[Stoves] [biochar] Julien Winter: a soil scientist in name but not in practice.

Crispin Pemberton-Pigott crispinpigott at outlook.com
Thu May 8 20:07:13 CDT 2014


Dear Stovers interested in making Char

 

I have seen the day before yesterday something that may provide an
additional opportunity for using the char, possibly char from stoves.

 

At YDD (Yayasan Dian Desa) there is a long term gasifier programme which has
'sizes' up to 350 kW(e) which I have reported before. But I just saw a small
internal combustion engine which runs on gas produced by a charcoal
gasifier.

 

The gasifier is about the size of a large domestic stove and holds 7 kg of
charcoal or so. From what I understand so far it is a) very simple to make
and operate, b) has none of the problems which make pyrolysis gas difficult
to clean for use in an engine and c) will operate an engine using about 3.5
kg per hour. I will get photos.

 

Indonesia has more than 10,000 occupied islands. Some of them have a lot of
waste biomass, or just lots, or agricultural products including sawdust.
Many only have diesel powered electricity.

 

If the char from a stove was suitably sized by planning the system as an
integrated unit, then water pumping, oil pressing and electricity generation
could be performed by very simple equipment. Candle nut shells are a good
candidate for this as Nurhuda has already demonstrated making good quality
char from a stove.

 

The use of the waste material from oil palm processing (the frond part that
holds the nuts) is a big opportunity for the big plants. As you may know,
huge areas of jungle forest are being cleared to create biodiesel
plantations of mono-cropped oil palm trees. That is going to continue until
the Europeans stop subsidising the destruction.

 

Dealing with the present means dealing with what is in hand which is a huge
amount of these frond-things (can't remember the real name). They can be
processed using a gasifier that involves steam and a fluidised bed of
ceramic sand. No problem, that has been solved by YDD and the Japanese, but
it is complex.

 

Also the process produces virtually no char. If we were to take products
such as Kaliandra (goat-wood, meaning goats create it stripping small
branches of bark) and use that for cooking in a gasifier that makes char,
the product is useful in a very simple locally made gasifier for operating
an engine.

 

At some point there may be a frond-pellet product that could serve as well,
but in the meantime there is already an opportunity.

 

A lot of the 'goat wood' is burned to get rid of it as there is no shortage
of biomass in general and it is not a very nice cooking fuel because of its
density and size.

 

So here is an opportunity for which all the elements exist: domestic or
commercial cooking creating charcoal, and a charcoal gasifier that is simple
and produces gas easily that can be used in any of the local engines -
perhaps even a small motorcycle.  Obviously the idea is to replace oil or
gas with local biomass while cooking.

 

Regards

Crispin

 

 

 

 

Julien, Paul,  and lists:

 

            Tough problem.  

 

            At first I was discouraged at the lack of sufficient Bangladesh
input biomass.  But this could be a perfect opportunity, if we can show
through a Life Cycle Analysis (LCA), that biochar can solve, not exacerbate,
the local biomass supply problem.

 

[snip]

 

Ron

            

 

 

 

On May 7, 2014, at 7:55 PM, Paul Anderson <psanders at ilstu.edu
<mailto:psanders at ilstu.edu> > wrote:





[snip] 

A year ago, I was invited to Bangladesh to look at their rural agrarian
culture, and advise on possible roles for biochar.  That is good soils
topic, because it involves organic waste management, and creating a
long-term increases in soil organic matter; much needed for their soils.
However, that topic has been trumped as well.  The difficulty was not how to
use the biochar, but how to get it.  With the high population density in
Bangladesh, there is no spare biomass in the landscape.  In fact, there is a
shortage.  So, if we are going to make biochar, it has to be as a byproduct
of some current usage, or processing of waste biomass.  At the household
level, making biochar in micro-gasifier cookstoves has promise, but this
technology needs to be developed locally.  I have been put in contact with
good researchers at the Bangladesh Council for Scientific and Industrial
Research.  However, as a consequence, I have ended up putting in vastly more
time on combustion science than soil science.  We are developing a network
of specialists called the Bangladesh Biochar Initiative, and as the momentum
builds, my role should diminish.  This has been the most useful and
interesting thing I have ever done: culturally fascinating and extremely
multidisciplinary.

 

That is a brief description of me: a soil scientist in name, but a plant
ecologist and combustion scientist in practice.

[Julien]

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