This is what my mind looks like at the moment

So the picture is pretty much self explanatory and nothing is in scale. I am searching for litterature that could be inserted along side the arrows. The picture has no numerical data but I hope to include that in the future as well. The miniatures are rendered bitmaps of "borrowed" pictures so please avoid spreading this picture. Made with CorelDRAWX3.

Meanwhile...

I’m not dead if that is what you think. A lot of studies, family life and other stuff have made blogging fall down on my list lately. That doesn’t mean, however, that my enthusiasm for biochar has fallen. On the contrary, bamboo as a source for biochar came to my attention through the following videos:

 

The first one is made by a PhD from Hawaii and the second one is from India where bamboo has been grown in new parts of the country.


I am also working on the metareview part II but that may take some time still.

If this doesn't quench your daily dose of biochar, head over to re:char and take a look at what they have been up to.

Another idea takes form

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.

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.

A Simple Stove Solution? Re:char talks abou liquified petroleum gas in cooking stoves and how this helps in reduction of indoor pollutants. Further they mention the possibility to switch from LPG to compressed biogas. I was wondering: could on compress the refined gases from the pyrolysis process as well?

Published with Blogger-droid v2.0.1

Good things come in small packages

Is it possible to build a pyrolysis unit small enough to fit in a standard sized cargo container? This is a question that has been there in the back of my head for a while now. I can see a number of benefits and potential use of a solution like this.

1. Containers are ment to be moved. Huge amounts of energy are wasted because the raw material used in the production has to be moved considerable distances to stationary facilities. The use of a truck-, boat- or whatever-towed container could easily reach remote locations with a surplus of whatever suitable-for-energy-production bio-materials. Agri-Therm out of Ontario, Canada is manufacturing a pyro-plant-on-wheels but this is more of a trailer type.

2. Mass production. As quantities of these small units go up, the prize should come down. This would mean less initial investments for smaller enterprizes or private customers and the transition towards greener energy and heat would be easier (and perhaps faster)

3. Construction, testing and improvement could be done in one place, like for instance here in Finland and the end product could be shipped pre-tested to the end user.

4. Catastrophy first aid. I have seen back up generators inside governmental buildings here in Finland that have easily been fitted inside containers. A caravan of aid-trucks could easily incorporate a generator-container that would work on bio-waste and even plastic bags (check this article about pyrolysis of plastics by Kaminsky et al. 2000)

Storage containers come in all shapes and sizes.
Picture from http://www.closetsidea.com

Optimal burn temperature

This is a graph[1] that got my attention. If you look closely you will discover an optimal temperature for maximum char production at about 450 degrees centigrades. This is not a high temperature and is achieveable with low-tech solutions like the one made by Peter Hirst and many others.

Sources:

[1] J. Lehmann, “A handful of carbon,” Nature, vol. 447, no. 7141, pp. 143-144, May 2007.