[Stoves] [biochar] Continuing in response to Crispin and James

Thu Feb 28 00:29:16 CST 2019

Daniel, fair enough.  I agree that anyone can be smart.  In fact it’s know that breakthroughs in technology have been achieved by those unencumbered by the paradigms of the models afforded academic training. I do believe formal education provides skills to engage in rigorous inquiry in a way that factors out personal biases and accounts for all the information rational way.   But there is no monopoly on the ability to be effective at rigorous inquiry and analysis.   

CLIMATE CHANGE

My point is that if we are going to debate climate change dynamics, there is a world of expertise outside of this biochar group that could be engaged, for instance NASA, fully informed by all of the available information?  I am sure there are other internet groups for debating the dynamics of climate change?  There are some really smart biochar experts on this thread, but nto many geologists who could speak to what happens to land masses when water melts away to the best of my knowledge.. 

STOVES

There is a separate group for that.  It's a charcoal business. The limitation of Stoves, (and biochar), is that there is an abundance of activity and interest in the technology, and those engaged in further developing our understanding and development of those technologies, with considerably less focus on commercialization. 

For instance, deploying Stoves in third world countries presents a confounding challenge in supply chain development, marketing, finance, and economics. You may have the greatest stove technology, which from what I’ve read, we do.  But that is far from enough to make an impact on people’s lives. 

To start, you need to build enough Stoves to pack up a container and ship them to say Africa.  Then, you have to get them through customs, in places where infrastructure is lacking, so the process takes a very long time, and often facilitation payments are needed. (paying facilitation payments to government officials is forbidden under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act if you are US based). Hopefully they don’t get stolen. Then you have to truck or rail the Stoves somewhere, perhaps a local town, and try to sell them.  Now you are dealing with people who have no money, so they need finance, and transacting in foreign currencies with exchange rate risk.  And while you are doing this you need to pay people, buy equipment, pay for logistics, banking transactions, all this requires finance, so you have to convince an investor, a government agency, or a charitable group, that there is a market and wants to take that risk.  The cost to the customer in the beginning will be much greater than when after a market develops (like solar, or electric cars). Large markups will be required to pay for all the costs of getting the stoves to market in the beginning when you do not have scale.  Do the economics work then?  In the end you will need to show how this business is economically viable.  

We need to drive commercial adoption of these technologies, either by positioning them to benefit from the forces of capitalism, enabled by early government support, or through not- for- profit resourcing.  These are the issues we should be discussing. Unlike technical development, which is under your control, dealing with markets is mostly out of your direct control, individuals who don’t care about changing what they do because they are risk averse in general, or are not necessarily incentivized to do so, which makes for a very big challenge, one that must be addressed. 

