[Stoves] Carbon management - one of several new metrics

[Jock Gill]

Crispin,

I am very sorry for the long delay in responding to your long note.

A few notes inserted below.

Many thanks,

Jock

Jock Gill
P.O. Box 3
Peacham,  VT 05862

Cell: (617) 449-8111

google.com/+JockGill

:> Extract CO2 from the atmosphere! <:

Via iPad

> On Mar 29, 2014, at 10:32 AM, Crispin Pembert-Pigott <crispinpigott at outlook.com> wrote:
> 
> Dear Jock
>  
> First, I want to say that I completely agree with everything you have said with reference to the use of a char producing stove in an economic context where the whole system is analysed as to how it fits into family life and the family economy.
>  
> Because words are often put into my mouth by others I wanted clarify that before moving on and generating my own words.
>  
> >I am happy with this if the value/benefit of the biochar is higher than the cost of the additional feedstock.  
>  
> I think there are only a few examples of this not being the case. The only feedstock that has a really high value are pellets and torrefied pellets and the only reason to char them would be to create a very high value specialised char product, or if the pellets were damaged in some way (mould?).
>  
> >For example, if the feedstock is scrap/waste with no higher use, its value is close to zero.  Then the value of the Biochar can also be close zero as well.  
>  
> I would have said that it allows the product to be sold at a low price, but I don’t want to under-appreciate the time it takes to operate the reactor. But I take your point.
>  
> >The special case where the feedstock can NOT be used by a combustion device voids the  argument.
>  
> Well, yeah, but what was the argument? If someone can cook on the waste or wood available and create a product with an economic value (amendment, fertiliser, fuel for a second stove, drawing crayons, pigment, food additive, medicinal applications) then a systems analysis would naturally consider those values.
>  
> If the product is incombustible, totally, that does not rule out the non-combustion uses.
> What is the issue if the biochar is used with forestry seedlings and substantially improves their success rate?  
>  
> Then the person looking for that benefit would probably be willing to pay something for it based on the economic advantage gained.
> >…What is the value/benefit of biochar used to enhance the success rate of reforestation?
>  
> That is for the forester to answer. The point is that there is a possible benefit for the manufacturer, who it is agreed might be a cook.
>  
> >Or what if the biochar has economic value in the kitchen garden that is greater than the cost of the additional feedstock.  Is this ipso facto a bad thing?
>  
> Of course not. I don’t think there is anyone suggesting that income be lost where it could be gained, or that there is inherent in a stove some bias against any use of any fuel or fuel product. That is not where the disagreements lie. People should be efficient and modest.
>  
> >In the end, if a pyrolytic device can meet all of the health requirements and ALSO create new/additional economic and social benefits, then I am all for it.  
>  
> Me too. I have on this forum many times encouraged everyone to consider the whole equation in the hope that we could agree on a spreadsheet that had each and every step in the whole production and consumption chain. Such a tool would help people new to the topic to understand how a stove or fuel fits into the entire context. It is one way to discover a disruptive technology.  This can be done on multiple fronts: just follow the money, just follow the energy, just follow the time and effort, maybe others.

JG:  This would be a useful tool to help one and all look at the whole system.

>  
> >Only in the case where a pyrolytic device can be shown to actually reduce economic and social value/benefits would I be opposed.
>  
> What would you be opposed to? If you were to narrow the focus to only, say, the total energy and you found some was wasted, is that the end of the story, or would you allow that the analysis could consider saving a great deal of time, though using more energy or costing more money?   People often choose to do what is convenient, not what is cheapest. They do it because ‘time is money’. Not everyone is utterly poor. Even very poor people in Indonesia use some LPG even though it is costly and inconvenient to obtain and transport to their rural homes. They could ‘save money’ by doing something else but they don’t, and they do what they do because they want to.

JG: Again, it is a whole systems question.  One thing that should be considered is the value of devices that folks "aspire to".  The aspirational value.  

