think about 1000 lateral cords of waste wood

[SPDRMNKY]

holy batman...hadn't been back to that thread in a while, so...

what about methanation?

or taking some of these abandoned mines we got, filling em' tight full of biomass, pre-laying a pipe to avoid drilling costs, and caving em' in with dynamite? it only takes what...20-30 years to press that stuff into crude?

for the DIY type, break out the post hole diggers...6 ft down...install one of those hyd rams from a car lift above ground pressing down...and cover the whole thing with a swimming pool (there was something about being under an ocean at one time I think?)

 

[KiwiBro]

I wonder how much energy is left after powering the chipper, but:
Power Pallets: Integrated Gasifier-Genset Skids « Gasifier Experimenters Kit

 

[KiwiBro]

Hmmmm, the biochar option perhaps:

BEKbiochar / BEK Testing, Instrumentation, and Automation

 

[SPDRMNKY]

the missus and I were talking about how to make an industrial cow stomach the other night...she's a chemical engineer...ran into a hassle with valving...always seems to be a materials problem.

i've always been fascinated with these things

combustion to heat steam to turn a turbine to produce electron flux has always bothered me...unless you're using the steam for heat

guess I should look into stirling engines...

 

[KiwiBro]

Coming from NZ where there are more cows than people (I'm guessing, don't know for sure) and this lil' country accounts for something ridiculous like 1/4 of the world's wholesale dairy trade, I can assure you that robo-cow has been a fencepost conversation staple for generations. There are rumours, unconfirmed though, of various cow cockies having cooked up something in their sheds over the years, but nothing ever seems to surface to substantiate such claims.

The BioChar concept I linked to above seems to have been shelved.

The thing I notice is transporting chips off site starts to erode any potential many ideas for their use may have.
It's a pity the wood can't be used somehow on-site. All those forestry machines drink diesel so if there was a mobile wood chips to methane to diesel plant they could park off the side of the landing somewhere and feed it their off-casts that would pump out enough deisel to help them stretch out their calls for a tanker, then perhaps that's plausible?

If there was some way of using the wood to create something needed without needing any transport costs of either the raw materials or the final product - i.e. produce it where both the input material and final product demand is, then it may not have to be a mega efficient process because it saves on freight costs.

Alternatively, produce something on-site that's actually worth enough to justify the costs of transporting the product and generally bringing such product to market.

 

[Whitespider]

:yoyo: :welcome: :yoyo:

opcorn:

 

[KiwiBro]

guess I should look into stirling engines...

there seems to be a certain element of 'back to the future' thinking happening where we break out of the easy/convenient nature of flicking a switch or filling a tank with petrol and start to see whether there are ways to refine old but very clever ideas and make them worthwhile for today's needs. There are quite a few Whispergen domestic heat/electricity using around using the stirling engine. I don't know much about them or how well they work.

As a storage of energy, it's hard to beat oil-based products. They are so energy dense and mobile that it makes commercial sense to buy them in when needed. But if there was some whay of using the energy within the wood waste, on-site, and somehow keep it's cost on par or below what's available in the market nowadays then it'll be great to find it.

I did some reading a while back about compressed air as the energy storage medium and it had merit but never seemed to get enough momentum. Or we could look at that waste wood in a different light and say it's simply storing energy, but only if there was a decent way of extracting that energy and putting it to use.

 

[KiwiBro]

:yoyo: :welcome: :yoyo:

opcorn:

Add something to the discussion or piss off.

 

[Whitespider]

Ok… how ‘bout this…
Push all the wood in a big pile and burn it.
Then collect all the ash and pack it in barrels.
Soak the ash in water to make lye water.
Evaporate the water from the lye so you get dry lye.
Put the dry lye in packets similar to desiccant packs.
Drop the lye packets in your ethanol blended fuel so it can absorb the water.
Problem solved!!


opcorn: Pass the salt and hand me a Budweiser.