Rick Wilson

> On Feb 27, 2019, at 4:46 AM, Daniel <carefreeland at aol.com <mailto:carefreeland at aol.com>> wrote:
> 
> Rick, with all the due respect you are not giving me, Crispin, or anyone here who doesn't have a degree or who drifts subjects.  A) Just because we don't have degree does not mean we cannot contribute. I didn't have a degree when I: taught Ohio State ( then the world) how to dramatically reduce global pesticide use, creating IPM ( 1983) , nor when I helped negotiate the Dayton Well field Protection Ordinance(1985) nor when I saved NASA  several lifetimes of "education" to figure out what I already knew about growing plants in controlled environments.( 1995?)    
>      You see all knowlege starts with observing nature, and we both do a lot of that! I learned my geology from hundreds of hours underground caving, soil testing, rock hounding, prospecting, rock climbing, oil rigging, and 38 years of landscaping, excavation, irrigation and drainage. I almost bought a gold mine in Cripple Creek Colorado when I was 16 years old and gold was $30/ oz.  Just to name a few.
> And B) off topic has been a common thing on the Stoves list since I joined in 2001.  I remember the airlift of food to Afganistan inspired by conversations right here about saving more lives with food than bombs back in about 2002.  Sometimes great ideas come from unusual places. 
> 
> I learned about making charcoal while mastering pyrotechnics at age 11-14. You see I needed a better char to make better rocket fuel and better colored stars, faster burning black powder. Dad taught me all about carbon when his lab partners were creating graphite fiber and shuttle heat shield tiles for the Air Force. He worked on Boron fiber in the early 1970's, and laser weapons protection when he passed in 1976. He started life relining blast furnaces. Never had an advanced degree
> 
> People like Crispin and I are way too busy actually learning "hands on" in real life, to have time to get degrees in every one of the many subjects we dabble in. Yet we open minds to ideas that are " not in the book" because sometimes as Dr. Reed used to say proudly " Sometimes the book is wrong"!   More often" the best book" is written by someone who couldn't find the information in another book and had to figure it out themselves.
> Dan Dimiduk.  Shangri-La Research and Development
> 
> Sent from my Verizon 4G LTE Droid
> On Feb 27, 2019 1:37 AM, Rick Wilson <rick012 at yahoo.com <mailto:rick012 at yahoo.com>> wrote:
> As an economist, and soil scientist, I struggle to see how stoves has a future. It would be great if we could keep stoves on the stove list. 
> 
> Unless you have a Ph.D. in geology, please stay away from discussions on the mass of glaciers, and the mass of oceans rising, you do not have the training to make sense of what is going on.
> 
> Rick Wilson
> 
> 
> 
> On Feb 24, 2019, at 5:27 PM, Gordon West gordon.west at rtnewmexico.com <mailto:gordon.west at rtnewmexico.com> [biochar] <biochar at yahoogroups.com <mailto:biochar at yahoogroups.com>> wrote:
> 
> The idea of lightening the load on the land and having it rise is… well, interesting. It does fit with the theory that the Great Biblical Flood came about when all of the subterranean water that the land floats on came gushing up through some massive cracks. I guess it rained alot, too. What I don’t quite understand is how all the water got back under the earth’s crust, but it must have, except for the oceans and lakes and stuff, which still float on top of the ground.
> 
> 
> I’m a little bit confused I reckon, I hope there’s a scientific study on this soon!
> 
> GW
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Feb 24, 2019, at 5:55 PM, Crispin Pemberton-Pigott <crispinpigott at outlook.com <mailto:crispinpigott at outlook.com>> wrote:
> 
> Dan!
> 
> As we say in Swaziland, "Menlo mandala!". It means my eyes have grown old since I last saw you.
> 
> Isn't it amazing what you can learn on the stoves list?
> 
> About the steel: isn't the purpose of the super low oxygen environment intended to reduce the oxidation of the iron?
> 
> It would keep the temperature up as high as possible while maintaining was nearly no available O2. Make sense?
> 
> About the glaciers, the only reason they flow to the sea is they are pushed from behind. I am speaking of those that are really big. The ones that terminate on land are not so interesting but there are lots of them. Just because a glacier flows doesn't mean there is a net change in mass. Let's suppose there is a drop in mass. That means the total water mass in the oceans rises. The land moves up (rebound) the sea floor moves down. The Hudson Bay shore is rebounding about 40mm per year, with, as you say, a delay of several thousand years. All things considered sea level rises - very slowly these days compared with 10,000 years ago.
> 
