[Stoves] Off-topic: Biomass power and charmaking

Sat Mar 2 22:32:03 CST 2019

Nikhil,

Thank you very much for this wide-ranging and, for all of your assertions
to the contrary, extremely well informed answer to my rapidly knocked off
comments.

In general, it is clear that we belong to the same camp. I, too, believe
that biomass power has an absolutely central role to play in dealing with
the issue of the complete, productive, efficient and sustainable use of
crop wastes (broadly defined). That said, we still have differences.

First, the failure of the biomass projects in the Indian Punjab follow the
same lines as the failure of biomass power in central Thailand: the initial
dependence on rice husk. It is such great looking stuff. Looks cheap, easy
to handle and abundant. Problem is that when you look closer, you see that
it is already a marketed product (bricks, tiles, cheap pottery) and has a
huge upside demand potential (especially in the cement industry). In
Thailand, prices went from 200 b/tonne to 1,400 b/tonne and the power
plants shut down.

The trick is to find a true waste feedstock. This is where I come to rice
and wheat straw. Just gets burned. No large volume, higher value uses in
sight.

By mobile, for power plants, I am thinking less that the power can get
shipped around, than that the plants themselves are so small. A 1 MW
gassifier plant that will eat 17,000 tonnes of straw a year has the foot
print of a house. It not only produces enough power for thousands of
households - cutting grid costs - but it provides masses of waste heat that
can be used as such or converted into cold to support small industrial
estates that provide new local labor.

As for the truly small, for all of India's rapid growth, hundreds of
millions of people continue to live in deep, rural areas and to cook on
charcoal or wood. This means that there exists a huge potential market for
biochar briquettes. These can be made easily and efficiently from straw,
maize stalk, etc. at the village level and are quite profitable when
compared to the alternatives. (Were the government ever to give up on its
tireless and both immensely costly and destructive policy of
super-subsidizing synthetic fertilizers, biochar soil amendments could
restore millions of ha of degraded agricultural land.

But all this said, thank you very much for the observations about the
politics of air pollution in the Indian Punjab. I cannot imagine that it is
much less a problem across the border. And whatever the mix of pollutants,
there is no question that decreasing the ag fire generated amount of PM2.5
in the air will save lots of lives and improve labor productivity enough to
affect the GDP.

M

Michael Shafer
www.warmheartworldwide.org
www.twitter.com/warmheartorg
http://www.facebook.com/warmheartworldwide
<http://www.youtube.com/warmheartvideo>

On Sun, Mar 3, 2019 at 3:01 AM Nikhil Desai <ndesai at alum.mit.edu> wrote:

