Fuel Pellets

This item surprised me also. It demonstrates that waste fiber can now be converted into fuel pellets conveniently and then transported into the global market. This also demonstrates and validates my original thesis that the primary solution to our ecological problems will entail the cooperation of agriculture and industry.

This is actually great news. It means that farm grade machinery already exists that is capable of pelletizing waste wood and the like. Even if markets do not immediately exist, the ability to clean up woodlots and produce fuel pellets is a vast improvement in terms of handling than any other option.

The pellets can be stored for long periods very easily and reloaded and moved very easily, likely with equipment already in use.

This article brings home the shape of our own future. We see here the strategies that are only been talked about here been actually implemented with real success. This will remove the doubts that delay the necessary regulatory changes. Read it slowly. When he calls it a miracle, it is because a regulatory framework was imagined and implemented successfully. This is economic engineering at its best.

The eastern forestlands continue to be semi managed forests with a poor economic model. Suppose we could produce an annual crop of fuel pellets while we groomed the forest properly. Suppose we got a decent price from industry for those pellets. If a combination of market price and perhaps a subsidy to smooth out local variations were put in place, we could create a feed stock from the Eastern forests alone that is massive and possibly sufficient to satisfy most of our fuel needs.

The real dividend would come from the full development of a rich mature forest ecosystem that could supply the full range of forest products. We can restore and surpass the partly managed woodlands of the original inhabitants.

Since a real market has already been created, we have a pricing mechanism in place to support early work. This is a great gift and can change the whole economics of forest management by the local small owner. My original model woodlot needed some form of long term government partnership in order to create economic stability. This is a very positive development that may still be insufficient but will certainly allow a better partnership with natural feedback and control.

It will be necessary to price coal and wood chips at the same BTU point through regulation to make this work since the coal industry will be always in a position to dump into any market that suits them. It is here that a carbon tax is suddenly attractive, provided it is phased in at ten percent of the final tax rate per year and the revenue is used to support expansion of the fuel pellet industry.

http://www.mlive.com/businessreview/tricities/index.ssf/2008/09/alt_energy_swedens_economic_mi.html

Alt energy: Sweden's economic miracle and why it matters to Michigan

by Chris Schilling

Thursday September 18, 2008, 6:32 AM

Last week, I mentioned that I recently took a Swedish alternative energy tour organized by the U.S. Department of Labor.

I was struck that the Swedish countryside looks so much like central Michigan: green farm fields, windbreak trees in the distance. The farms were generally smaller, and it seemed they all had a windmill or two. I saw field after field of yellow flowering canola, a crop that is shipped to nearby biodiesel refineries. I saw field after field of native grass and salix (a native shrub), crops that make heating fuel pellets or methane biogas (an automotive fuel).

It seemed many people had jobs related to some aspect of farm-based renewable energy.

Is this a glimpse of rural Michigan's future?

For the past decade, high energy prices across the board have spawned remarkable economic growth across Sweden. And it turns out the miracle is spreading across Europe and the Former Soviet Republics.

It's characterized by a strong linkage that is forming among three existing industries: agriculture, forestry, and renewable energy production. Bottom line: these industries are joining forces to create a host of new food production and renewable energy operations large and small. As a rule, the supply chains for these industries are becoming more local. In turn, local jobs are created.

As food and fuel prices continue rising, I believe Michigan will eventually follow suit. We have a big advantage with our talented people and our abundant biomass resources.

How will the workforce change? Based on what I learned in Sweden, I predict farming will no longer be viewed as a smelly, impoverished business. I noticed little difference in the work qualifications of today's Swedish farmer, today's Swedish MBA, and today's Swedish chemical engineer / computer programmer.

The boundaries between these jobs are becoming blurred. And it's spreading across Europe. Since when did farming get sexy?

It happened before the King of Sweden decided to visit Flint to kick off the new biogas plant. Invented by clever Swedish engineers, it makes cheap auto fuel from all manner of biomass, including grass clippings, food waste, and manure. The affordable technology was born out of the same economic miracle described above. It's mimicked after the clean, odorless plants that have been perfected in small and large towns throughout Sweden.

