[Stoves] [stove] 30 years went by quickly
Frank Shields
franke at cruzio.com
Thu May 19 16:21:24 CDT 2016
Crispin, Paul and Al,
Is coal considered a biofuel? and natural gas? I always considered a biofuel as any fuel that is carbon neutral and not from old carbon.
Interesting subject.
Regards
Frank
> On May 19, 2016, at 11:13 AM, Paul Anderson <psanders at ilstu.edu> wrote:
>
> Crispin,
>
> I and many others are in agreement with your comments. Your concluding sentence is especially appropriate:
>>
>> If the term ‘biofuels’ turns out to be used as a tool for demonising solid fuels, I think we should push back, citing examples of solid fuel combustors that match or even outperform liquid and gas burners.
> But that is not an easy task. And we cannot expect cooperation from the liquid and gas advocates. All ideas are welcome.
>
> One idea is to push to have "biofuels" expanded to include solid dry biomass (used in appropriately clean-burning devices.).
>
> Paul
>
> Doc / Dr TLUD / Prof. Paul S. Anderson, PhD
> Email: psanders at ilstu.edu <mailto:psanders at ilstu.edu>
> Skype: paultlud Phone: +1-309-452-7072
> Website: www.drtlud.com <http://www.drtlud.com/>
> On 5/17/2016 9:41 PM, Crispin Pemberton-Pigott wrote:
>> Thanks Paul
>>
>> Does this in some measure explain why Kirk has been saying for years that solid fuels cannot ever be burned cleanly enough to be used for cooking?
>>
>> It remains one of the strangest positions taken in the field of cooking stoves. It was repeated in 1999 and many times since. It has been taken up, with polite wording, by the GACC which frequently refers to ‘clean fuels and clean cooking solutions for people who have traditionally been forced to use solid fuels’ as if solid fuels are somehow inherently objectionable or ‘unclean’ (haram).
>>
>> The implication, as early on taken by Kirk, is that solid fuels somehow contain inherent emissions that cannot be done away with. Remember that quotation about the ‘combustion efficiency of fuels’, by type? I think that is the root idea behind ‘clean fuels’. There are ‘dirty fuels’ and ‘clean fuels’ in that world of thinking. There are also ‘clean stoves’ and ‘dirty stoves’ I suppose.
>>
>> Picture two testing teams operating two identical stoves with the same fuel in adjacent rooms. The results are very good – extremely low emissions. One team announces, “We have discovered a really clean fuel!” In the next room the other team announces, “We have discovered a really clean stove!”
>>
>> Obviously we have a problem accepting either claim. Only a combination of stove and fuel is clean, and even then, the way it is operated will still have an influence.
>>
>> So what is the motivation for saying that solid fuels cannot be burned cleanly enough to be used indoors? Why only liquid and gaseous fuels? I reported earlier the remarkably clean burning pellet stove made by a tiny workshop in Indonesia that has about ¼ of the PM emissions of an LPG stove. Is an Albasia pellet a biomass fuel or a biofuel? I think that ‘bio’ means ‘living’ and that the pellets are the product of a living source – trees. In the UK they have power stations burning biofuels (wood pellets). Maybe they should be consulted.
>>
>> I agree that the use of terms passes through fashion and whim, and it is correct that the biofuels industry wants to be considered separately from everything else. It is a way of hogging the subsidies, if nothing else, with legislation requiring a certain amount of ‘biofuel capacity’ to be developed, then restricting it in a way that excludes the obvious: wood and agricultural waste pellets. Keeps the home fires burning for liquids, as it were.
>>
>> Recently I was sent a set of stove tests where the fuel burned was money – literally. Money pellets! That’s a pretty good idea, right? Instead of burning old money in a kiln, it is pelleted and sold as fuel. If it is really expensive, does it qualify as a biofuel in need of a subsidy, or is it plain old biomass?
>>
>> Paul, I would say that this stoves listserve, and in no small part your efforts to promote gasifiers, produced some of the cleanest burning stove products ever seen. As we know, bioethanol, bioparaffin, biodiesel, bio-plant oils, biomethanol – all can be burned cleanly under certain conditions, meaning they are not always seen to be doing that, but they can. I hold that the same is true for virtually all solid fuels. First they are rendered into liquids or directly to gases, then the gases are burned. All fires are gas fires.
>>
>> If we start using ‘biofuels’ only for non-solid energy carriers, are we not defeating the cause of clean combustion of wood and plant-based fuels? Wouldn’t that make it easier than it is now to demonise wood the way the West has demonised coal, still widely (and badly) burned in the East?
