[Gasification] Charcoal and biochar

David Coote dccoote at mira.net
Fri Mar 14 21:55:00 CDT 2014


As you say, Pete, charcoal manufacture has been around for millennia. 
And there's a great range of techniques employed these days. There's 
sites in Africa making char using small-scale methods that would have 
been recognisable to "colliers" operating in British forests centuries 
ago. One approach a few years ago to a State Forestry body in Australia 
wanted guaranteed access to 250ktonnes/annum for a modern charcoal 
plant. As well as the USFS reference you provided, the UN FAO has a 
number of useful references for charcoal manufacture at smaller scales.

Depending on factors such as manufacturing technique charcoals can have 
a range of material characteristics suiting them to various uses such as 
fuel - well-made char burns very clean and is still a popular fuel for 
artisan blacksmiths as well as cooking and so on - or as a filtering agent.

If to be used as a soil conditioner, biochars ideally have a number of 
characteristics with consequent effects on suitable biochar 
manufacturing techniques. If woody biomass is the feedstock there are 
claims that the tree species may have an effect on the quality of the 
biochar. And there are claims that biochars may benefit with respect to 
soil conditioning utility from various amendments added before the 
biochar manufacturing process such as clay, manures and so on. Which 
would, I suspect, have an influence on the gasification process if the 
char was to be made in a gasifier :)

I'm confident I can make charcoal from waste woody biomass using a 
vernacular method at small-scale. I'm exploring what quality of biochar 
I could make at smaller scale using vernacular methods. And I'm very 
interested in where the technology is for integrating biochar 
manufacture with gasification with a view to using the producer gas for 
energy generation (thermal and electricity) and what this integration 
means with respect to biochar characteristics and quality of producer 
gas. Hence my questions over the last few months on various aspects of 
this technology stack from feedstock preparation onwards

Regards

David


On 15/03/2014 5:00 AM, gasification-request at lists.bioenergylists.org wrote:
> Message: 5
> Date: Fri, 14 Mar 2014 12:09:08 -0500
> From: "Pete&  Sheri"<spaco at baldwin-telecom.net>
> To:<scda2 at t-online.de>, "'Discussion of biomass pyrolysis and
> 	gasification'"	<gasification at lists.bioenergylists.org>, 	"'Discussion
> 	of biomass cooking stoves'"<stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org>
> Subject: [Gasification] Charcoal making techniques
> Message-ID:<000701cf3fa8$1f55dc50$5e0194f0$@net>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
> I see a lot of posts about making charcoal lately.  I just thought I?d point out that charcoal making has been around for quite a while, for those who might be new to the process.
>
>
>
> Here?s a US Forestry department document on the subject in some detail:
>
>   <http://www.fpl.fs.fed.us/documnts/fplr/fplr2213.pdf>  www.fpl.fs.fed.us/documnts/fplr/fplr2213.pdf
>
>
>
> Pete Stanaitis
>
> --------------------
>    





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