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Bio-coal: A renewable and producible fuel from lignocellulosic biomass
- semi-extrinsic 7y agoBio-coal is possible, and may be economically viable (especially when produced from biowaste as here), but only makes sense for an extremely brief transition window. So these guys need to go from the current five-gram scale to the estimated one million tonnes per day scale in less than five years. Maybe in China that's possible.
- elric 7y agoI'm not sure whether I agree with your timeline. Coal will likely remain useful for a variety of industrial processes, like steel production.
- neltnerb 7y agoBut that's because of it's usefulness as a chemical precursor (i.e. carbon) rather than because it was worth it to burn for straight heating energy in a power plant. I am pretty much okay with (or at least resigned to) petrochemicals/coal being used for the next 30 years to produce chemicals and other products. Burning it is a waste of a very useful chemical feedstock. The lowest value (and by extension least valuable) thing you can do with a material like coal is burn it. If it's used because of it's properties other than it's fuel content of course it's value is higher and economics will make it more compelling. These are entirely different markets in size and kind.
- MertsA 7y agoEven with steel there's direct reduced iron and electrolytic steel production is already on the horizon.
- neltnerb 7y agoIs this what you're talking about? https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/cleaner-cheaper-way-to-make-steel-uses-electricity/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/cleaner-cheaper-w... Looks like another great way to use excess renewable power when the grid is underutilized but the wind is blowing and the sun is shining. Build enough of these to matter and you could probably get away with a fair bit less battery storage as long as you still have natural gas peakers.
- jacobush 7y agohttp://www.hybritdevelopment.com http://www.hybritdevelopment.com "If successful, HYBRIT means that together we can reduce Sweden’s CO2 emissions by 10% and Finland’s by 7%."
- neltnerb 7y agoNice! I saw a great presentation from some researchers that figured out how to make electrolytic Boron as well using molten oxide electrolysis. http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/64889/34540560-MIT.pdf;sequence=2 http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/64889/34540560... (warning, link to a thesis)
- pjc50 7y agoBefore coal, there was charcoal; the process works perfectly well with it. We switched because the energy-ROI and logistics are much easier than the manual charcoal production process was.
- elric 7y agoYour comment made me realize that I didn't fully understand the difference between coal and charcoal. I assumed they were functionally equivalent, just of a different origin. But apparently charcoal is just carbon, and coal contains all kinds of other substances which can be used to create rubber and other synthetics. As a result burning charcoal is much cleaner (though making it isn't), and coal has uses far beyond merely setting it on fire.
- jacknews 7y agoJust charcoal the biowaste, and bury it. Much less tech needed, and it actually reduces co2 not just circulates it. Profit is via increased crop yields.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- zozbot234 7y agoBio-coal is charcoal, just produced by different means than charring the biomass. Typically, bio-coal production manages to convert more of the carbon into coal, while less of it is burned.
- samatman 7y agoFairly sure GP's point was that sequestering the resulting carbon is a better move than burning it back into the atmosphere. Meeting CO2 goals requires removing carbon actively from the atmosphere, and drastically reducing our use of CO2-producing energy sources. Burning bio-coal does neither of these things; burying it accomplishes the former, and is at least not working against the latter.
- barry-cotter 7y ago> Meeting CO2 goals requires removing carbon actively from the atmosphere, and drastically reducing our use of CO2-producing energy sources. No. Either one could be sufficient alone, just as you can lose weight either by exercising more or eating less alone, though generally the combination is better. For removing carbon from the atmosphere we could dump olivine sand into coastal waters where it would sequester carbon as it was weathered. If we want to reduce our use of CO2 producing energy sources without massive declines in quality of life or vast environmental damage there’s only one choice, nuclear.
- jointpdf 7y ago>If we want to reduce our use of CO2 producing energy sources without massive declines in quality of life or vast environmental damage there’s only one choice, nuclear. Unsubstantiated claim detected. Solar, wind, hydroelectric, and geothermal are all cheaper than nuclear (and even coal) for new generation capacity. That includes capital, operation and maintenance, and transmission costs. See tables starting on page 8 for the numbers (https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation.pdf https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation....).
- swiley 7y agoIt’s important to note that (although I only skimmed it and am not a professional chemist) they only talk about hydrocarbons up to 6 carbons long (hexane) where coal/coke from the ground can have much longer hydrocarbons (what paraffin wax is made of.) This is because the hexane comes (probably) from sugar molecules (or monomers in things like cellulose) which are chains or rings of six carbon atoms (with other stuff bonded to them.) It’s possible to lengthen the hydrocarbon chains but it’s very expensive. EDIT: yeah after reading more carefully they’re doing what I thought (side note: the dick bar was pretty annoying, at least it goes away when you scroll down but coming back when scroll up and covering the text I was trying to read is just dumb.) They’re drying/dehydrating the biomass by heating it without oxygen and then distilling off the VOCs. Then they take the remaining gunk, crush it up, sift it, and dry it.
