[Stoves] High mass space heating options Re: Rocket Stove for the PLACE

[rongretlarson at comcast.net]

List: 

This is to comment on a message yesterday from Crispin Pemberton-Pigott on charcoal-making stoves - with a lot on climate "information" thrown in. I comment on most below - using inserts. Ron 

From: "Crispin Pemberton-Pigott" <crispinpigott at gmail.com> 
To: "Discussion of biomass cooking stoves" <stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org> 
Sent: Monday, October 10, 2011 9:43:53 PM 
Subject: Re: [Stoves] High mass space heating options Re: Rocket Stove for the PLACE 




Dear Roger 



>In this thinking I bring up the "Russian fireplace", The oldest and most widely used High Mass heater I have known in my 26 years. They are typically loaded up with 80 lbs of fuel and burned off one or two times per day. That’s up to 160 pounds every 24 hours, and no char is left. I believe that the common EPA certified wood stove can provide just as much "useable" heat to ones home with a lot less fuel, and no char is left. 
> So, I am asking out loud.......are we better off selecting the heat source that gets more for our waning resources, and maybe asking if there is another medium for giving a home to these microbial critters other than just the "char". 





[RWL1: Roger is new to the Biochar world. I suggest he (and Crispin) join at least one of the four (Tom Miles supported) sister Biochar lists. The answers to Roger are no and no - there is no better heat source than charcoal-making stoves (for those now using wood) and there is no better "home" for critters than char. Next sentence, and all those not in bold, headed by "RWL", are from Crispin.] 




As I was pointing out at length, having an efficient heater (when it is running) is quite different from having a high efficiency all the time. Fires have a habit of going out and at time, very different physics come into play. 



You have probably heard that most fireplaces give almost no net benefit to the house. This is certainly true of large old ones with a large chimney. They pull so much cold air into the house and toss hot air up the chimney that there is no net benefit. You are only warm if you sit beside the fire which is exactly what people used to do. They had burning faces and frozen butts. 



This issue is not nearly resolved yet. There are ways to run an EPA-certified stove that wastes huge amounts of heat so one has to tie the claims of fuel saving to overall thermal efficiency. It has to be operated correctly. Rare is the stove that properly operates itself. 




[RWL2 - no complaints on last few paragraphs. But, Crispin continues 





The drive to create char has a couple of roots. One was an inability to make clean burning stoves. 


[RWL3a: Not true, I was the first to write on this topic (in 1995) - and the drive was entirely to do something about desertification and deforestation - caused by the horrible production of most charcoal (a practice that is now illegal in many African and other countries because of this non-sustainable production of char.). Cleanliness was a fortunate outcome of this sort of stove, but never an early driver for charcoal making stoves on this list - or its predecessor.] 


It was found that simple batch-loaded TLUD stoves that were so choked for primary air that they made charcoal, were surprisingly clean. That is because, it was believed at the time, they were not burning the carbon, or most of it. 

[RWL3b: Working with Tom Reed, this was never part of the analysis; we knew perfectly well what was happening to the carbon and why. The first reactions to my first writing was that the TLUD system couldn't possibly work .] 


Well, that is interesting, but it wastes a lot of fuel that should have been burned. 


[RWL3c: Let me repeat: the sole reason for my writing to Tom Miles re this stove was to to save trees (burning the char was expected then). The idea of global warming and the importance of carbon negativity was on (as far as I know) no-one's agenda in 1993-4, when I started on this. The "wastes a lot of fuel" was (and still is) in the traditional means of making char.] 


The obvious risk is that it the stove is not thermally much more efficient, people will go out and cut additional biomass to feed the stove that does not burn all the fuel. 


[RWL3d: But the comparison must be with the way people did and are still making 99% (a guess) of all char - horribly - out in the bush. Fortunately, char-making TLUDs are as much more efficient (and cleaner) - as Crispin is asking for. I am afraid it is mainly climate deniers who don't worry about wasting all those trees. TLUD's provide a char co-product that can/should go into the soil, mostly using biomass materials (seeds, leaves, twigs, that avoid the need to "cut additional biomass" and can't be used in Rockets. 





Enter the bio-char enthusiasts. They want to put char into the garden to help with production of food. 


[RWL4a: That is half the rationale - compost can do that. Compost cannot provide the carbon negativity that is so sorely needed - needed decades ago, if we are to avoid a tipping point. Charcoal can provide carbon negativity AND increase food (and energy) supply.] 




