Wood Energy: Woodgas to Fuel ICEs

trendal · Tar Sands Joined: Jul 07, 2005 Posts: 87 Location: Canada

I don't know if this has been posted before, but I just came accross this site:

http://www.gengas.nu/byggbes/index.shtml

Looks quite interesting! It's a method to run internal combustion engines on gasses produced from wood.

"Construction of a Simplified Wood Gas Generator for Fueling Internal Combustion Engines in a Petroleum emergency"

There goes the forests Cool

_________________
"Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it."
-- Thomas Jefferson

backstop

Trendal -

well done you for posting this link.

It's one of a number of wood-energy sites I keep an eye on.

Your final quip "there go the forests" is so widely held a false assumption on this site that there has seemed little point in continuing to post on wood energy until others start to do so.

Re the forests durabiltiy, four points.

First, most of the supercomputer GCMs (global circulation models) show the Amazon being reduced from forest to desert if we do not achieve the start of global cooling before the feedback loops become effectively self-fuelling (jargon: run-away greenhouse).

Second, 2004 had the second highest clearance of the Amazon on record, with comparable forest loss elsewhere, driven by the usual forces of the landless' homesteads ceding to agribusiness beef/soya/ palm-oil etc.

Third, anyone investing in a wood-energy plant for : firewood /charcoal /woodgas /methanol /power /surplus heat & bi-products, has an absolutely prime need to maintain the foreat within close haulage distance (<3 miles is recommended by UK research).

Fourth, the ancient tradition of Coppicing (2,000 BC) is still practiced in many countries and is readily applicable to supplying feedstock to wood-energy plants arround the world. In essence, it's about allowing deciduous species to regrow from the stump, which they do up to 20% faster than a new tree owing to a large and vigorous root ball. It's also worth noting that in Europe, Coppice Woodland accomodates the highest biodiversity of any ecosystem.

To sum up, most of the forests we have are doomed if we don't very rapidly end fossil fuel dependence, and quite rapidly end their clearance for agribusiness expansion. Coppice Woodland for Methanol, planted wherever possible as protective buffers around old-growth forests, looks to me easily the best option under the present circumstances.

regards,

Backstop
_________________
"The best of conservation . . . is written not with a pen but with an axe."
(from "A Sand County Almanac" by Aldo Leopold, 1948.

Caoimhan · Intermediate Crude Joined: May 10, 2005 Posts: 562

It seems to me we need as much of the carbon-fixing properties that forestation can provide. Unfortunately, it competes with agriculture for land availailability. It's pretty sad.

backstop

Caoimham -

I'd well agree that CWM could compete for farmland (just like agribusiness biofuels are intending to do), but it has a major advantage that means it doesn't need to -

Unlike agri-biofuels forest doesn't require fairly level machine-accessible land for planting, while its harvesting (by chainsaw or machete) and extraction (potentially by horse, mule, pony or oxen draft) needs only occaisional access tracks.

Logically, CWM is thus best sited primarily in the uplands and on lower north-facing slopes, at best interspersed with present marginal hill grazing. From this perspective CWM is about a self-funding means of starting to restore the planet's natural forest cover while banking significant quantities of airborne carbon.

regards,

Backstop
_________________
"The best of conservation . . . is written not with a pen but with an axe."
(from "A Sand County Almanac" by Aldo Leopold, 1948.

trendal · Tar Sands Joined: Jul 07, 2005 Posts: 87 Location: Canada

backstop

Trendal -

Nothing can sustain the eternal-growth ideology on which current US transport is founded. It's a dinosaur that's been shot in the hind brain.

Biomass resources are entirely sustainable, given the collective agreement to manage them rather than merely exhausting them. In this, they are wholly different to say solar, which keeps on shining regardless.
The range of benefits CWM offers is unique, and I've strong confidence that it will be widely developed at the necessary village scale.

And, as I noted above, anyone investing in such plants has the survival of their local woodlands as a prime business concern.

There may be cultures incapable of agreeing good management practice, and some may try simply de-foresting conifer areas for pump-&-dump frauds, but I guess they'll be in the minority, and will anyway be self-defeating.

Given that the forests are patently finished without benign action, it seems simply defeatist to assume that all cultures are as stupefied as is that of the prevailing US business-fool. I would assure you that they're not !

regards,

Backstop

Edit PS: Re Elephant grass biomass, see the various disadvatages of Agribusiness Biofuels in my earlier post; also consider their minimal carbon-banking, biodiversity, sub-crops, wind shelter, etc.