Since when is a sewage treatment machine sexy? It became so when Swedish engineers figured out how to cheaply feed the machine native grass instead of manure, native grass that local farmers grow in big quantities. Did I mention Swedish gasoline filling stations have pumps that sell this locally-made biogas?

It's a symbol of national pride. So is the new generation of computer-savvy auto shop students, who can make any gasoline car switch from gasoline to biogas and back to gasoline again; drivers simply flip a switch on the dashboard. Sweden is bringing us the auto shop of the future.

The King's visit is part of a larger, concerted effort to market on a global basis a tremendous variety of new, renewable energy technologies recently born in Sweden. Car fuel from grass clippings is just one example. Others are slow, powerful, and quiet wind turbines, smart geothermal, cheaper biodiesel, and more.

Again, it's part of the Swedish economic miracle: high energy prices stimulating a strong linkage between the industries of agriculture, forestry, and renewable energy production over the past several years.

Did I mention the miracle is spreading throughout Europe and the Russian Federation? American inventors have some catching up to do.

Let's have a deeper look at one of these new industries coming our way: pellet fuel that burns cleanly in furnaces large and small, pellets made from biomass wastes such as grass clippings or sawdust. Last week I mentioned that this industry is growing rapidly across Europe. However, it now faces a big problem: in many locations, demand is outstripping the supply of locally available biomass. Sales of furnaces that consume this biomass are rapidly increasing. Across Europe, many new companies, small and large, are making these furnaces.

It turns out Canada is exporting massive quantities of pellet fuel to meet the fuel supply challenge in Europe. The Wood Pellet Association of Canada reports that, in 2006, Canada exported over 600,000 tons of wood pellets to Europe, eighty percent of which was shipped from the Canadian west coast. It is remarkable this business is profitable, given the rising cost of diesel fuel needed to ship this material from Vancouver through the Panama Canal to northern Europe. I would think a shorter trip from Saginaw might make more sense.

At its core, this Canadian industry utilizes a fleet of massive, ocean-going ships that are originally designed to haul grain. This industry uses much of the same infrastructure already in place for international grain markets: truck- and rail-transport equipment, ocean tanker terminals, and so on.

The rapid growth of this export industry is covered in a report by B. Verkerk, M. Junginber, and A. Faaij of Utrecht University; and E. Ackom and P. McFarlane of the University of British Columbia. Their report, "Current and Future Trade Opportunities for Woody Biomass End-Products From British Columbia, Canada," was presented at the 2008 World Bioenergy Conference that I attended in Sweden.

The authors report that sawmill residues are mainly used as feedstocks for pellet fuel in British Columbia. However, the availability of this material is becoming limited. As in many countries, the forest products industry is becoming more efficient, making less waste from wood cutting, and incorporating more residues into fiberboard. As a result, more and more Canadian companies are investigating alternative feedstocks to satisfy the European pellet fuel market. Prime candidates are native grasses and roadside trimmings of grass, shrubs, and trees.

The authors claim British Columbian pellet fuel production could cover a whopping 67 percent of the European Union's anticipated imported pellet demand (60.9 gigajoules) by the year 2020. However, cost reductions throughout the supply chain and increases in market prices are needed to expand trade. I think it is safe to conclude that market prices will increase as long as oil prices and shipping costs continue to rise.

It seems to me, Michigan can benefit from this growing industry. We have plenty of wood waste, plenty of roadside trimmings, and we can grow native grasses. We have deep water ports closer to Europe than Vancouver. Our shipping costs will be more competitive.

Make no mistake. I'm not talking about clear-cutting Michigan. And I'm not talking about reckless crop cultivation that destroys land. I can point you to an abundance of scientific literature that teaches best practices in grass and tree cultivation, best practices that prevent erosion, preserve wildlife, and conserve soil fertility for future generations. It is exactly these best practices that are producing a miracle of economic growth throughout many rural areas of Europe.