There are many claims and many disappointments all over the world. There are successes and they tend to be smaller in number than the claims and the failures. 


[RWL4b: I spend well over 40 hours a week reading on this topic. My guess is that 80-90% of the reports on Biochar I read are positive. An example of this is a careful technical analysis of 24 Biochar studies from 5 years ago - ALL 24 were positive. [see: http://www.css.cornell.edu/faculty/lehmann/publ/Lehmann%20et%20al.,%202006%20Bio-char%20soil%20management.pdf] Or read the material at the IBI website or the many conference papers or try You Tube or look into the dozens of papers now coming out of the ARS/USDA or look at the value of Terra Preta soil in Brazil today. Only very rarely is a negative result described - and if there is - there is almost always a simple explanation (such as not knowing that charcoal absorbs nitrogen or that you don't put low temperature (acidic) char in already acidic soil). So I ask Crispin to give us a citation or two behind his surprising statement that Biochar failures exceed the successes. 




That is OK, research will fix up the knowledge base and common sense will prevail. Don’t fret. 


[RWL4c. I apologize in advance if this was meant to be positive - I take it (because of what follows) to be a prediction of increasing Biochar failures.] 




It is a very big question as to whether or not one can make meaningful amount of char with a stove. Meaningful means having a return on crops that more than compensates for the collection (possibly) of additional fuel and the effort to move that fuel to the kitchen and the char back again. So far I have not seen a single case where this is going to be economically viable on its own. 

[RWL5a: The reports I am reading from people like Nat Mulcahy (WorldStove) and Jason Armburu (RE:Char) and Paul Olivier (Vietnam) are ones Crispin should look at (and would see if he were part of the Biochar lists). They are very positive. And there are many more - showing economic viability today (and we would hear more about economic sense if we in the developed world paid moral attention to the "polluter pays" principal). 





Enter the Climate people. They want to burn (sequester) carbon in the ground on the understanding that if it is left there it will a) not re-emerge for a very long time, b) will take carbon out of the air (biomass) and put it in the ground, c) produce sufficient quantities of carbon offsets that they may be sold to a willing buyer (probably in Europe) and d) bring some arguable agricultural benefit – which is still being argued. 

[RWL6a. Yup. That is what (not enough) climate people believe. That is why there are four sister biochar Yahoo groups. Not clear to me what the point here is. In the next sentence, should "not" be replaced by "now"? (To me this is the most complicated topic I have ever worked on.)] 




Notice that the plot has not become very complicated. The original problem was not that we should build pyrolysers for the good of our health, but that we could not apparently build good stoves for our health. Those days are long gone. We can easily build very clean wood or other biomass stoves that do not produce char. The original argument has fallen away, first to fan stoves and then to a new generation of natural draft stoves. 


[RWL7a. As explained earlier, Crispin has his early TLUD (=charcoal making) stove history wrong. But I have seen only data showing that TLUDs are much superior on health issues to the Rocket or anything else. Where is the data showing equality in emissions? 




As many of the touted stoves that produce char (but not all) cost more than people are willing to pay, the carbon trading folk are devising methods of subsidising them from CDM sales or the Gold Standard markets. This is, long term, a risky proposition upon which to base a business plan because the carbon market is looking shakier by the year – and that has nothing at all to do with the worthiness of carbon/climate arguments, it is purely economic. There is a window which is rapidly closing. After about 9 more months, that window will close. If you want a CDM funded stove programme (which is a very expensive thing to create and moderate) it will have to be submitted by July next year. After the end of the Kyoto Accord there is no plan in place to continue it. Many countries and most notably China and Japan have said they will definitely not participate. As China’s per-capita carbon emissions exceed the USA’s (or almost –will be true soon) they are a gigantic emitter and if they are not playing along in the carbon trading, the other countries will find they cannot compete economically. CDM contracts will run at a maximum to 2020. After that – zilch for burying a few grams a day of char from a stove. We can’t tell exactly what happen 9 years from now, but you can bet that if the temperature continues to drop in the USA (winter temp is presently falling at 3.8 deg per decade) there will be little enthusiasm from the USA either. That leaves Europe and they can’t go it alone. Too expensive. 

