What if one could retrofit an old diesel locomotive to run on wood gas? It has been done with cars and tractors. Imagine a gas-train that gets its fuel from stations along the way. I was thinking rural Russia and the trans-Siberian railway. You could have a pyrolysis carriage that little by little produces gas for the train and the biochar could be deposited on farms along the route.
Now I'm no engineer and as such I have no idea how much gas is required for a regular sized train and how big the pyrolyser would have to be.
Wednesday, February 1, 2012
If biochar is such a good thing, why aren't everybody doing it?
That question was posed today at the coffee table. A very non-scientific question perhaps but I think it contains a few points.
1. We (in the west) are too distanced to energy production and consumtion to realize the amount of resources it demands. As long as the light goes on at the turn of a switch and the water is hot in the shower nobody really cares.
2. We have no or very little connection to the food we consume. Some state that we would eat far less meat if we somehow could see the cow behind the beef. All this leads to less interest in conserving farmlands and protecting forests.
1. We (in the west) are too distanced to energy production and consumtion to realize the amount of resources it demands. As long as the light goes on at the turn of a switch and the water is hot in the shower nobody really cares.
2. We have no or very little connection to the food we consume. Some state that we would eat far less meat if we somehow could see the cow behind the beef. All this leads to less interest in conserving farmlands and protecting forests.
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