The problem with wood and biofuels is that once you’ve chopped down the forest to make charcoal to smelt iron or run your steam engines, the forest is gone, and you are limited to the annual harvest of that resource. So yes, you can grow fuel wood or oil crops on a farm, but that’s a farm that isn’t being used for other crops like cotton or wheat.
You can smelt iron ore and make steel using wood or biofuels, that isn’t the problem. The problem is the amount you can make. Steel has been made for thousands of years. But you can’t produce steel in industrial quantities–steel for battleships and Eiffel Towers and skyscrapers and bridges and railroads and automobiles–without industrial quantities of fuel. In our world, that fuel was coal. Without coal, there is no industrial steel production. Instead there is craft steel production, and metals are an expensive luxury, rather than a commodity.
Without cheap steel, our modern buildings are impossible. The Eiffel Tower was the first demonstration of what could be done with cheap iron, the ancient Romans knew about iron, but the thought of construction a tower made entirely out of metal would have broken their brains. And without steel reinforcement, concrete is a different sort of material. Concrete has incredibly high compressive strength, but no tensile strength. So yes, you can build concrete bridges and concrete buildings and concrete boats, but you can’t build the things we build today.
So what you have is a civilization entirely constrained by the annual energy budget that can be intercepted from the sun. You expand hydro power until every source is used. You exploit wind and tidal until all sources are used. You have massive plantations of fuel crops, so food is much more expensive, but yields are pretty much fixed. Photoelectric solar power is pretty much equivalent to growing plants and burning them. You have geothermal power in some locations.
But the problem is that you can’t intensify energy production the same way you can intensify fossil fuel extraction. And that means a world with a vastly, dramatically reduced annual energy budget, and that means certain things are just economically impossible. Until and unless someone discovers nuclear power, civilization is permanently stuck at a lower level of technology.
Transportation is still stuck in the horse and buggy and sailing ship stage. Of course steam cars and railroads and steamboats can be powered by wood. That’s how early steamboats were powered. The areas along the river or rail link collect the wood at the various stations. The trouble is that gigantic amounts of wood are required, and pretty soon the area is deforested, and steam transportation becomes too expensive to compete with sail and barges.
Expensive steel means that every metal object in your house costs ten times as much. Forests would be managed to within an inch to provide maximum fuel wood, and wood would be a much more expensive, even though wood construction and wood objects would be cheaper than metal. Electric power in the home is possible in some locations and for the very wealthy, but almost all electric production is going to be turned to industrial ends, not domestic. No domestic electrification means no electronic industry.
So, transportation is expensive. Home heating is expensive and people huddle around tiny little stoves that burn precious scraps of wood. No home electrification. Expensive food that competes with fuel crops, and since transport is expensive you can’t even cheaply ship food from one location to another.
The world resembles the 1700s more than the 1800s, because the 1800s is when massive steel production and steam power and coal heat really took off. Remember that it’s not that any one technology is literally dependent on coal, it’s that without cheap coal a whole panoply of technologies and goods become vastly more expensive, and because those things are more expensive a secondary panoply of technologies and goods become more expensive because resources have to be diverted to the first group.
So you have a much a poorer world, where people have to expend a lot more effort just to stay warm and fed, and that means less space for technological advancement. The only way over the energy hump is if they can harness nuclear power, and without the industrial revolution providing wealth that might never happen.
