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

[Crispin Pemberton-Pigott]

Dear Ron and Friends

 

For those who want to study AWG and all that, I recommend WUWT. Ron recommends SkepticalScience. This mis-named blog hosted by John Cook was discussed this week at length here http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/10/11/on-skepticalscience-%e2%80%93-rewriting-history/#more-49062 where the extraordinary antics of John and his moderators is exposed. Not only do they prevent people presenting contrary evidence from posters they don’t like, they are editing the messages before posting to weaken the arguments presented. Now he has stooped to editing the contents of OLD posts and editing the OLD responses to try to cover the failings of the AGW meme. It is nothing short of extraordinary. Do not believe me – go read it for yourself. See what mendacious and desperate behaviour is required to support the idea that mankind’s CO2 emissions are destroying the planet by roasting it to death (etc).

 

[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.).  

The problem then is quite simple. All you have to do is convince people in town to use TLUD’s that burn (processed?) biomass, is that right? You have been calling for this since 1995. 

>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.]

I am greatly in favour of cleanliness in the burn. Great news. I am also in favour of clean burning anything else that comes along. I am impressed that you are expression vigorous concern for the environment. Domestic fuel use by the poor is a major source of forest destruction. Badly managed charcoal production is extremely wasteful.

>>   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 .]

I think you were ahead of the field I thinking about this particular type of stove..

>    [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.]

Was your plan to have people stop making charcoal and transport an equivalent amount of energy to the cities in the form of biomass? I presume if so, the plan was then to burn the char in other stoves in the city. And not the plan is to ship the char back to the countryside for agricultural purposes. Is this correct?

>     [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 very happy they are clean.

>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.

I think you owe us an explanation here, certainly you owe me one as you have several times called me a ‘climate denier’ which I presume means I deny the earth has a climate. If it means something else perhaps you could take the time to explain here. It sounds to me like you are trying to imply that I am like a skin-head Nazi who denies that Hitler attempted to exterminate the Jews – something well known to have factually taken place. I think you should make clear your meaning so there are no threads left hanging about your imputation and perhaps motive for saying such a preposterous thing about me. I have objected to this before and received no protection from the moderators so you will please explain yourself publicly, here where the witness to your insults can read and decide for themselves if your behaviour is appropriate for this list.

>>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.]

So we are agreed that the bio-char enthusiasts entered this field promoting char-making stoves in order to have a distributed source of char from domestic cooking, is that correct? 

>>  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.  

I stand corrected. Good news. I do not read as much as you on the subject. It makes sense scientifically. From what I do read, there are many factors involved and the processes are not well-understood. There is a lot of speculation as to why it works (or does not). No doubt with time it will become well understood. Oh, I see that I already said that:

>>    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.  

I am not sure that this answer the question. This is a stove and I Suppose energy related to fuels list. I have not seen something that looks like an energy audit for char being made in town and shipped back. I have several times presented sets of calculations but no one present alternatives. Perhaps this is not the venue for discussion of stove fuels.

>>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.  

The point was to lay out the argument in favour of burying char, as presented by those who feel it will affect the climate of the planet. If they really think it will ‘help’ they should do it, I suppose. They should not lay the burden of expenses on the general population just because they think it is helpful.

> In the next sentence, should "not" be replaced by "now"?   (To me this is the most complicated topic I have ever worked on.)]

Yes. Well spotted.

>>Notice that the plot has now 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?

We have differing opinions on what is pushing the char-producing stove agenda because we entered the field at different times. What you wrote in 1993-5 is not much cited these days. It seems to me the push is from carbon sequestering folks and agricultural folks who have jumped on the TLUD bandwagon. It is quite OK if they don’t spoil things for everyone else and if they don’t wreck the economics of cooking for the poor in some misguided attempt to have them solve problems created elsewhere. The production of biomass (trees) can easily be managed were it only a matter of growing them. The problem has been the manifest failure of forestry departments nearly everywhere to establish the necessary woodlots. That is another subject.

>  [RWL8a.  [snip] Biochar activities are booming - with and without credits.  

That is good news because it means it may be viable long term. 

>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,   

Well it is true, so get used to it. 

>That statement is so ludicrous that it should cause all readers to doubt anything else Crispin is saying here  

What?? But it is true – go check for yourself at the US met office – not sure the link at this moment. I provided it before with instructions on how to generate the outputs. Check 1980-2011 (temp is up), then 1995-2011 (down 1.8 Def F per decade) then 1998-2011 (down 3.8 deg F). What is there to argue about? 

>Winter-only temperatures for one country are not the needed data.

Well do it for other regions. People loudly claim that any tornado or heat wave or heavy rain or snow in the USA is caused by ‘global warming’ and ‘climate disruption’. The temperature of the US has not risen in any meaningful way since 1995. 