It will be essential that local schools and colleges teach these best practices; weed science is a hot college degree these days.

And just as in Sweden, we'll need regulatory agencies to protect against reckless land use as this new industry unfolds.

For more information on this exciting industry, have a look at the Wood Pellet Association of Canada, the Swedish Bioenergy Association, the (US) Pellet Fuels Institute (www.pelletheat.org), and the magazine, Bioenergy International.

Lignin Breakthrough

I had given up on any early success in the conversion of wood chips into fuel several months ago. Mother Nature had not designed wood for easy disassembly for obvious reasons. The best promise though was coming from the use of enzymes to break down cellulose. And we have seen some promise there.

The other portion of the wood stock was the lignins. As far as I could see, conversion was not even been tried because of its chemistry. This was altogether an unsatisfactory situation with apparently limited promise of any early resolution.

This article announces an important breakthrough in the processing of the lignin.

Again this is all in its infancy, but it appears to be to be tailor made for the efficient processing of the wood chip feedstock. If one step can separate the cellulose first and then a second stage can be used to process and separate the lignin component, what is left is a much smaller brew of complex chemicals amenable to further processing.

I have not sourced a chemical breakdown of wood, but suffice to say that these two components are it for wood. We can now envisage processing that easily consumes the feed stock while producing a modest amount of other chemicals.

Cellulose can be expected to produce ethanol after been broken down into glucose by enzymes. And this article shows us that we can get diesel and gasoline from the lignin. This is about as good as it gets in terms of likely outcomes..

This article shows us that we have unexpectantly solved the lignin problem. So far, we are still struggling with the cellulose problem, but it just became much easier.

This also reinstates my early drive to bring proper forest management under agricultural control. They are the natural operators if it were possible to create a viable economic model.

I had thought that conversion of wood to biochar a viable option, except it does not compete with corn culture for that application. Corn biochar will naturally powder, while wood will need to be ground or the soil will soon become almost gravelly in texture.

Now we have an economic model that supports solid forest husbandry. An annual clean up of waste wood into the chipper will now produce tons of immediately salable fiber that can be taken to the local fuel producer. There should be enough coin in this process to keep everyone very happy, particularly if the price for the wood is similar to that of straw.

Initially there is a lot of labour involved but that will soon be managed and improved on.

This type of program will not need long term financial support although that should still be part of any long term forest management scheme. Only government is able to operate on century long horizons.


Chemical breakthrough turns sawdust into biofuel

* 17:08 18 July 2008
* NewScientist.com news service
* Colin Barras

A wider of range of plant material could be turned into biofuels thanks to a breakthrough that converts plant molecules called lignin into liquid hydrocarbons.

The reaction reliably and efficiently turns the lignin in waste products such as sawdust into the chemical precursors of ethanol and biodiesel.

In recent years, the twin threats of global warming and oil shortages have led to growth in the production of biofuels for the transportation sector.

But as the human digestive system will attest, breaking down complex plant molecules such as cellulose and lignin is a tricky business.

Food crisis

The biofuels industry has relied instead on starchy food crops such as corn and sugar cane to provide the feedstock for their reactions. But that puts the industry into direct competition with hungry humans, and food prices have risen as a result.

A second generation of biofuels could relieve the pressure on crop production by breaking down larger plant molecules – hundreds of millions of dollars are currently being poured into research to lower the cost of producing ethanol from cellulose.

But cellulose makes up only about a third of all plant matter. Lignin, an essential component of wood, is another important component and converting this to liquid transport fuel would increase yields.

However, lignin is a complex molecule and, with current methods, breaks down in an unpredictable way into a wide range of products, only some of which can be used in biofuels.

Balancing act

Now Yuan Kou at Peking University in Beijing, China, and his team have come up with a lignin breakdown reaction that more reliably produces the alkanes and alcohols needed for biofuels.

Lignin contains carbon-oxygen-carbon bonds that link together smaller hydrocarbon chains. Breaking down those C-O-C bonds is key to unlocking the smaller hydrocarbons, which can then be further treated to produce alkanes and alcohol.