[RWL8a. I will ignore the first part of this paragraph - with which I disagree totally. Biochar activities are booming - with and without credits. There are possibly a very few people (maybe some in the Tea Party and those who rely on WUWT) who believe that the "winter temp is presently falling at 3.8 deg per decade" means anything important - even if true, That statement is so ludicrous that it should cause all readers to doubt anything else Crispin is saying here Winter-only temperatures for one country are not the needed data. 


My guess is that this statistic comes from this site: 


http://reasonabledoubtclimate.wordpress.com/2011/08/17/another-look-at-us-winter-temperature-trends/ 


This seems to be a subset of the WUWT site. This technique is known as "cherry picking". 


a. It picks one season, not telling the reader that the other three seasons for the same time period for the US has an upward trend, 

b. I couldn't reproduce the -3.8 degrees (F) per decade, but I could get a number slightly more negative than -4 if I chose the start and stop years carefully. Over twenty years the winter US temperature is still slightly negative slope, but over 30 years it is positive. But winter temperatures in one country are not the right parameter. I encourage anyone interested in temperature trends to use the site apparently being used for this data: 


http://climvis.ncdc.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/cag3/hr-display3.pl 


The latest data this week from the above WUWT-affiliate site has found an amazing spring anomaly for Idaho! I'd like to see the US average winter statistics with Alaska included (but I gave up). 

c. The area of the continental US is about 1 Gha, about 7 % of the global land area - and less than 2% of the total surface area. It is clear that the temperature for the total globe is going up - especially at northern latitudes. The Arctic is about (2016?, 2015?) to be ice free in September. Does anyone think that is not a problem? 


d. For those just getting into the climate-denier temperature debate that Crispin and I have been having for several years, I recommend www.skepticalscience.com - and specifically 


http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-stopped-in-1998.htm 


There was a reference there to 35 years of global data from the two most often-cited groups at 

http://web.archive.org/web/20080607061138/tamino.wordpress.com/2007/08/31/garbage-is-forever/ 

which shows what I think is a pretty well agreed-upon global trend (up, not down)- and which most climate scientists seem to think is going to accelerate. I fail to see any negative trend in that data. ] 







So….if you want to promote char making stoves for agricultural reasons, and you do not want to be accused of making the biomass shortage worse than it is already, you will have to show that you are using a) a fuel that is not currently being used (and wasted) or b) you are using a fuel so economically that the total fuel required is reduced, or c) that you are balancing your stove programme with a tree planting/ resource-creating activity that goes with it. 

[RWL9: All those are already true - and in addition you have to believe that a world at 550, 650, 750...ppm is something to avoid like the plague. You have to believe that we can get to 350 ppm or lower with (and maybe only with) Biochar. And that char coming from cookstoves offers some of today's best economics.] 




In physics there is no free lunch. If the stove does not save fuel and produce char on the side, it is going to face programmatic problems. Such a thing is possible, but if have no carbon argument, you are left with fuel efficiency. Any stove that burns the whole fuel is going to outperform any char producing stove. Simple as that. 

[RWL11: Not simple. It becomes simple only when you say we "have no carbon argument". We do have a carbon argument. And I am not saying that Biochar is a free lunch - but it comes pretty close. There are two efficiencies at play here - efficiency in getting heat to the pot and efficiency in making char. These efficiencies are additive. Charcoal-making stoves are one of the most efficient devices around if you think both efficiencies are important. Having short fuel and char transport distances, etc are part of why stoves are so important for those of us who are so scared of Crispin's views on climate. 




If biochar turns out to be a winner in all cases, or most, it will definitely be more efficient to produce it under controlled circumstances near the source so only the carbon is shipped, not the rest of the matter and moisture in it. That is simple math. 

[RWL12: Not counting, but this may be the only thing so far I have agreed with - and TLUDs and TLODs can do that job with remarkable efficiency. What needs to be added is that the people who will making the char using stoves are also the best possible recipients of the char - and most of us reading this have a moral obligation to subsidize that. If not us - who?. Taxes are the approach I am coming to think best.] 




If you happen to have some char production, by all means throw it into the ground near something that will benefit from it. But it would be better to put it into the next fire and get that sweet heat without having to lift another finger, or axe. 

[RWL13: These two sentences are both logical when read apart. Together they make no sense. First "by all means" place char in soil, then "better" to do the opposite? Why not leave off the first sentence? Crispin, as a climate denier, can't grasp that charcoal has a huge and larger value in the ground than when being combusted (in one of the world's worst possible combustion devices - a jiko). 




My apologies for too long a response. 




R on 




Regards 

Crispin 


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