>  
> This issue is cannot be evaluated on any one single metric.  It is much more complex than that.
>  
> That is precisely my point of course. Things happen in a social context. Do you agree? One might make the most marvellously energy-efficient stove that is really inconvenient to operate. The enthusiast who designed it will demonstrate that with time and practise, the inconvenience can be minimised. Well, perhaps in the community of interest it happens that they really hate that type of inconvenience. It has no chance of success. It is a form of, “If you don’t like hot food, don’t move to Mexico.”

JG: Exactly the point.  The technical aspects/virtues of a stove are only one of many many factors to take into account.  The software and hardware worlds at the tip of the pyramid are full of "insanely great" products that are flops.

>  
> When designing a test, the first thing to ask is what the User of the result wants to know. They may not have framed the question well, so the user should be interrogated to see if there is any misunderstanding of what is desired. Then with an agreed metric(s) and definitions clear, a test is designed to produce that metric as accurately as necessary (and not moreso).

JG: Yes.  But we need to allow for innovations that deliver benefits the user is previously unaware of.  Else we are trapped in the past.

>  
> All stove evaluations take place in a context. That does not mean the context defines the metrics, however. What I mean by that is just because one is in a community that does not use charcoal at all, one can still consider how much charcoal is produced by a fire if that is the metric the user wants determined.  User pays, tester produces.

JG: A  user who is unaware of the value/benefit of the charcoal is unlikely to ask for it.  See note above.  Need to be able to go where the user has not been.  Getting there is very hard.  In marketing it is called "crossing the chasm" to go beyond the early adopter stage. IF you  are unable to cross the chasm, you will never go beyond niche markets or, more likely, will fail.

>  
> On the other hand just because a community uses charcoal, a user may only be interested in how much fuel is consumed each time the stove is used, with a definition of ‘consumed’ meaning how much of the available raw resource is needed to complete whatever task is being performed, considering the re-use of fuel remaining from the previous replication. You can see from these words that definitions are intimately linked to the worth of a measured output.
>  
> The enthusiast stove community is coming to grips with the maturation of the sector and the recognition of the importance of performance evaluations. It is a struggle because as an isolated band of brothers whatever we wanted to use, we used, and we had some informal agreements on what most things meant.
>  
> Now that the stove community members are being consulted on, or deeply involved in, the creation of international and national regulations for the determination of stove performance, it is not uncommon find ourselves out of our depth because at that stratospheric level of regulation, things are far more rigorous and structured. Unlike in the garage and on the ground, we can just ‘make stuff up’ the way the science pioneers invented units of measure like ‘Ohms per ton-mile’ as a metric for a wire size in the telegraph industry. Bars and bottle stores were happy with gills and noggins but internationally you have to talk about hectolitres.

JG:  The problem is how to be disruptive from the bottom up? How do you go viral?  That is the questions.  The bureaucrats rarely are able to achieve this.  Consider how well the internet would have done if it had been regulated from the start by the ITU?  Do you remember the old email standard called X.400?  Did you ever have an X.400 email address.  They were UGLY. I was involved in killing X.400 back in the early Clinton administration.

>  
> Viewed systematically, the early stove designing community was the context. International regulation is a different context and the old quality of work or word precision or technical refinement is simply not sufficient.

JG:  But is the new context sufficiently broad to get the job done, or will it only implode and close off future innovations.  Top down regulation is almost always a negative with respect to innovation and disruption of the status quo.  Who is going to make the money and exert control?   Who will be empowered?  The people on the edges who actually might use the product?  Or remote centers of capital in the developed world?

>  
> So with reference to char making stoves in an environment with real economic consequences for the users, an evaluation is needed, and that evaluation is ‘wide-eyed’, meaning it is all-seeing. It is not limited to the energy chain, the value chain or the time chain. The great majority of stove tests are performed to determine the fuel consumption. This has been handled for years using a method designed for coal-fired power station boiler rating. However it was dressed up, or how much lipstick was put on, it was conceptually a ‘continuous condition’ measurement method. In Europe they still take this approach for the most part. Conditions are stabilised, often with a CO2 level in the exhaust used to determine that conditions are ‘the same as before’ and a comparison is made for some metric or other like CO, burn rate, combustion efficiency or heat transfer efficiency.