But there are also C-O-C bonds within the smaller hydrocarbons which are essential for alcohol production and must be kept intact. Breaking down the C-O-C bonds between chains, while leaving those within chains undamaged, is a difficult balancing act.In hot water

Kou's team used their previous experience with selectively breaking C-O-C bonds to identify hot, pressurised water – known as near-critical water – as the best solvent for the reaction.Water becomes near-critical when heated to around 250 to 300 °C and held at high pressures of around 7000 kilopascals. Under those conditions, and in the presence of a suitable catalyst and hydrogen gas, it reliably breaks down lignin into smaller hydrocarbon units called monomers and dimers.

The researchers experimented with different catalysts and organic additives to optimise the reaction. They found that the combination of a platinum-carbon catalyst and organic additives such as dioxane delivered high yields of both monomers and dimers.

Under ideal conditions, it is theoretically possible to produce monomers and dimers in yields of 44 to 56 weight % (wt%) and 28-29 wt% respectively. Weight % is the fraction of the solution's weight that is composed of either monomers or dimers.

Easy extraction

Impressively, the researchers' practical yields approached those theoretical ideals. They produced monomer yields of 45 wt% and dimer yields of 12 wt% – about twice what has previously been achieved.
Removing the hydrocarbons from the water solvent after the reaction is easy – simply by cooling the water again, the oily hydrocarbons automatically separate from the water.

It is then relatively simple to convert those monomers and dimers into useful products, says Ning Yan at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland, and a member of Kou's team.

That results in three components: alkanes with eight or nine carbon atoms suitable for gasoline, alkanes with 12 to 18 carbons for use in diesel, and methanol.

Efficient process

"For the first time, we have produced alkanes, the main component of gasoline and diesel, from lignin, and biomethanol becomes available," says Yan.

"A large percentage of the starting material is converted into useful products," he adds. "But this work is still in its infancy so other aspects related to economic issue will be evaluated in the near future."

John Ralph at the University of Wisconsin in Madison thinks the work is exciting. He points out that there have been previous attempts to convert lignin into liquid fuels. "That said, the yields of monomers [in the new reaction] are striking," he says.

Richard Murphy at Imperial College London, UK, is also impressed with Kou's work. "I believe that approaches such as this will go a considerable way to help us extract valuable molecules including fuels from all components of lignocellulose," he says.

Green Vatican Shows the Way

It is perhaps fitting that the one organization on earth that is mandated to think in terms of centuries should actually get this issue right. I launched this blog to focus attention on the need to integrate good forest management into our agricultural economy. That was before I discovered biochar and its capacity to manufacture carbon rich soils that will persist for centuries with moderately sensible practice.

The real message here is further into the article. The simple purchase of all the globe’s vulnerable forest lands is completely within the scope and financial ability of even a country such as Canada. There is no need to either play the USA political game or to suck up to other allies and their internal politics. Canada, for one and a lot of other countries such as China has a lot of good reason to do just that.

Such land does not even need to be turned into parks, nor should they be. It is enough to ensure that catastrophic clearing in prevented as a matter of course and restoration practiced by any lessees. Direct forest ownership leads rather quickly to forest maintenance and restoration as a matter of good practice and sustainable husbandry.

In fact, it quickly quells discontent from the massive CO2 emissions of these countries. I just never understood that the purchase price was currently so reasonable.

As I have posted before in the very beginning, forest management in the developed world in particular needs to be partnered with funding agencies able to operate and finance over a century or more. That means a government agency in the early going, but likely a very happy private industry a couple of decades down the road as the quality of the long term finance paper improves. The economic life cycle of woodlands prohibits a mere human from being able to carry the responsibility forward.

So I want to cheer the Pope loudly for his not so symbolic action, and I want my readers to get the word out that their country can buy all the threatened rainforests in the world by themselves and that they damn well should. This is not so much a great leap forward as putting a line in the sand that keeps us from continuing to go backwards.