Trees need planting if we're going to enjoy forests ! In Europe we have understood this for almost a thousand years - maybe it's a new idea in the US ??? Cool

_________________
"The best of conservation . . . is written not with a pen but with an axe."
(from "A Sand County Almanac" by Aldo Leopold, 1948.

oiless

[/QUOTE]There may be cultures incapable of agreeing good management practice, and some may try simply de-foresting conifer areas for pump-&-dump frauds, but I guess they'll be in the minority, and will anyway be self-defeating.[QUOTE]

Try Canada, or at least my province, British Columbia. Forest practices are largely based on the southern pacific coast areas. The climate on the pacific coast is warm and wet, of course, so trees grow like hell. The rest of the province is various combinations of dry, high, cold, and short growing seasons, yet trees are harvested everywhere as though the growing conditions were west coast-like. Quite unsustainable.
I agree that wood gas in IC can have a place, like twice a year in the tractor to till and harvest, but I do not forsee it being sustainable on a large scale. It takes a lot of wood to run an IC engine of say small truck size. It's not a "throw a couple of logs on the fire" proposition, more like hundreds of pounds of dry seasoned (preferably hard) wood. Figures I've run across indicate around 30 pounds of wood per hour to produce 10kw with a 195 cid engine turning 1800rpm, driving a generator. Figures I've seen for small trucks are worse. A gas turbine would yield better economy, but you'd still be burning a lot of wood.

backstop

Oiless -

Sorry to hear that such malpractice is still going on in BC. The campaigns against it have to be into their 2nd generation by now.

I fully agree that the inherited technologies -as in tractor mounted gasifyers on 15% efficient deisel engines, offer no kind of efficiency.

The up-to-date options, following EU funded catalyst research, give a dry wood to Methanol conversion of around 65% by weight, with the fuel having about half the energy density of diesel. However, this fuel is of course used in drag racing for its exceptional combustion characteristics.

Perhaps the more sensible approach (being pursued by Mitsubishi and others), is of the Methanol Fuel Cell + Reformer or at best the DMFC (the Direct Methanol Fuel Cell), which utilizes both the H and the C in the fuel (CH3OH).

Just as solar panels can be made by slave labour in China, and Hydro-power can be on the titanic scale of the Xingu Dam in the Amazon Rain Forest, and Wind Turbines can be imposed in glorious country rather than out at sea, and Tidal Power can be vast concrete lagoons destroying local ecosystems rather than sea-bed turbines, so Wood Energy can be produced abusively if shareholders, governments, media and customers allow it.

Just like every other non-fossil energy, this vulnerability to mis-application in no way diminishes the major potential benefits of utilizing Wood Energy appropriately.

It simply requires that we strive the harder to establish and promote requisite standards of sustainable operation from the outset, and, further, to have those standards written into the accreditation process for energy-woodlands applying for highly valuable carbon-banking status under the forthcoming UN Treaty of the Atmospheric Commons.

Finally I'd note that the NGOs' 'Protectionism' (isolation) of the planet's forests has failed dismally for the 36 years that I know of - it hasn't even slowed the rate of their destruction. If we're going to halt and reverse the damage we have to move on to a strategy of 'Stewardship' (integration) where we use the forests' sustainable yields efficiently to meet a part of society's material needs. Coppice Woodland for Methanol is just one such efficient use.

regards,

Backstop
_________________
"The best of conservation . . . is written not with a pen but with an axe."
(from "A Sand County Almanac" by Aldo Leopold, 1948.

oiless

Yes, sorry to say, forestry still leaves much to be desired here. Pulp mills use huge amounts of wood, (you'd really have to see it to believe it) and they use northern softwood, mostly lodgepole pine, that are too small to be easily converted into lumber. (Less than two feet or so diameter.)
These pine trees grow in soil that has maybe six inches of topsoil accumulation since the glaciers left the land. It takes over a hundred years to grow an eighteen inch diameter tree.
Lately we have the mountain pine beetle problem. Mature pine forests are being beetle killed. Pine beetles infest old age-homogenous pine forests. You can create old age-homogenous forests by controlling wild fires and by reforestation.
The governments solution is to give forest companies free reign to clearcut forests in beetle outbreak areas as fast as they can, which really doesn't do anything except make clearcuts.
Another factor in the beetle outbreak is global warming. Cold weather will keep them in check; sudden prolonged mild cold in autumn will kill them, or a prolonged winter cold spell, a few weeks at -20F or so will do them in.
We don't get that kind of weather anymore.

backstop

Oiless -

I had the joy of spending some time in BC in the early '70s, and the mills seemed huge even then.

The beetle population boom through climate change is a great shame - and I think a problem whose seriousness has yet to be recognized - I've reports from the UK, Alaska, Sweden, Canada and Siberia of unprecedented infestations of otherwise healthy forests due to similar removal of climatic constraints.

The potential carbon output as the trees eventually burn or rot looks to be on a scale globally to make this another (but unrecognized) feedback loop between GW & CC.

Personally I doubt the urgency of ending fossil fuels can be overstated.

regards,

Backstop
_________________
"The best of conservation . . . is written not with a pen but with an axe."
(from "A Sand County Almanac" by Aldo Leopold, 1948.