story. With the wood burning, either
a) another tree is planted in its place, in which case it is climate neutral ish in the long run
b) the tree would not have been grown and sucked CO2 out of the air in the first place if it wasn't for commercial need, so still carbon neutral
c) the tree was a naturally grown tree cut down and never replaced - in this case, in a temperate region, the exposed ground reflects away light into space more than an absorbing tree, and this counteracts the carbon loss meaning it is still global warming neutral ish probably

In all these cases, wood wins on climate change. (Which you seem to already at least partly understand with your "Take in" comment.

But you have to counterbalance this against the pollution of wood: particulates like PM2.5 (nasty) and whether you have any nearby people annoyed by having smoke blown over them. This would tend to increase the negative effects of wood in a city (where we might prefer gas) but make wood a clear winner if you have no neighbours where you are burning.