 

[KiwiBro]

Ok… how ‘bout this…
Push all the wood in a big pile and burn it.
Then collect all the ash and pack it in barrels.
Soak the ash in water to make lye water.
Evaporate the water from the lye so you get dry lye.
Put the dry lye in packets similar to desiccant packs.
Drop the lye packets in your ethanol blended fuel so it can absorb the water.
Problem solved!!


opcorn: Pass the salt and hand me a Budweiser.

Given that lye is used in the production of methamphetamine (sp?) , we could be onto a money spinner here down under with our crazy 'P' drug culture. At least until the cops turn up.

 

[SPDRMNKY]

that gasifier skid looks promising...upfront cost will come down eventually, and you'll probably be able to buy aftermarket parts to soup up your gasifier someday (that thing would be sweet with a set of lake pipes)

yeah...I think the robo-cow is a materials problem right now...hard to beat mother nature's design...among other things we don't have a man-made sphincter valve that'll hold pressure and last a decent while. I have a hunch that if you mixed shredded greens with brewery effluent you'd be a lot closer to the needed slurry...but it's just a hunch.

I like the on-site concept...something the forestry guys leased from you, with a maintenance agreement, that saved em' just enough on tanking diesel in

stirling engines were always finiky when we messed with em' in college...worth re-looking though

you can't beat oil's convenience and power right now (except nukes, but that only happens in sci-fi)...sometimes I think we're going down the wrong path trying to make new fuels that act like oil, but ya' gotta start somewhere. and, there are many other things that need refined before we can stop using oil, but get similar performance...like gears. A few months ago I saw something where magnetic gears had been prototyped (I think on the nano scale)...no friction from the teeth meshing!

on the power-gen side there are some smart concepts being tossed around...like storing excess energy kinetically to help even out the highs and lows of demand, instead of always adjusting your gens.

 

[KiwiBro]

on the power-gen side there are some smart concepts being tossed around...like storing excess energy kinetically to help even out the highs and lows of demand, instead of always adjusting your gens.

Big flywheels as back-up generators using near frictionless magnetic bearings are deployed commercially already, I just can't find the link to the article I read a year or so ago. It was a USA power company or massive data server company that needed an on-site, near -instant back-up in an uninterrupted power supply chain. Heaps of power, albeit of limited duration, but enough to bridge a gap before back-up generators kicked in. another flywheel application is the KERS system employed on the F1 race cars. Flywheels spinning in a vacuum at super high speeds.

Perhaps if instead of producing electricity perhaps that GEK unit could store its methane and the forestry equipment engines converted to run off methane instead?

 

[zogger]

Big flywheels as back-up generators using near frictionless magnetic bearings are deployed commercially already, I just can't find the link to the article I read a year or so ago. It was a USA power company or massive data server company that needed an on-site, near -instant back-up in an uninterrupted power supply chain. Heaps of power, albeit of limited duration, but enough to bridge a gap before back-up generators kicked in. another flywheel application is the KERS system employed on the F1 race cars. Flywheels spinning in a vacuum at super high speeds.

Perhaps if instead of producing electricity perhaps that GEK unit could store its methane and the forestry equipment engines converted to run off methane instead?

the methane produced from methane digesters (I made a small one before) comes with some chemical baggage, it is corrosive.

The best mass quantity use of scrap wood I ever saw first hand was a wood factory I worked at that had a conventional largish GE steam turbine for electricity. As the phrase goes, "bog standard" some off the shelf unit that instead of burning coal or natgas, was using wood. Nothing all that exotic to it, just the feedstock was a "problem" there until some smart guy at the plant came up with a way to profit from it. It powered the factory, provided all the juice for everything from machinery to lights and heat, etc, and they sold surplus electricity into the grid and made thousands a month extra. They burnt scraps from the production floor, albeit good quality hardwood scraps.

Electricity is way cheaper to transport than truck or trainloads of scrap wood. Build a plant as close to your wastewood as possible, while still having access to a piece of your grid where it can be fed in. Then just cash the check...

Or, make an economic force multiplier and use the electricity for some other productive use.