- Pfhreak 7y agoI've been learning about biochar/syngas production from biomass. It turns out there's methods that range from 'burn slash in a giant metal bucket' to large industrial gassifiers for producing biochar. There's a part of me that wants to exit the tech sector, buy a couple hundred acres nearby, live modestly, and tinker with biochar production/sequestration.
- swiley 7y agoDrying plants in the sun is a surprisingly effective way to heat a building, I grew up with it. The problems are: burning wet stuff is terrible (surface wetness isn’t bad, it’s the moisture inside the biomass that causes problems.) Secondly you can’t just straight up burn it because you’ll get a lot of heat that you don’t need so you’ll usually burn it in cycles and you’ll get a lot of soot at the beginning and end of the cycles so you need to either wash the exhaust or make sure you don’t have nearby neighbors downwind (in places like this that means within a quarter mile or so.)
- Pfhreak 7y agoFor sure, excess heat is something that is interesting to explore. Oregon Kilns are basically just a big metal bucket that burns top down and produces biochar, but burns off the syngas. https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/detail/or/newsroom/stories/?cid=nrcseprd1499267 https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/detail/or/newsroom... Other systems try to capture the syngas/bio oil to generate electricity or capture the heat for heating/other uses.
- darksaints 7y agoOne of the more interesting approaches toward wet biomass utilization is Hydrothermal Liquifaction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrothermal_liquefaction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrothermal_liquefaction Basically you dump the wet biomass in a high pressure medium temperature reactor, and the water content of the biomass becomes supercritical, then acts as a solvent to break down the biomass into an usable crude oil (fairly similar to fossil crude, but with more oxygen content). This crude can be used directly as a fuel, or it can be upgraded (hydrogenated) into graded fuels like gasoline.
- agumonkey 7y agowhile we're on cellulose, anyone heard of homelab-scale methods to produce cellulasic enzymes ?
- hootbootscoot 7y agoclimate crisis, hello... fossil fuels are a dangerous anachronism to be gotten over, hello... (renewable or not, net carbon emitter and HOW...)
- acvny 7y agoAlthough biofuels prevent consumption of fossil fuels, they still contribute to CO2 emmissions. Another side effect is that the land resources used to grow those biofuels are consumed. Also they lead to food prices increase and shortages. The good thing is when the raw material is made of leftovers from normal food oriented farming. However when farmers replace corn cultures with rapeseed that's bad.
- oconnore 7y agoThat’s exactly why newer biofuels rely on sources that don’t require high investment crop land — e.g. switchgrass and other “weeds”. You could also plant switchgrass in highway medians, for example.
- doctor_eval 7y agoThis doesn’t make sense to me. First, the CO2 released from burning farmed plants does not increase the CO2 in the atmosphere. It’s a cycle. Second, climate change will also cause food prices to increase. There is going to be an equilibrium point at which the increased cost of food due to land use changes outweighs the benefit of reduced emissions, but that point is almost certainly not zero. In theory, farmers could replace corn with rapeseed at no cost to consumers if doing so mitigates climate change, the main problem is that the net cost of doing so needs to be averaged out over decades :(
- revax 7y agoOn your first point, that is not quite correct. While the CO2 released will eventualy come back, it takes an enormous amount of time. It may be a cycle but what matters is the CO2 concentration in the athmosphere or more precisely the radiative forcing at a given time.
- vpribish 7y agoit takes one growing season for the rice, wheat, sugar cane, and soybean they were using.
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- jabl 7y agoThis seems like a nice improvement for processing biomass waste - less of the input energy wasted compared to traditional charcoal production. - retains coal advantages compared to less processed biomass, namely higher heating value meaning cheaper to transport, and easier to store (doesn't rot if it sits in a pile outside) However, as a side note I'm very sceptical wrt bioenergy. Using biomass waste for energy is fine if there's no other use for it, but growing biomass for energy production really isn't. Next to climate breakdown, the most serious ecological problem we're facing is biodiversity loss, largely due to conversion of wilderness to farmland. We really need to get past the idea that every hectare of land has to be put to "productive" use. Much better to produce our energy with wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, and nuclear, and rewild nature to the extent possible.
- reaperducer 7y agoWhile I don't disagree with you, it's worth noting that wind, solar, and hydro all have major impacts on nature. As long as everything goes to plan, nuclear seems to have a limited impact on nature. I'm not sure about geothermal. I wonder how the potential energy output of a solar farm compares to a biomass farm.
- adrianN 7y agoCovering about 2% or so of the world with solar panels and wind turbines would provide for our energy needs. Biomass would require a lot more land.
- layoric 7y agoMain problems with bio fuels of any kind is hard to avoid bad actors finding externalities and just burning non waste, and it’s still burning. I non market or very mature regulation would be needed to make it a good alternative but even then the scale of energy is very small last I read. I’m still skeptical on nuclear due to its low risk but severe outcomes when it goes wrong, build time and end of life issues/economics (solar might have end of life issues too, less so wind it seems). Solar and wind imo still winning on real world offsetting thanks to their relative simplicity for rolling out at scale. A hydrogen based economy would also marry nicely with excess production at peak times.