[Stoves] Air pollution in cities

[Tom Miles]

Crispin,

 

Thanks for your comments. The agricultural science that we have seen is done at a high level. It is also done in collaboration with expert institutions around the world. In just our limited view we are interacting with a large department of soil and crop scientists at a “key university” for biochar. They are collaborating with some large corporations. They have really been innovative compared to how others around the world are thinking about the conversion and use of biochar. The people we are working with have been at it for at least 10 years, so it hasn’t happened overnight.

 

The business model is unique and there clearly are subsidies. There are multiple objectives, but a main driver is to reduce the open field burning. Improving soil health, reducing effects of pollution, increasing yield and sequestering carbon are other targets. There are many local challenges to deal with, like arsenic and cadmium.    National, county, and local governments are involved organizing supporting policy and funding businesses. 

 

They are moving very quickly to scale. The scale is not surprising. You can get to the current stated capacities with only 25 plants each processing 30,000 tons of residue per year at about 4 tons per hour. They have engineered one processing scheme and have cloned it. Meanwhile they are working on incremental improvements. Whether each plant is actually producing 8,000 hours per year may be debatable but that’s also true of our small North American biomass plants. Field testing in300 locations is impressive. There is a whole educational program at each level. 

 

I haven’t seen their pelleting operations, but I have seen other stationary systems with Chinese equipment and know their typical limitations. The pellets are not very dense which should offset some of the wear issues associated with crop residues. 

 

This is still evolving. It will be interesting to see where they are in a year’s time. 

 

Tom     

 

From: Stoves [mailto:stoves-bounces at lists.bioenergylists.org] On Behalf Of Crispin Pemberton-Pigott
Sent: Wednesday, November 22, 2017 11:42 PM
To: Discussion of biomass cooking stoves <stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org>
Subject: Re: [Stoves] Air pollution in cities

 

Dear Friends

 

Tom sez:

 

>Fuel supply and pelleting businesses are organized at the county level as farmer coops. Crop residues (rice and maize) are only processed to pellets during the harvest season so that any businesses that were not organized by October probably missed this season. 

 

One of topics investigated as part of the Hebei Clean Air Project was the production of biogas and the mixing and making of fertilizers based on crop residues. A huge amount of investigative work on how this can be done effectively, maximising energy content in the biogas, for example, and the use of artificial wetlands for water purification (etc etc) has been done by the China Agricultural University (CAU). There is a section of the College of Engineering devoted to this and they have recently expanded their graduate programme so such an extent that there are not 6 student desks permanently in the office of Prof Dong. I think they have about 35 Masters students working on these matters at any one time.

 

My point is that the topics are taken seriously and ‘at scale’. The linkage between CAU and fertilizers and the province Hebei is that biogas is important, CAU is the lead lab for this, and biochar is a ‘tax’ on biogas. You can’t have everything. The question of what to make and how much it costs is dominated by the seasonal availability of the input materials. Fertilizer is pretty easy to store. Gas is not, neither is the input material.

 

In Hebei there are multiple plants making fertilizers but surprisingly (to me anyway) it is not used locally, meaning inside the province. The reason is economic. Nearby provinces have subsidies for ‘organic’ fertilizers and the difference makes it worth shipping Hebei’s production of biochar (or not) based fertilizers to other provinces. Because of the availability of additional raw material (which is typically burned illegally in mid-October) that is not making it into the gas (A) or fertilizer (B) system, I suggested that the obvious best use of the available material was A or B but not burning. (I am not putting pellets in there because they are not economically viable at the moment and all production is still subsidised – or was the last time I saw a presentation on it. Equipment issues are major.) 

 

The basic problem was the cost of gathering the material. It has to have a value to the farmers if it involves work. Typically all the pellet and other production relies on the delivery of the input material to the factory gate. The economics of the enterprise start at their own gate with a cost of the delivered inputs. 

 

>The product is sold at competitive prices, and the yields improve so it is a live business model.  

