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

[Crispin Pemberton-Pigott]

Dear Nikhil

The situation in Hebei is affected by what is marketable. If something has value, it is traded. The question for agricultural crop wastes is, will the farmers be paid enough to make it worth collecting, whether that be stover, straw or slash.

>Thank you for pointing out market signals due to fertilizer subsidies. Very interesting.

The organic fertilizers made in Hebei are almost, without exception, sold to nearby provinces because there is a small subsidy to use them, but not in Hebei. That is a matter of local policy.

>China also must have a great deal of animal waste from the food industry - couldn't that go to fertilizer and climate char?

Something of high value is not going to be applied to a low value chain. If something makes great pig food, it won’t be wasted making char. It might go to compost, rather, but as cooked food it is better eater directly.

For manure, there are of course biogas applications and I work in the bioenergy section of the College of Engineering, where most grad students work on biogas. Collected paper are available from the university as “Biogas Engineering and Application Vol nn”. One of the presentations made at the October conference last year was on the use of a two stage digestion process in which methane and hydrogen production are separately optimised by changing the cooking temperature and selected microbes partway through the process. In this way the highest total energy can be recovered in the form of combustible gas.

Therefore the use and treatment of field wastes is a far cry from the simple idea of tossing it in a stove and making magic dust. Expanding the organic fertiliser market and raising its value through specialised blending will eventually create a market for all the field products, I assume. (They don’t just dump everything into a bin and call it ‘organic fertilizer’. It is a science.)

>CDM and GS computations are driven by theories that have not been validated in practice.

They are also driven by the use of a performance rating system that has not been properly reviewed. It contains two serious defects: it does not rate the fuel consumption of stoves based on their fuel consumption, and it overcomes this failure by applying annually a ‘corrective formula’ that explains away the difference between a defective lab or field test and the observed performance, thus re-crediting the stove with a fuel mass saving that is not achieved in practice.

Seeing that the whole purpose of the trade is ‘fuel mass saved’, this seems a particularly egregious pair of errors.

Regards
Crispin

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