>>
>> I ask that because the campaign against solid fuels is so unreasonable, so unscientific. Rather than rejoicing at the discovery of new technologies and techniques that turn easily packaged solid fuels into combustible and clean burning gas, we observe repeated references to solid fuels being ‘not clean enough’, or even ‘will never be clean enough’ to be used for domestic energy.
>>
>> There is a new move afoot to develop another generation of coal burning stoves in Asia, possibly two. Testing recently (since the beginning of this year) at the BST Lab at CAU, we have seen a number of stoves that ‘go negative’ for a considerably portion of the burn time. Not as good as the best Mongolian stoves mind you, but pretty good. Refinement will improve these further.
>>
>> By ‘negative’ I mean they not only produce no PM2.5 part of the time, but they clean the air of background particles so their net impact is negative, presuming there is something in the background to remove. Thus I predict that within two years we will have coal burning and wood pellet burning stoves that are overall, negative for PM2.5 emissions during the whole burn including ignition, provided there is a WHO acceptable 50 micrograms of background PM2.5 available to clean from the combustion air.
>>
>> I think that is a pretty big accomplishment and it will owe a lot to this assemblage of stove enthusiasts when it happens. If the term ‘biofuels’ turns out to be used as a tool for demonising solid fuels, I think we should push back, citing examples of solid fuel combustors that match or even outperform liquid and gas burners.
>>
>> Regards
>> Crispin
>>
>>
>> Stovers,
>>
>> The message below from Kirk Smith's Stove List (Not StoveS, and not a ListSERV where there is discussion) is interesting reading.
>>
>> He is totally correct that in America ( and probably Europe and elsewhere) the term "Biofuels" does NOT include dry biomass.
>>
>> American politicians refer to "renewable energy" as solar, wind and biofuels. They NEVER mention wood and other dry biomass for renewable energy. But so much of our energy needs is for thermal energy, even water heating at below boiling point.
>>
>> Paul
>>
>>
>> Doc / Dr TLUD / Prof. Paul S. Anderson, PhD
>> Email: psanders at ilstu.edu <mailto:psanders at ilstu.edu>
>> Skype: paultlud Phone: +1-309-452-7072
>> Website: www.drtlud.com <http://www.drtlud.com/>
>>
>>
>> -------- Forwarded Message --------
>> Subject:
>> [stove] 30 years went by quickly
>> Date:
>> Thu, 12 May 2016 14:27:40 -0700
>> From:
>>
>> Reply-To:
>>
>> To:
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> “~30th Anniversary Edition” of Biofuels, Air Pollution and Health.
>>
>> Nearly 3 decades after publication of the first and still, I believe, only book laying out the major issues around what we now call household air pollution, it is available for free download in pdf – see below and on my website. It began to address most all of the issues we still struggle with except, perhaps, the climate angle, which I am coming to think in any case is a bit of a red herring even though we also introduced the concept of what is now called “co-benefits” and made the first measurements related to cookfuel/stoves in the early 1990s. Unfortunately, however, unthinking application of climate concerns now operates as a deterrent in some quarters to embracing truly clean cookfuel alternatives that have so much benefit to offer the very poorest populations.
>>
>> Note, I have long stopped using the term “biofuels” to mean biomass fuels, since biofuels now have come to mean liquid and gaseous fuels made from biomass in most of the world’s literature and media. Continued use of “biofuel” by some in our community now serves to confuse things I am afraid: biomass fuel is a perfectly reasonable term and nicely parallel to fossil fuel, but most importantly we cannot fight the now widely accepted use of the term “biofuel”, which describes fuels with entirely different characteristics/k
>>
>> Modern Perspectives in Energy <http://link.springer.com/bookseries/6313>, (originally published by Plenum, which was purchased by) Springer
>> 1987, Biofuels, Air Pollution, and Health: A Global Review, Kirk R. Smith
>> ISBN: 978-1-4612-8231-0 (Print) 978-1-4613-0891-1 (Online)
>> http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-1-4613-0891-1 <http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-1-4613-0891-1>”
>>
>>
>>
>> Kirk R. Smith, MPH, PhD <mailto:krksmith at berkeley.edu><krksmith at berkeley.edu> <mailto:krksmith at berkeley.edu>
>> Professor of Global Environmental Heath
>> Chair, Graduate Group in Environmental Health Sciences
>> Director, Global Health and Environment Program
>> School of Public Health
>> 747 University Hall
>> University of California
>> Berkeley, CA 94720-7360
>> 510-643-0793 (fax: 642-5810)
>> http://www.kirkrsmith.org/ <http://www.kirkrsmith.org/>
>>
>>
>>
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>>
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>
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