> Michael:
>
> This is the second part of my reply from the earlier thread that started
> outside the Stoves list. Again, you gave me an opportunity to look up
> something and validate my suspicions.
>
> 2. l haven't looked at the brick kiln fuel markets in India in a
> systematic manner. The Punjab story I mentioned is from personal
> experience. Not only had I met the developer in a flight from Nairobi once,
> Liz Bates or someone else from Boiling Point sent me a paper - around
> 2006/7 - for peer review. The paper pointed out that compared to the
> earlier situation where biomass power projects could pick up rice husk (I
> believe) for free at the farm gate, now they had to pay, wherefore the
> feed-in tariff should be revised upwards from Rs 6/kWh (at the time around
> 15 USc/kWh). If I remember correctly, I found no problem with the paper's
> methods but disagreed with the policy conclusion.
>
> It is not just that biomass power is mobile - transmittable; so is biomass
> waste, properly compacted and free from rain risk. What matters is the
> netback value at farm gate of the price this fuel or fodder can fetch.
>
> What I think has happened in some parts of India is that there are better
> roads and that tractors are available cheaply for off-season rental. So a
> tractor can deliver crop waste where coal and wood are higher cost.
>
> I visited one such brick kiln in a rural area on the road from Goa to
> Kolhapur once. around January 2011. No big city close by, but enough new
> construction in villages and towns. The brick kiln used a mixture of local
> agro wastes supplemented by local tree wastes and trucked in agro wastes. I
> took down the numbers but lost them.
>
> Several times since then I have seen bales of hay being trucked on the
> highway to arid regions of north Gujarat where dairy cattle population has
> grown because of milk support prices but there isn't enough fodder.
>
> I am happy to see you are planning something for Pakistan Punjab. I will
> try to gather information on feed-in tariffs and brick kiln fuel prices on
> the Indian side and pass on to you. My personal bias is in favor of biomass
> electricity generation and then use of electricity for induction cooking --
> depending on the context, of course. I agree with you, " if there are, in
> fact, generous feed-in rates for biomass power, we ought to see multiple,
> biomass power plants outside of the radius of economically viable brick
> production where wheat straw is still largely burned. If we go not, then
> the barriers to biomass power lie elsewhere, not in the cost of
> feedstock. " In fact, I would push for penalties for direct burning.
>
> There is a political and modeling issue here as well. I am not convinced
> that short-term smoke from biomass open burning has the same health damage
> as from the ozone and NMVOC pollution in India's National Capital Region,
> say. I know Kirk Smith would argue otherwise, based on this PM2.5
> equitoxicity assumption and GBD models; frankly, I don't give a damn. Agro
> waste is but one of the sources, and its emissions are likely to be
> specific to the chemistry of the burnt material. Enough for now. I am
> somewhat familiar with urban air source apportionment studies in India.
>
> There is probably also the politics of individual states and the central
> government. Delhi is almost a state but not fully. Like DC here, Delhi
> government is in the hands of a party in opposition to the party in the
> central government. Surrounding areas of Delhi have state governments in
> charge of three different parties. We have ignorant fools in Delhi High
> Court calling farm smoke as an act of "genocide", though air pollution and
> agro waste treatment are entirely state and city level subjects, and I
> don't think the central government Ministry of Environment and Forests or
> the Central Pollution Control Board have jurisdiction over farms.
>
> "Free biomass" is the practical counterpart to the zealotry of "renewable
> biomass". There is no free salad, nor free carrot/onion peels.
>
> I thought Husk Power faltered precisely for that reason -  loss of free
> crop waste - but it seems they made a comeback. See
> https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/small-biz/entrepreneurship/generating-electricity-for-millions-husk-power-bolsters-modis-dream-of-power-to-all/articleshow/68213635.cms
> and
> https://www.thebetterindia.com/155140/husk-power-system-renewable-energy-investment/
> .
>
> From the look of it, it seems they have combined solar PV with biomass
> power, which I think is a superb idea if they have some daytime power
> demand and the tariff is reasonably low. I did not at all like their
> earlier business model.
>
> Important to note: " Another interesting thing that the company has been
> doing with the waste generated from the gasification is to use the charred
> rice husk to make incense sticks, also known as agarbatti. For every three
> to four power units, they have an incense stick-making unit set which
> employs local women. "
>
> That is not much, but it's probably because the demand for charcoal as a
> fuel is much larger than can be served.
>
> I don't have the fuel price data for brick kilns but I imagine they vary
> with those for coal and HFO. Here a couple of stories on a new "zig zag"
> technology and subsidies:
>
>
> https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/ludhiana/punjab-to-harp-on-better-aqi-subsidised-straw-management-equipment-as-sc-hears-plea-on-stubble-burning/articleshow/67093703.cms
>
>
>
> https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/punjab/no-tech-upgrade-punjab-brick-kilns-operate-illegally/724466.html
>
>
> https://www.hindustantimes.com/punjab/work-at-brick-kilns-halted-for-four-months-in-punjab-prices-likely-to-shoot-up-3-lakh-workers-to-be-hit/story-5eChuYNj2H5Tw3CtLJkudP.html
>
>
> https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/ludhiana/punjab-to-harp-on-better-aqi-subsidised-straw-management-equipment-as-sc-hears-plea-on-stubble-burning/articleshow/67093703.cms