>   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.  

Is that cherry picking or factual? Was the last year of the series a recent one?

Over twenty years the winter US temperature is still slightly negative slope, but over 30 years it is positive.   

Is picking the 30 year trend cherry picking? At present, is it getting colder or warmer? The answer is that it is getting colder. For how long has the USA been getting colder? The answer is ‘more than 10 years’. Is there a 60 year up and down cycle in the global temperature with a slight positive long term trend? The answer is yes. Why is there cooling across North America if the globe as a whole is ‘warming’. Where is it 4 deg F warmer?

More helpful to people getting into the stove business is “What sort of stoves should I be researching?” If things are going to be getting colder, space heating especially for the poor will become more and more important.

>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   

That site did not load.

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).

So we are agreed that in fact the continental USA winters are colder that 10 years ago? And 15? I recall that was my claim, and I provided publicly funded information showing it.

>     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?  

I take you point about the % of land area that the US represents. I hope you take my point that claiming individual weather events are caused by higher temperatures on a continent with lower temperatures is a logical error.

It would be interesting to find any source that was able to project Arctic ice. An ice-free Arctic in September has not occurred since the Medieval Warm Period, as far as is presently known. There is nothing to support the assertion that it will be in 2016. Further, and more relevant, is what harm would come from it, and what, if anything, does it have to do with anthropogenic CO2 emissions? Is it because of BC particles? Stoves produce copious quantities of BC. We can help reduce that.  Is it because of ocean current cycles? It appears to be closely related to ocean currents which move in cycles (NAO, AO, PDO, AMO etc). 

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.

[big snip]

>    [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.]

I wonder if you have read anything about the potential for the CO2 level to reach 550 ppm. You all have no doubt heard of ‘peak oil’. There is also ‘peak carbon’ which refers to the consumption of every available carbon fuel source on the planet. I have previously posted for your consideration the PhD thesis of Willem Nel showing that the level won’t get to 540 ppm even if the total amount of all known fuels were to be doubled. People write enthusiastically about CO2 reading 1000 ppm, as if we have the fuels to reach that level. This is a separate argument from the forcing effect of CO2 which is logarithmic. The addition of 140 ppm from 700 to 840 would only increase the temperature 0.04 degrees, even if you take the IPCC’s inflated forcing rate. The whole AGM meme relies on bad math and people’s ignorance of basic atmospherics physics.

>>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.

My views on climate are no doubt irrelevant unless I plan to take all you money and give it to my friends for them to conduct whacky experiments. It is unfortunate you feel it necessary to continuously mix atmospheric fiction with stove facts. I think the best thing I can do is alert people to the possibility that the whole funding presently available from carbon trading (such as it exists for stoves) is at complete risk. If you build a castle in the air be prepared for a fall to earth. After that, we will still have to make good stoves in a sustainable manner. Nothing subsidised is sustainable.

>>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.]

We agree on lots of things. We apparently read different sets of scientific papers. I encourage everyone to read widely and not by bamboozled by personal attacks on the messengers bearing message of dispute.

>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).

There you go again with the “climate denier”. You have no shame and no counter-argument. That much is clear. The worst combustion device is an open fire in a closed Mozambique kitchen. You are so tied to CO2 in the atmosphere arguments that you are unable to see the downside potential of wishing additional expense and inconvenience upon millions of urban poor who are so desperate for fuel that they will burn plastic bags, garbage, bricks dipped in old engine oil and anything else they can find. 

This misrepresentation of the climate issue has diverted hundreds of billions of Dollars to the climate-industrial complex at the expense of the ordinary citizens. Things like this abound:

“Another result of the study is that emissions from deforestation might have been overestimated by between 18 and 75 per cent. This would agree with results published last week in Nature Geoscience by a team led by Guido van der Werf from VU University Amsterdam. They re-visited deforestation data and concluded that emissions have been overestimated by at least a factor of two.”

Is the implication being accepted or ignored? The fraction of human-sourced CO2 in the atmosphere is not increasing, in spite of people supposedly burning ever-increasing amounts of biomass, including domestic cooking stoves. See http://bristol.ac.uk/news/2009/6649.html  It completely undermines the idea that we, humanity, is in a position to reach 540 ppm (Nel’s maximum potential) even if we burn everything we ever found. People are continuing to blame domestic stoves for cooling, for heating, for increasing CO2, for any and everything that will bring in more $$. From what I understand of your proposition, CO2 trading is essential to the viability of turning char producing stoves into a major domestic technology. Is that correct?

It is also worth mentioning that I am still looking for a counter to my calculated efficiency demands for char-producing stoves as seen from the point of view of the user. If it is going to increase the cost of cooking, they are not going to do it.

Regards

Crispin

 

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