JG: Can we say lipstick on a pig?

>  
> These conceptual frameworks have evolved little and are in need of a really good re-evaluation because many are slightly or grossly inappropriate. Some of the most imperative are the determination of the energy efficiency, the energy consumption and the fuel consumption of domestic stoves.

JG: I would add another metric:  Is the device carbon negative?  As we learn that we must leave fossil fuels in the ground, ever more value will be put on carbon negative solutions.  As far as I know, this metric is no where to be found in current thnking.  Most folks do not even know what "carbon negative" means.

I would also add: Regenerative Stewardship as a new imperative and metric.  Sustainability of debased conditions is not good enough.

Other new metrics for the conditions we can expect, not the conditions we have known?

>  
> Consider the manufacturer of charcoal fuel who uses the potential energy in the raw wood, if it had been fully dried, as a denominator in an efficiency calculation. The charcoal produced is completely dry and serves as the numerator. The maximum potential energy that was available in the sourced wood is its dry wood energy. Suppose it was 1000 MJ.  This wood is turned into charcoal with an energy density of 1.5 times that of the raw, dry wood, and the mass yield is such that the total energy in the charcoal is 500 MJ.
>  
> We can say that is a conversion efficiency of 50% because the energy available from the charcoal is ½ of the energy that one could have got from the wood, had it been completely dried.
>  
> However that wood is never completely dried first because it is difficult to do that, so the energy available, the denominator in the equation is the moist fuel energy value: the dry fuel value factored for fuel moisture. Suppose it is 800 MJ moist instead of 1000 MJ dry. One can say justifiably say the energy efficiency of the production of charcoal is 62.5%, not 50%.
>  

JG: You've lost me in the weeds.  What is your point?

> In reality almost no one reports charcoal production that way. They report it on a mass basis. The same options arise: should we report the charcoal mass as a fraction of the dry fuel mass or the mass of moist fuel that went into the process? There are two quite different answers with these two options.

JG:  This fails to look at the whole system.  What is the TOTAL energy system value with respect to carbon negativity, carbon management, and restorative stewardship?

>  
> Contributors here happily report their ‘char production’ but without using agreed units we don’t really know what the person is saying. In short, the correct answer depends on what question is being asked. Personally I want to know the dry/dry charcoal production rate, compensated for ash, because that metric has uses in several different formulas.
>  
> This point made, and returning to the issue of fuel consumption, the slightly modified formulas from the power station industry that are in common use have always assumed that stoves do not ‘manufacture charcoal’. The realisation that char contains energy (even if it is difficult to measure) led to the further modification of the formula used to calculate the Heat Transfer Efficiency (HTE). At this point, a problem arose. Were people asking for the HTE or the fuel consumption? To a designer, the HTE is an important design metric. To a forester the fuel consumption per cycle is most important because he has to plan to produce enough to feed the fires. For years the designer’s context has ruled the protocols.

JG:  Only interesting if you are using fuel with higher uses.  Too far into the weeds.  Maybe the forester would be interested in how wood lot waste could be converted into a substance that would improve the success rate in the planting of tree seedlings?  If he even knew of this as a possibility?

>  
> With the advent of carbon trading and aggressive conservation, the forester’s perspective is becoming dominant among the Users of the test results, but the formulas have not kept pace.  HTE can be used as a proxy for fuel efficiency, but only when the amount of char produced is very small because, essentially, it contains a calculation error. The more char produced, the greater the difference between an HTE calculation and a fuel consumption calculation – conditioned on one assumption: that the stove cannot or does not burn the char remaining from the previous fire (which is usually the case in the real world).
>  
> The forester, looking at the part of the whole system that interests him, wants only the fuel consumption, or its energy equivalent (which to a scientist is the same thing). Notice I am saying the energy equivalent, not the energy consumption, because the latter is a different metric and does not necessarily represent fuel consumption. The energy consumed can be turned into a fuel mass equivalent. That fuel mass equivalent is not the same as the mass of fuel consumed if there is unburnable (in that stove, next fire) char produced during operation.