How the pope is saving Earth

Benedict's Hungarian forest plan will cut emissions and power Vatican City.

By Glenn Hurowitz

July 14, 2008

Pope Benedict XVI, like many world leaders, has spoken passionately about the urgent need to protect the planet from climate catastrophe. But unlike his fellow heads of state, the pontiff has actually created a carbon-neutral economy -- and done it cheaply and quickly.

The Vatican announced last year that it would restore 37 acres of forest in Hungary that had been cut down in the Middle Ages. Those growing trees will absorb enough carbon dioxide to offset all the pollution from the fossil fuels used to power Vatican City.

The reason this "Vatican model" succeeded while other countries struggle to achieve even modest emissions reductions is because of the unique qualities of forest conservation and restoration. Compared with other methods of reducing climate-changing pollution, such as switching to wind, solar or geothermal power, it's fast and relatively cheap. That's true on a small, Vatican City scale as well as a massive American scale.

It's particularly true when it comes to the carbon-rich tropical forests that act as the Earth's lungs, breathing in carbon dioxide and breathing out oxygen. These forests are being logged and burned at a terrifying pace by big agricultural, biofuels and mining companies. Between August 2007 and April 2008, for instance, big ag and its cohorts destroyed a whopping 2,300 square miles of the Amazon, releasing 300 million tons of CO2 into the air in the process. Compounding that disaster, the treeless land generally loses its capacity to absorb the greenhouse gases produced by the world's fossil fuel consumption.

The good news is that stopping that destruction -- by purchasing the land outright or paying landowners and others to conserve it -- is a bargain. Because of the low cost of tropical land, protecting these forests can cost as little as $1 per ton of CO2 saved and almost never more than $10 a ton. (For comparison, cleanups based primarily on energy now trade for more than $40 a ton on European markets.)

As a result, the World Bank and others estimate that global deforestation could be completely halted for the relatively tiny sum of $11 billion to $15 billion a year. That one move alone would eliminate 20% of total global warming pollution.

Despite the urgency of the problem -- and the ease of the solution -- forest conservation has, until recently, been the forgotten stepchild of climate legislation. For many years, policymakers (particularly in Europe) were nervous that polluters would abuse the system by using low-cost overseas forest conservation projects as an excuse to avoid cleaning up industrial pollution at home.

But forest conservation needn't be an end. It should be a beginning. Again, we can look to the Vatican as a model. The pope didn't stop with his Hungarian forest. This year, he's planning to unveil an array of solar panels atop the huge Paul VI Audience Hall, which will provide enough electricity to light, heat and cool the building year-round. The pontiff is using forest conservation the right way: not as a method to avoid a clean-energy revolution but as a way to achieve immediate gains while other progress is underway, including the greening of Catholic Church operations around the world.

That should be the model for the United States (and other industrialized nations too). Although comprehensive climate change legislation is considered dead for this year, it's likely that Congress and President Bush could cobble together a consensus to authorize the $11 billion necessary to halt worldwide deforestation for 2009. That would keep 6 billion tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere -- equivalent to the United States' entire annual emissions -- and save 30 million acres of forest from destruction for the foreseeable future. It would send a clear signal to American voters (and the world) that although the details still have to be figured out, the federal government can deliver real action on climate change.

This isn't as pie-in-the-sky as it might seem. Bush already has approved several significant tropical forest conservation projects in Guatemala, Costa Rica, Panama and elsewhere. With this deal, Bush could legitimately claim that he'd done far more, far sooner, for far less money to stop global warming than either the Kyoto Protocol or the failed congressional climate bill would have.

By following the pope's example, even Bush might qualify for a bit of eco-sainthood.



Glenn Hurowitz writes about the environment at Grist.org. He is the author of the book "Fear and Courage in the Democratic Party."

European Forest Recovery

First, a merry Christmas to all. the season is upon us.

I picked up an article this weekend on the subject of European forests. It appears, that without a lot of fanfare and certainly no publicity, that Europe has adopted a policy of financing the retirement of farmland back into forest. By its nature, it is taking out marginal lands. In other words, it is economically driven.