 

Well, in the case of the fertilizers, it is sold at competitive prices, but the buying is subsidised. Hebei producers can get more money selling outside the province, so they do. Is selling at an inflated price because someone is offering a subsidy ‘competitive’? Mileage may vary.

 

>We saw pictures of the crops and data from many of the tests sites in other areas. They have been very practical and creative in the development of commercial biochar fertilizers.

 

I think this aspect of Chinese agriculture is underestimated by those outside who don’t see the work close-up. We can talk freely about how this or that ‘solution’ will bring benefit x or y, but in a real world of constraints, there are multiple competing solutions on the go. 

 

Carbon and hydrogen are energy sources, and that is in no way limited to thermal energy. In the past 100 years gross biomass production has risen 14-20% depending on species because of increased CO2 fertilization. If Hebei sends out more than say, 18% of its gross carbon-containing materials in the form of biochar or other fertilizer, or sells it as gas, then their net provincial stock of soil carbon will drop. They have two options: either buy it back (offer the same subsidy in-province) or take more from the air. To get more from there air there has to be more in the air. If carbon sequestration is successful at scale and returns the planet to the pre-industrial level, which was almost a 4.5 billion year historical low, gross food production of the 4 key species (wheat, rice, maize and soybeans) would drop 18%1. If it was dropped (accidentally or deliberately) to the glacial era level food production would drop 51% because all plants would be on the verge of starvation (plants evolved and first thrived in an atmosphere with 2000-3000 ppm CO2).

 

We apparently have the luxury of postulating what could be done with biomass and char and stoves and lots of cool things. Those working at the cutting edge, so to speak, have to face the inevitable limits of the system where there is only so much carbon and so much hydrogen and so much solar energy. The first thing to do is to stop burning it wastefully in the field. 

 

I think India will soon reach the same level of understanding and action and China.

 

Regards
Crispin

 

 

Crispin Pemberton-Pigott

Key Lab of Clean Production and Utilization of Renewable Energy, Ministry of Agriculture, P. R. China

China Agricultural University

 

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1  “The USGCRP and the UN disregard these practical finding in their academic claims that carbon dioxide-caused global warming will cause mass famine, etc. The writers at CO2 Science disagree. They reviewed a paper by L. Mariani in The European Physical Journal Plus titled “How to Feed the Planet and Its Additional 1.5 Billion Persons 30 Years from Now.” Given how far-fetched the academic forecasts of the UN and the USGCRP are compared to actual events, it is worth quoting a few comments at length.

“ “As illustrated in the figure below, Mariani notes that a ‘return to a glacial period would reduce by 51% the global productivity for thermal (low temperatures) and nutritional (low levels of CO2) reasons,’ whereas a return to pre-industrial conditions would reduce global production of the four keystone crops by 18 percent. Looking to the future, however, Mariani notes that increases in both CO2 and temperature would improve production, increasing the combined production of wheat, maize, rice and soybean by 15 and 24 percent above today’s values.”

“ “Commenting on his findings and looking to the past, Mariani writes that ‘the return of temperature and CO2 to glacial or pre-industrial values would give rise to serious disadvantages for food security and should be as far as possible avoided, as also highlighted by the results of Cage and Coleman (2001) and Araus et al. (2003). And with an eye to the future, Mariani says that ‘the agricultural sector is able to successfully meet the challenge of global change and guarantee food security to levels higher than the current ones for a world population that in 2050 will exceed 9 billion people,’ to which we would add — only if governments avoid implementing CO2 emission reduction schemes, which schemes are appearing more and more to be akin to genocide.””

Carbon plants nutrition and global food security <https://link.springer.com/article/10.1140/epjp/i2017-11337-8>  

How to Feed the Planet and Its Additional 1.5 Billion Persons 30 Years from Now <http://www.co2science.org/articles/V20/nov/a8.php>  which discusses the paper.

 

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