JG:  I think you are setting up a straw man to prove a point you want to prove.  I suggest that what you write might be interesting if the wood being discussed is high quality -- too good for cooking or heating.  

What the forester might be thinking about is carbon management and the role that both trees and charcoal placed in the ground play in long term carbon management.

So I would add another metric:  Carbon management.  How do stoves fit into a carbon management strategy for the future?  How do stoves and photosynthesis best work together to form something greater than the sum of the parts?  This is a new question and one I think is critical to ask.

>  
> This subtle difference in terms has large real-world consequences when rating stove performance. TLUD pyrolysers that deliver 50% of the original fuel energy in the form of char can be grossly misrepresented if an incorrect formula is applied to the fuel consumption calculation.
>  
> Someone might ask what the fuel consumption is. Someone else might want to know how much energy was consumed. Another wants to know how much energy was leftover. All are valid questions and have a place in an analysis of the entire fuel-stove-char-agriculture context. We need protocols for determining all of them. We must also be clear that it is incorrect and misleading to provide an answer to a question different from the one asked.

Always true,  We must continually invent NEW QUESTIONS, else we will be stuck in the past -- trying to solve tomorrow's problems with yesterday's tools - wondering why we are failing.  This strategy has poor prospects for success.

>  
> If the User of the information wants to know how much dry raw fuel a stove consumes each time it performs a certain burn cycle, and is told the dry mass equivalent of the energy consumed, or the energy yielded by the fire (considering the combustion efficiency) they are getting the wrong information. In the case of a TLUD pyrolyser, the two answers can differ by a factor of more than 2.5:1.  If I were to understate the fuel consumption of a stove by a factor of 2, my customer would understandably be upset.
>  
> For those who want to produce char for other reasons than fuel, they will have a set of metrics crafted to inform them.  They may differ substantially from fuel efficiency metrics. This is not a problem unless they are mixed inappropriately in an evaluation report.
>  
> You can see that a set of clearly defined terms is needed.

JG:  Along with new questions and new metrics.  How do we properly and creatively address the issue of carbon management?


> All the desired metrics are definable, and provide valid information, but have their place. Unfortunately, even at the UNFCCC level, metrics and methods are being used and money is changing hands even though the methods have not been reviewed for correctness and appropriateness (these being two different things). People are being misled even as we speak.

JG:  Absolutely.  Could not agree more.  Asking yesterday's questions trying to solve tomorrow's problems.  Sure to fail.  It is a scary task to ask new questions as they inevitably lead the the goring of well established and profitable oxen.  The beneficiaries of the status quo will not be eager to ask new questions, or will deny the answers.  This is an age old problem.

>  
> A way of dealing with this in the longer term is that methods should have signatures under them, and the reputation of those signatories or the sponsoring organisation should rest on the quality of their work. The recent release of GACC-WBT 4.2.3 is a case in point. It is basically unchanged from v4.2.2.
>  
> If the WBT was a bridge, would you drive your car over it?
> If the reported fuel consumption was a rock climbing rope, would you climb it?
> If the precision of the method was a targeting sight, would William Tell use it to loose his arrow the apple on his son’s head?
>  
> You get my point I am sure. We should hold people who are certifying test methods responsible, somehow, for the quality of their work. A lot of money is changing hands on the basis of some pretty dubious claims.

Indeed.  And we should expect them to ask many new questions.  Else what value is their work, other than to codify the status quo?

Many  thanks for your long note.  It made me think.

Jock


>  
> Regards
> Crispin in Johannesburg
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