>
> And I find it encouraging that India and Pakistan are emulating each other
> not only in nuclear weapons fut also in kiln pollution management:
>
>
> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-pakistan-climatechange-bricks/with-smog-season-looming-pakistan-shuts-polluting-brick-kilns-idUSKCN1MT0CI
>
> https://www.technologytimes.pk/zigzag-kiln-technology-emissions/
>
>
> http://ccacoalition.org/en/news/pakistan-moves-toward-environmentally-friendly-and-cost-effective-brick-kilns
>
> I think the challenge is to find climate finance for both brick kilns as
> well as charcoal kilns, using avoided NMVOCs and black carbon.
>
> Including from non-biomass solid fuels, but heck, no fighting with
> ignorant folks.
>
> Nikhil
>
> PS: I am skeptical about " The issue, however, is that most places even in
> India, biomass occurs in small, highly distributed amounts that defy
> cost-effective collection and scale processing. This being the case,
> millions of stoves or tens of thousands of trenches may be the only way to
> go. "  How you can save the poor people TIME is more important than saving
> the fuel. Individual household  cookstoves without regard to fuel will NOT
> make any more difference than they have for the last 50 years. Whether the
> minimum economic size is 10,000 stoves and can be multiplied 100 times, or
> whether a combination of charmaking plant with gases used for commercial
> cooking and heating and char for soil conditioning and household cooking at
> 50,000 stoves as a minimum economic size --- these are questions of
> contextual intelligence. We have wasted 50 years on technology, but we have
> learned along the way and I hope that some breakthroughs are required on
> the policy front to take the technology adaptation to the next step over
> the last ten years. It is good that GACC is dead; now we need to kill WHO
> and ISO nonsense. Or even bother with individual biomass cookstoves for the
> poor. Define an economic geography and a business model and market
> alternative policy and financing approaches to those who still care.
>
> There is an emerging market for bulk biomass wastes. Was always there, but
> transport and skills didn't exist. Now there are roads and skills. I
> remember a timber mill along the road from my grandfather's village to its
> railway station - some 60 years ago. Timber waste was a ready fuel then and
> sometimes taken to small industries nearby. I don't understand why we
> always fuss with households as collectors and users of fuel. Perhaps we got
> brainwashed by Kirk Smith in his defining cookstove pollution as the
> household problem - I agree, but not his estimates of damage - and earlier
> by all the "save the trees" greens. Trees are grown, crops are grown; there
> is waste all around, solid and otherwise. I see no reason why charring
> cannot revolutionize distributed fuel and technology markets. At least,
> there is a technical potential if only we get away from household
> coookstoves smoke and open the window to see who and what else is out
> there.
>
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------
> Nikhil Desai
> (US +1) 202 568 5831
> *Skype: nikhildesai888*
>
>
> On Sat, Mar 2, 2019 at 2:07 AM d.michael.shafer at gmail.com <
> d.michael.shafer at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> My apologies to Nikhil for failing to know the backstory on the 20 v. 100
>> year GWP choice. My observation was meant as an entirely innocent
>> observation about the actual practice in the field, not as a moral
>> judgement about its rightness.
>>
>> On a more general basis, I am very interested by Nikhil's story about
>> biomass and prices in the Indian Punjab. This is new information for me.
>> Knowing the story of biomass power in Central Thailand as I do, I find this
>> story compelling but also incomplete. It may be true that farm gate prices
>> for straw have risen because of brick kilns, but approximately 20 million
>> tonnes of wheat straw burn annually after the harvest. If this is the case,
>> it is obvious that the brick kiln market is not clearing and price gouging
>> by farmers cannot be the whole story.
>>
>> Here is what I don't understand. Bricks are heavy and low value. This
>> suggests that they must be made relatively close to their end market.
>> Biomass power, on the other hand, is far more "mobile" and its demand is
>> very widespread. Together, these suggest that if there are, in fact,
>> generous feed-in rates for biomass power, we ought to see multiple, biomass
>> power plants outside of the radius of economically viable brick production
>> where wheat straw is still largely burned. If we go not, then the barriers
>> to biomass power lie elsewhere, not in the cost of feedstock.
>>
>> This is an important issue for me because I am about to begin work on an
>> anti-smoke planning effort in the Pakistani Punjab. If there is a hidden
>> factor that I completely do not see, I would like to be informed about it
>> now. I can easily factor in the prospect of rising straw prices with new
>> demand, but what else is lurking?
>>
>> To Nikhil's criticism about scale, the problem, I think, is more complex.
>> It is absolutely true, as Nikhil argues, that in areas of huge biomass
>> production where centralized processing and production are possible,
>> "macro" solutions are necessary. (The Indian Punjab near major cities where
>> immense farms prevail, for example.) The issue, however, is that most
>> places even in India, biomass occurs in small, highly distributed amounts
>> that defy cost-effective collection and scale processing. This being the
>> case, millions of stoves or tens of thousands of trenches may be the only
>> way to go.
>>
>> M
>>
>> Michael
>>
>> Michael Shafer
>> www.warmheartworldwide.org
>> www.twitter.com/warmheartorg
>> http://www.facebook.com/warmheartworldwide
>> <http://www.youtube.com/warmheartvideo>
>>
>>
>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
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