Join Open Intelligence on Amplify
I think, therefore I Amplify.

Amplify whatever
makes you think...

Open Intelligence | My Amplog

Only what you need to know
« Amplog Home   Search results for charcoal

About this Amplog

EACH CATEGORY BELOW CONTAINS KEY CLIPS ON THE SUBJECT GOING BACK MORE THAN 1 YEAR.
+Join!

Contributors to this Amplog

Open Intelligence
simon eaton
Conrad Taylor
Bob Bater
Robert Sprigge

Categories

Wood gas vehicles: firewood in the fuel tank

Open Intelligence says:

Charcoal provides almost twice the milage and is a lot lighter than wood. Do not ignore tried and tested ‘low tech’ solutions which have been proved to work.

Amplify’d from energybulletin.net
Woodmobile joost conijn
Wood gas car source generator jahrbuch
“You can go around the world with a saw and an axe”, as John Dutch puts it.
Despite its industrial appearance, a wood gas car scores rather well from an ecological viewpoint when compared to other alternative fuels. Wood gasification is slightly more effiicient than wood burning, as only 25 percent of the energy content of the fuel is lost. The energy consumption of a woodmobile is around 1.5 times higher than the energy consumption of a similar car powered by gasoline
If the energy required to mine, transport and refine oil is also taken into account, however, then wood gas is at least as efficient as gasoline. And, of course, wood is a renewable fuel. Gasoline is not.
Wood gasification is a process whereby organic material is converted into a combustible gas under the influence of heat
The greatest advantage of producer gas vehicles is that an accessible and renewable fuel can be used directly without any previous treatment. Read more at energybulletin.net
 
Share:  Recommend it    4 responses
Tags:    ,  ,  ,  ,  
Posted by Open Intelligence  20 days ago

Hubble bubble means forest trouble #climate #deforestation #COP15

Amplify’d from www.atimes.com
With his family, he decided a few years ago to abandon tobacco-growing after three years of severe drought caused productivity to plummet. To deal with the family’s deteriorating financial situation, Amer started working in the production of charcoal from the oak trees of the nearby al-Shoaira forest.
The charcoal fetches a good price because of demand for use in nargiles, the hubble-bubble tobacco pipe popular in cafes across the country. But the uncontrolled harvesting of wood is
endangering the country’s forests.
It is thought that hundreds of Syrians work in the production of charcoal today, especially in the heavily wooded northern coastal areas of Tartous and Latakia. The numbers have increased because of the recent rise in unemployment and inflation, observers say. Some people with other jobs produce charcoal in their spare time to raise cash because their salaries are insufficient.
Those working in the production of charcoal say they make on average US$400 a month.
Read more at www.atimes.com
 

Open Intelligence says:

No Commentary

Share:  Recommend it    Comment
Tags:    ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  
Posted by Open Intelligence  7 months ago

‘Biochar’ goes industrial with giant microwaves to lock carbon in charcoal

Amplify’d from www.guardian.co.uk

Climate expert claims to have developed cleanest way of fixing CO2 in ‘biochar’ for burial on an industrial scale

Burning Charcoal

Burying charcoal produced from microwaved wood could take billions of tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere every year. Photograph: Rex Features

Giant microwave ovens that can “cook” wood into charcoal could become our best tool in the fight against global warming, according to a leading British climate scientist.

Chris Turney, a professor of geography at the University of Exeter, said that by burying the charcoal produced from microwaved wood, the carbon dioxide absorbed by a tree as it grows can remain safely locked away for thousands of years. The technique could take out billions of tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere every year.

Fast-growing trees such as pine could be “farmed” to act specifically as carbon traps — microwaved, buried and replaced with a fresh crop to do the same thing again.

Read more at www.guardian.co.uk
 

simon eaton says:

No Commentary

Share:  Recommend it    Comment
Posted by simon eaton  7 months ago

The myth of efficiency

Amplify’d from energybulletin.net
Along with freedom and progress, efficiency rounds out the triad of America’s most treasured ideals.

But what makes efficiency? Is it clever management? The “productivity” of human resources? Economies of scale? Centralization? Better information and computer systems? The competition of markets? Business people give credit to these innovations, and all of these changes may contribute incrementally to the cheapness of our food, but these are just icing on the cake. The real underpinning of what we think of as efficiency is cheap energy - especially cheap oil.

Small farms are actually more productive and efficient than large farms. They produce more per acre. However, while fuel is inexpensive, small farms cannot achieve the massive economies of scale enabled by the replacement of people with gigantic tractors and chemicals.
Replacing man (and horse) with machines may seem efficient, but it is not the efficiency of nature, which uses every particle of matter and energy and creates no waste.Read more at energybulletin.net
 

Open Intelligence says:

Nature works by parallel processing making tiny seeds into huge vegetables at a rate of return in the hundreds and thousands. In a woodland, this kind of simultaneous multiple productive streams can be simulated e.g. burning charcoal, at the same time as making Yurt poles, at the same time as growing timber.

Share:  Recommend it    Comment
Tags:    ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  
Posted by Open Intelligence  8 months ago

Woodchips with everything. It’s the Atkins plan of the low-carbon world

Amplify’d from www.guardian.co.uk

Goodall is even more naive. He believes we can maintain the profusion of animals and plants in the rainforests he hopes to gut by planting a mixture of fast-growing species, rather than a monoculture. As the Amazon ecologist Philip Fearnside has shown, a mixture does “not substantially change the impact of very large-scale plantations from the standpoint of biodiversity”.

