[Stoves] Pellet production (no longer --Re: China and cookstoves [Was Re: A user-centered, iterative e
Paul Anderson
psanders at ilstu.edu
Wed Dec 6 10:41:20 CST 2017
Gordon,
I understand your approach. Correct me if I am wrong.
You are focused on the making of biomass pellets (could be briquettes).
the biomass is abundant but rather dispursed (thinly distributied) .
Please update us about your work on that fuel preparation. It is a
topic of interest to everyone who has a stove that can utilize pellets.
And I am thinking mainly of the TLUD stoves that do make the desired
biochar. To use those pellets in larger units such as for centralized
(or district) heating would be great, especially with your system of
getting the char as a co-product with the heat.
How large of pelletiizing units (tons per day, or some other number)?
Please elaborate more about:
> The combination of scaled and use-tailored biochar+heat systems allows
> us to harvest even low quality biomass (dirty, wet, twigs and needles,
> etc) and manufacture it into feedstock for more pyrolysis and heat.
Have you operationalized such a set of equipment? Timetable and budget
and other factors. Your next sentence says "will be".
> Our pellets will be suitable for charring, even though they probably
> won’t be good for pellet stoves.
I agree that pellets can be very useful even if not optimized for pellet
stoves.
Paul
Doc / Dr TLUD / Prof. Paul S. Anderson, PhD
Email: psanders at ilstu.edu
Skype: paultlud Phone: +1-309-452-7072
Website: www.drtlud.com
On 12/6/2017 9:21 AM, Gordon West wrote:
> Our business is largely springing from the need in the U.S. to remove
> woody biomass from overgrown forests and other biomes - we have what I
> call a 'liability biomass' problem. The usual approach to this problem
> is to dispose of it by controlled burning, though there have been many
> attempts to utilize it for co-firing electrical generation plants, or
> more exotically, to make jet fuel. Those massive, concentrated,
> burn-it-to-ash projects don’t do very well as for profit enterprises,
> much less triple-bottom-line.
>
> We have thousands (tens of thousands?) of rural communities that are
> suffering economically, even though they are surrounded by massive
> amounts of 'liability biomass’ (note our problems with catastrophic
> wildfires). The combination of scaled and use-tailored biochar+heat
> systems allows us to harvest even low quality biomass (dirty, wet,
> twigs and needles, etc) and manufacture it into feedstock for more
> pyrolysis and heat. Our pellets will be suitable for charring, even
> though they probably won’t be good for pellet stoves.
>
> That is the material that we will trade for biochar to biochar+heat
> users with cookers and building heaters. The economics may even
> support providing devices to users with no upfront cost - a lease that
> is paid for with produced biochar. With adequate biochar markets, the
> “stoves” can even be fairly expensive, as long as the char value can
> cover the “payments”. That model would require substantial initial
> investment (or subsidy, if you wish) to cover the cap cost of
> producing and distributing appliances.
>
> Gordon West
> The Trollworks
> 503 N. “E” Street
> Silver City, NM 88061
> 575-537-3689
>
> /An entrepreneur sees problems as the seeds of opportunity./
>
>
>
>
>
>> On Dec 6, 2017, at 1:31 AM, Crispin Pemberton-Pigott
>> <crispinpigott at outlook.com <mailto:crispinpigott at outlook.com>> wrote:
>>
>> Dear Gordon
>> “We plan to give the micro-producers/free dried and densified
>> feedstock/in trade for their char. “We”, in this case, will be a
>> regional biochar cooperative that will handle technology distribution
>> and operation, biomass processing and feedstock distribution, and
>> biochar aggregation and marketing.”
>> There is a project in Rwanda that operates on a similar basis. People
>> bring wood fuel to the pellet mill and trade it for pellets which
>> they use in their pellet stoves.
>> People find the fuel and deliver it when convenient, bringing enough
>> to trade for a month of cooking fuel.
>> Am I correct in understanding you are looking at something similar?
>> There is no char involve, it is a wood fuel from end to end. The idea
>> is that rural homes will operate that way and urban families will but
>> the pellets to use instead of charcoal.
>> Thanks
>> Crispin
>> Gordon:
>> Sounds promising. "Disruptive" is music to my ears.
>> Aggregation of demands or of use benefits - monetized or not - is the
>> central problem of small-scale retail technologies in the developing
>> countries - be it in energy (including electricity), water,
>> transport, and until recently telecom. Anything that has economies of
>> scale at organizational level -- even the simple issue of disbursing
>> public money, if planning projects - even if not at technology level
>> suffers from this problem.
