[Stoves] Chinese biochar projections [formerly Re: Calculating cooking costs and char costs ----Re: [biochar] Where to discuss STOVES AND CARBON offsets and drawdown

Robert Taylor rt at ms1.hinet.net
Tue Sep 19 15:56:19 CDT 2017


Hi Ron,

I'm not aware of a different weight unit (the traditional Chinese weight 
units that are still in use today don't go up that large), but the 
Chinese number system itself can easily give rise to confusion in 
conversion to English numbers, due to the mismatch between basic units.

In English we have units, tens, hundreds, thousands, millions, billions 
and up (with historically different definitions of the billions and up 
in different countries).

Chinese has units, tens, hundreds, thousands, ten-thousands (wan), 
hundred-millions (yi), trillions (zhao, i.e. 10 to the power of 12) and 
up (with historically different definitions of yi, zhao and up).

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_numerals

So a million in English is 100 wan in Chinese, and an (American) billion 
is 10 yi.

A similar problem to lakhs, crores etc. in Indian numbers.

Robert Taylor
Taiwan


On 2017-09-19 16:40, Ronal W. Larson wrote:
> Tom and stove list (and adding the biochar list).  Note thread title 
> change.
>
> I have reviewed the IBI “8858” message below and suggest these are the 
> two key sentences:
> /
> /
> /“The ambitious plan of the cooperative enterprises on straw biomass 
> and biochar technology is to upscale up to 5M tones of straw recycled 
> per year and 100 enterprises converting biomass to biochars, reaching 
> a total market value of 10 billion CNY (Chinese yuan) by 2020. /
> /With this mode so far, up to 100,000 tons straws were carbonized 
> while some twenty thousand tons straw biomass biochar fertilizer 
> produced with additional 20 thousands tons biochar sold, giving a 
> reduction of GHGs over 0.6 Tg CO2 equivalent.”/
>
> These numbers don’t hang together!
>
> I am now inclined to believe the total annual 2020 market value (10 
> billion Yuan per year) and the .6 Tg CO2 equivalent reduction to date. 
>  Only if I increase the quantity scales by a factor of 10 (both “to 
> date” (meaning 2015) and in 2020) can I get a future char price to be 
> $150/tonne char and a 3:1 weight ratio of CO2 to biochar.  As the 
> weights are now stated, we would get $1500/tonne char (seems way too 
> high for China in 2020) and a (ridiculous) 30:1 ratio.
>
> I can get their factor of 50 increase (1 million t char/yr) / (20,000 
> t char) [or my preference that is ten times larger in both numerator 
> and denominator] if I assume a five year  period (all of 2016-2020) 
> AND I assume that all of the stated past values were from only 2015.   
> Then I need an annual growth rate of about 119% for five years.  So we 
> might be able to justify an annual bit-more-than-doubling of output - 
> that is six annual _*relative *_numbers for 2015 - 2020 like 1, 2.2, 
> 4.6,10, 22, 50.  Their computations were probably more like an annual 
> doubling of output at each site when we factor in growing from about 
> 50 sites to 100.
>
> This annual growth factor is still huge (but probably well less than 
> that seen for hand-held phones).
>
> Is it possible that the Chinese have a weight unit that is 10 times 
> larger than a kg or tonne?  (that got lost in the translation?)
>
> The first key quantity to check could be whether the Chinese could 
> have produced 200,000 tonnes char in 2015 rather than 20,000?  With 50 
> companies this is 4000 tonnes per year per machine, so a bit more than 
> 1/2 tonne char per hour.  This looks possible with the machine shown 
> at the IBI site given below by Tom.  They appear to be going from 50 
> such machines to 2500 such machines over a 5 year period.  To say that 
> (looks big) machine can only produce less than 1 kg char per minute 
> doesn’t seem reasonable.
>
> Anyone else see a major opportunity here for pushing biochar? (via the 
> Chinese goals).  Or maybe I have just made an error?   I have 
> intentionally not shown all the computations, but they are quite 
> obvious, and better to have independent confirmation.  Glad to comment 
> off line with anyone.
>
> It is exceedingly important in our world (of selling biochar) to get 
> this (double) factor of ten sorted out!
>
> Tom - thanks for this important lead.  I am sorry to report that I see 
> this factor-of-10 error.
>
> Ron
>
>

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