As Almuth Ernsting and Rachel Smolker of Biofuelwatch point out, many of the claims made for biochar don’t stand up. In some cases charcoal in the soil improves plant growth, in others it suppresses it. Just burying carbon bears little relation to the farming techniques that created terras pretas. Nor is there any guarantee that most of the buried carbon will stay in the soil. In some cases charcoal stimulates bacterial growth, causing carbon emissions from soils to rise. As for reducing deforestation, a stove that burns only part of the fuel is likely to increase, not decrease, demand for wood.Read more at www.guardian.co.uk
 

Open Intelligence says:

Monbiot does not consider localised (even garden) coppicing, yielding both heat — in making the charcoal - the “biochar” for cooking or soil enhancement at the same time.

Share:  Recommend it    Comment
Tags:    ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  
Posted by Open Intelligence  10 months ago

James Lovelock on Biochar: let the Earth remove CO2 for us

Amplify’d from www.guardian.co.uk
What we have to do is turn a portion of all the waste of agriculture into charcoal and bury it. Consider grain like wheat or rice; most of the plant mass is in the stems, stalks and roots and we only eat the seeds. So instead of just ploughing in the stalks or turning them into cardboard, make it into charcoal and bury it or sink it in the ocean. We don’t need plantations or crops planted for biochar, what we need is a charcoal maker on every farm so the farmer can turn his waste into carbon. Charcoal making might even work instead of landfill for waste paper and plastic.
Incidentally, in making charcoal this way, there is a by-product of biofuel that the farmer can sell. If we are to make this idea work it is vital that it pays for itself and requires no subsidy. Subsidies almost always breed scams
No one would invest in plantations to make charcoal without a subsidy, but if we can show the farmers they can turn their waste to profit they will do it freely and help us and Gaia too.Read more at www.guardian.co.uk
 

Open Intelligence says:

Both parties seem to have forgotten about sustainable coppicing in mixed broadleaf woodland.

Share:  Recommend it    Comment
Tags:    ,  ,  ,  ,  
Posted by Open Intelligence  10 months ago

‘Biochar’ goes industrial with giant microwaves to lock carbon in charcoal

Amplify’d from www.guardian.co.uk
Turney has built a 5m-long prototype of his microwave, which produces a tonne of CO2 for $65. He plans to launch his company, Carbonscape, in the UK this month to build the next generation of the machine
Chris Turney, a professor of geography at the University of Exeter, said that by burying the charcoal produced from microwaved wood, the carbon dioxide absorbed by a tree as it grows can remain safely locked away for thousands of years.
He is not alone in touting the benefits of this type of charcoal, known as biochar or biocharcoal. The Gaia theorist, James Lovelock, and Nasa’s James Hansen have both been outspoken about the potential benefits of biochar,
Hansen calculated that producing biocharcoal by current methods of burning waste organic materials could reduce global carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere by 8ppm (parts per million) over the next 50 years.
Turney said biochar was the closest thing scientists had to a silver-bullet solution to climate change.
Burning Charcoal
See more at www.guardian.co.uk
 

Open Intelligence says:

Microwave uses electricity. Burning charcoal in the traditional way produces heat energy which could be used to produce electricity.

Share:  Recommend it    Comment
Tags:    ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  
Posted by Open Intelligence  11 months ago

One last chance to save mankind — Interview with James Lovelock

Amplify’d from www.newscientist.com

What about work to sequester carbon dioxide?

That is a waste of time. It’s a crazy idea - and dangerous. It would take so long and use so much energy that it will not be done.

Do you still advocate nuclear power as a solution to climate change?

It is a way for the UK to solve its energy problems, but it is not a global cure for climate change. It is too late for emissions reduction measures.

So are we doomed?

There is one way we could save ourselves and that is through the massive burial of charcoal. It would mean farmers turning all their agricultural waste - which contains carbon that the plants have spent the summer sequestering - into non-biodegradable charcoal, and burying it in the soil. Then you can start shifting really hefty quantities of carbon out of the system and pull the CO2 down quite fast.

Read more at www.newscientist.com
 

Open Intelligence says:

Being a charcoal burner myself, I must heartily agree! And you can heat water and space while burning the charcoal, too.

Share:  Recommend it    Comment
Tags:    ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  
Posted by Open Intelligence  1 year ago

Ancient skills ‘could reverse global warming’

Open Intelligence says:

Also known as Terra Preta.

Amplify’d from www.independent.co.uk
Trials are to be started in Sussex and Belize early in the new year, backed with venture capital from Silicon Valley, on techniques to take carbon from the atmosphere and bury it in the soil, where it should act as a powerful fertiliser.
aim to grow trees and plants to absorb CO2 and then trap the carbon by turning the resulting biomass into “biochar”, a fine-grained form of charcoal that can be buried in the soil, keeping it safely locked up for thousands of years.
if just two and a half per cent of the world’s productive land were used to produce biochar, carbon dioxide could be returned to pre-Industrial Revolution levels by 2050.
The pre-Columbian Indians used biochar to make the poor soils of the rainforest – which otherwise quickly become exhausted – productive for harvest after harvest.
The new enterprise will start with wood grown in Suffolk and with prunings from the Belize cacao trees that supply Green & Black’s chocolate.Read more at www.independent.co.uk
 
Share:  Recommend it    Comment
Tags:    ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  ,  
Posted by Open Intelligence  1 year ago