I also get the sense that it is generational. It naturally recognizes that the best time to accomplish this is upon the retirement of the owner operator rather than his displacement.

This has been in place for some time and the effect is already been seen. The disappearance of borders throughout Europe has sped this effect throughout. It is telling that a farmer in Poland can report half his daughter's income working cleaning floors in London is his farm's best source of income.

People are making up their minds a lot faster than when I was growing up when most of my fellow classmates still looked forward to a life on the family farm(1950's).

This on top of similar news out of China, and I suspect even India shortly, means that the modern world is quietly doing the right thing in terms of land use. It is not quick,nor should it be. But we can make a prediction from this. Since it is a largely low cost process and it has little if any impact on production, we can expect that the restoration of natural forests will be maximized over the next one hundred years.

In these lands, the issue of ownership is not nearly the problem, since the land units are generally small and well within the capacity of the owner operator to maximize efficiency.

This is not quite true in North America, were traditional land ownership sizing was already far too large for one family to get the most of. This has been supplanted by the easy assemblage of larger farms and fields to grow certain mono cultures.

It goes without saying that if you are operating a one thousand acre field, you have little time and resources left over to do much about the couple of hundred acres of associated semi waste land. The point that I am making is that the transition to large industrial farms has left a lot of opportunity on the table and has made it harder to do a managed conversion to forestland were warranted. It still will be done, but it will be a little more costly and will require political will.

What we can take comfort from is this global outbreak of common sense when it comes to land management. It is a long way from perfect and we are still a long way from been proactive, but the easy steps are well under way and they are driven by economic common sense.

Perhaps governments can wake up and actually get a little ahead of the curve for once. Good policy is obvious for once.

Chinese Revolution

As should be understood by those who have worked through my posts, the CO2 climate driver hypothesis is very likely untenable. Simple and obviously normal decade and century long fluctuations in the temperature of the ocean surface is the prime climatic driver. And this is exactly what El Nino and La Nino is all about.

In our current geographic configuration, the Antarctic has become our principal heat sink and principal control reservoir. It is a very large cold tank. Most of the incoming solar energy is actually absorbed by the oceans and then redistributed very slowly through the various currents.

The atmosphere is principally influenced and conditioned by these ocean temperatures long before any sojourn over land. It absorbs its share of solar energy, particularly over land and then re-emits that energy as heat which can also be absorbed by the moisture in the atmosphere. The point is is that the ocean is the heat sink for the atmosphere also. This is all very obvious but seems to get forgotten in the heat of this debate.

If the atmosphere ever truly got a little too hot, the surplus energy will get dumped back into space as certainly happens over the deserts. After all where does all that warm desert air go at night?

Curiously, building great forests in the desert will actually collect more solar energy on Earth than at present while actually moderating and humidifying that desert air.

All this leaves the CO2 problem as a pollution management problem which can not be ignored but not as a very convincing driver of climatic change. Left to itself, its impact will be a more robust growth of plant material.

Those ocean current fluctuations are too large and too compelling to ignore. They are real heat engines comparable only to the impact of a hurricane which strips surface heat from an ocean and moves it a few hundreds of miles onto the adjacent continent.

I read a very encouraging bit of news today. It appears that the Chinese have successfully implemented a forest management system throughout China that seems to be partially self financing and self sustaining. They are actually going to show us how to do it. The press coverage makes it out to be a great success, but in light of the general tenor of all the previous news that I have ever seen from China about the historic despoliation of the forests I am happy to take this one at face value. After all this was always one fix that simple government policy could easily implement, and they had the manpower to do it.

Core to the program is the removal of marginal lands from cultivation and the building of forest barriers on the edge of the deserts, particularly west of Beijing. That is actually the most difficult part of all. Any sensitive observer saw that the lands needed this form of enlightened policy and it is wonderful to see it happen. This will make it easier to establish the same sort of practice elsewhere.

This will be the true Chinese revolution.