> Those that calculate such things have recently changed how sea level is reported, meaning how it is calculated. They are adding an estimated depth increase to the actual rise, and report it as " sea level rise" even though the sea level doesn't rise that much. So the number you an find now reported is padding: about 50% of it. Amazing, right? Sounds like good old stove testing. You can't really trust anything you hear, even about simple things.
> 
> How's the bush clearing going? Can you get a large propane tank to use as a charcoal kiln?
> 
> Best regards
> Crispin
> 
> From: carefreeland at aol.com <mailto:carefreeland at aol.com>
> Sent: February 24, 2019 3:46 PM
> To: crispinpigott at outlook.com <mailto:crispinpigott at outlook.com>
> Cc: schmidt at ithaka-institut.org <mailto:schmidt at ithaka-institut.org>; kdraper2 at rochester.rr.com <mailto:kdraper2 at rochester.rr.com>; biochar at yahoogroups.com <mailto:biochar at yahoogroups.com>; d.michael.shafer at gmail.com <mailto:d.michael.shafer at gmail.com>; stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org <mailto:stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org>; psanders at ilstu.edu <mailto:psanders at ilstu.edu>; wastemin1 at verizon.net <mailto:wastemin1 at verizon..net>
> Subject: Re: [Stoves] Continuing in response to Crispin and James
> 
> Crispin and all. A quick check of The MAKING SHAPING and TREATING of STEEL notes the following. Blast furnace gas has zero methane.. It has 27.5% of CO and even 1% H2 makes it through the reaction. While methane, fuel oil, and even steam are introduced to balance the smelting reactions, methane and hydrocarbons do not make it out. Note this is a high temperature yet oxygen starved reaction. In any half efficient combustion devise that allows adaquate secondary air, the methane and light hydrocarbons are first to combust.
> 
> Now, Crispin, according to your hypothesis: Any glacier melting would raise sea level, but the sea would sink deeper from the added weight. This would keep the actual level constant. I say maybe after 10,000 year lag or more. - Dan Dimiduk.
> 
> Sent from my Verizon 4G LTE Droid
> On Feb 24, 2019 7:09 AM, Crispin Pemberton-Pigott <crispinpigott at outlook.com <mailto:crispinpigott at outlook.com>> wrote:
> Dear Paul and Mike and All
> 
> An important addition to Mike's comment about the stack temperature of 900 is that it must have some minimum O2 content for the statement to be true in general.
> 
> On the topic of many charcoal kilns in a confined space on a windless day etc. This question seems to confuse radiative effects of GHG's with "air pollution".
> 
> There is no way charcoal making can compare with rotting that vegetation to gases, in terms of its net GHG effects. The whole point that has been made is that charcoal is a way of holding the carbon. Methane can't be made without carbon. If the char exists, the methane and CO2 that would have been produced by rotting doesn't.
> 
> For example, the alarming claim that melting permafrost "will produce a lot of methane" is based on the fact that permafrost is full of frozen forest products. Of course it will produce methane, at least it will in summer, but there are two other questions that must be answered at the same time as the methane bomb is mooted: how did that forest debris get there in the first place (it grew there the last time it was warm enough to do so) and what will grow there if the ground is melted (another forest, of course, far more than offsetting the effects of any methane).
> 
> So there is no meaningful net effect of methane "influence" on the atmosphere other than the new forest which will grow on that land will again start sequestering CO2. Proof? Look south - what do you see, an endless forest. In other words the net effect is the opposite of the myopic (partial) analysis given by the methane bomb advocates.
> 
> Frankly, this charcoal-making-methane bomb equivalent is a tempest in a tea cup, a thimble, an eye-dropper. When I stand on the shore and piss into the ocean, it raises sea levels. That is half the story. The other half is I weigh less so the ground under me rises and deepens the ocean, cancelling my "influence".
> 
> Charcoaling systems should burn the effluent to prevent smoke which is a pollutant. However if we managed to completely suppress all fires in all forests and grasslands, it would probably stop raining because raindrops form around aerosol particles, a large fraction of which are from bad combustion.
> 
> In times of drought on the Great Plains, the First Nations people learned to recognise supersaturated conditions in the air and lit grass fires to cause the formation of raindrops which then fell in the vicinity.. Rainmaking is a real thing. If they instead made charcoal in a modern kiln it wouldn't have worked. Too clean.
> 
> Crispin's rule number one: Never assume anything.
> 
> Regards
> Crispin assuming this is adequate
> <

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