Charcoal As A Byproduct From Intermediate Temperature Power Plants

Fuel acquisition and disposal costs? Dioxin pollution from low stack temps?

Dry cellulosic fuel shouldn't have significantly greater harvesting and transportation costs than "cellulosic ethanol" which never seems to get past the research stage.

To be sure people pay a premium for liquid fuel because of it's high energy density and ability to work in cheap high power density engines. Also, depending on the economics of cap and trade, a majority of the fuel may end up as charcoal but that may be offset by much lower cultivation costs.

Hay costs about the same as diesel on a BTU basis but without nutritional and other restrictions some plant that can be irrigated with or grown in sea water and then converted to charcoal would be the most cost effective solution to carbon abatement.

Maybe the thread title should read, Electricity As a Byproduct of Charcoal Production

Bret Cahill

Please do not mix the monetary system created by man with the living system called Earth. And by the way, this carbon capture thing is a nonsense and a waste of time. Better for us is to addapt to the changes. That would be "money well spent", if I may use this expression.

The solution is to consume less, and get a bycicle. The large number in population is thanks to the concentrated energy of oil. When it will finish we'll see a reduction in population; these are the nature rules.

I did never expect to hear such a thing in my lifetime!.

In Spain, just after the Civil War the conditions were awful.

There was no fuel for Winter Heating and the people used charcoal dust to be burned in copper pans kept burning slowly during the whole day under the tables.

The system is an extremely low energy way to keep pèople comfortably hot.

But the dust fuel, obtained from partial burning of Oak-trees, was very expensive.

At the time, we had a glue factory energized by a large steam boiler.

I made a special High Temperature reverberation furnace joined to the boiler by a short insulated duct.

In this furnace, we burned at high temperatures, not Oak.wood but dryed olive cores (An useless agricultural residue).

The boiler worked at a high efficiency and the result from the furnace was a high quality charcoal powder.

I bragged that we had the only Factory in the World where the fuel had a negative value. The factory made more money with the spent fuel than wiith the produced glue.

That is; Its value was much higher after using it in an industrial boiler.

But these were exceptional times.

It is strange that the system gets revived. BTW, The charcoal producing precombustion can be made at high temperatures using my reverberating furnace

Chorete

India has coal but no petroleum. To save money on diesel GE tried adding pulverized coal and injecting the slurry into their locomotive engines.

They never got it to really work. An ex GE engineer said they tried 20 additives to keep it in suspension but the coal always kept separating out.

The coal-slurry mixture seemed to work at steam power plants back during the '70s, probably because the larger fuel lines.

It would be interesting to try charcoal dust.

Bret Cahill

Would it be more efficient to create methane (natural gas) from biomass in place, and compress it or pipe it where needed? How difficult would it be to use such fuel in farm machinery? Farm co-ops might benefit from this, as well as communities with large amounts of sewage. Long ago this was used to light towns with "town gas."

A lot of stuff that'll burn in gasoline engines like carbon monoxide, methane, methanol, acetone, etc. is created making charcoal.

In WWII Europeans put stills in their cars and ran off the gases coming from wood chips.

It might be difficult to handle a two phase mixture of gases, however. They don't have the heat content as CNG. A lot of them might need to be consumed to generate grid power as well as charcoal.

Bret Cahill