Why use wood fuel? What are the benefits?

a) It's competitively priced: Wood fuel can compete on fuel price with the fossil fuel alternatives, although the costs of installing wood fuel systems can be higher than fossil fuel systems.

b) It's carbon-lean: Wood fuel has a number of benefits, but the most significant one in the 21st Century is its potential role in helping to prevent dangerous climate change. That's because it can result in lower nett emissions of greenhouse gases than those emitted by burning fossil fuels.

Wood fuel produced in sustainably managed forests is ‘replaced’ by the next crop of growing trees, which reabsorbs the same amount of carbon that is emitted by the current crop being burned. The only nett emissions are those caused by the harvesting, transport and processing of wood fuel. No such balanced carbon cycle exists for fossil fuels except, perhaps, one measured in millions of years. Their emissions are effectively all one-way traffic from the Earth's crust to the atmosphere.

c) It's renewable: Unlike fossil fuel reserves, sustainably managed woodland can produce an endlessly renewable source of energy. In contrast, once fossil fuels have been used, they are gone for millions of years.

d) It's good for the woodland environment: Sustainable management of woodlands for wood fuel is good for wildlife, biodiversity and woodland health and vigour, because the thinning, harvesting and coppicing of trees for wood fuel opens up the woodland floor to the sunlight. This encourages a greater range of plants, animals and insects to flourish than if the woodland were left to become rank, dark and overgrown - a state that foresters call "over-mature" or "under-managed".