>>
>> I wonder what you are thinking in terms of the owners and operators
>> of the community scale biochar+heat systems or "regional biochar
>> cooperative". I take it you are thinking of US-based enterprises and
>> cooperatives, but if the unit investment size is around $0.5 million
>> to serve a community (households plus others) of roughly 10-20 kt per
>> year of feedstock, there may be markets in some developing countries
>> as well. (Using waste biomass, if usable.)
>>
>> Are you planning a survey of cooks in the developing world where you
>> could add in the questionnaire "“How important is making (more than
>> saving) money when you cook?”
>>
>> Nikhil
>>
>>
>> On Dec 4, 2017, at 12:28 PM, Gordon West <gordon.west at rtnewmexico.com
>> <mailto:gordon.west at rtnewmexico.com>> wrote:
>>
>> I want to support Ron in his point and to provide a scenario to
>> help to explain it. We are a relatively new ‘stoves’ R&D company
>> and manufacturer operating in the U.S. Our business plan is not
>> directly relevant to the markets that are the major focus of this
>> list, but there are some significant developments in our world
>> carrying what should be a disruptive lesson for biomass cooking
>> strategies.
>> The basic lesson, which we are creating a business model for, is
>> this: the biochar that is produced from our TLUD appliances is
>> worth many times more that the biomass feedstock going in. This
>> is true on a triple-bottom-line basis, looking at direct
>> economics, social benefits, and environmental benefits - note
>> that global economic systems generally acknowledge only only
>> transactions involving sale for currency as “making money” even
>> though the other non-monetized benefits result in greater
>> lifecycle economic good than the direct sales do.
>> First let me make the distinction between fuel and feedstock -
>> this is a very important point. Fuel is burned for energy;
>> feedstock is used to make other products. In our TLUD process,
>> biomass is always feedstock, from which is produced char and a
>> flammable gas (a fuel).
>> One problem with micro-production of biochar (cookstoves and
>> heaters in households) is that the char does not have enough
>> value to cover the cost of aggregation and sale to existing
>> markets - and existing markets are poorly developed, partly
>> because of a lack of supply. Our solution is to establish
>> community scale biochar+heat systems that acquire local biomass
>> for feedstock, process it into char and heat, use the heat to dry
>> more incoming biomass, and densify it into pellet or briquet
>> feedstock. The densified and bagged feedstock can then be
>> distributed to micro-producers to make heat for cooking or other
>> uses while making more char. We plan to give the
>> micro-producers/free dried and densified feedstock/in trade for
>> their char. “We”, in this case, will be a regional biochar
>> cooperative that will handle technology distribution and
>> operation, biomass processing and feedstock distribution, and
>> biochar aggregation and marketing.
>> This approach solves many problems - the households get free
>> feedstock, saving significant amounts of time and money; the
>> feedstock is of a much higher quality - it is dry and consistent
>> and dense, making stove operation safer and better; the char is
>> aggregated into a marketable form; carbon is sequestered; adding
>> CO2 to the atmosphere is avoided; soils and biomass productivity
>> is enhanced; and water is saved. There are many more benefits,
>> but those are some top examples.
>> In the U.S. we have the numbers to show that we can make a
>> business out of this approach. In more distressed areas,
>> governments and NGOs, who have more of an interest in the
>> non-monetized triple-bottom-line benefits, could set up the core
>> biochar+heat facilities to produce free feedstock for
>> micro-producers and manage the char collection. The subsidies to
>> do this would actually be long-term investments, and not bandaids
>> like so many ‘help for the poor’ efforts are.
>> Burning local biomass to ash in cookstoves for heat does not
>> really solve any fundamental lifecycle problems, no matter how
>> cleanly it is done.
>> Gordon West
>> The Trollworks
>> 503 N. “E” Street
>> Silver City, NM 88061
>> 575-537-3689 <tel:%28575%29%20537-3689>
>> /An entrepreneur sees problems as the seeds of opportunity./
>>
>> On Sun, Dec 3, 2017 at 3:39 PM, Ronal W. Larson
>> <rongretlarson at comcast.net
>> <mailto:rongretlarson at comcast.net>> wrote:
>>
>> Paul:
>> I have yet to see on ANY stove questionnaire: “How
>> important is making (more than saving) money when you
>> cook?”
>> Ron
>>
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