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The Pyrolysis Combine
Wood Gas (from Wikipedia), also known as holzgas, air
gas or blue gas, is the product of thermal gasification of biomass or other carbon containing materials such
as coal in a gasifier or wood gas generator. The idea of wood gas has been
around for a long time. During WWII, many European automobiles were
powered with home built wood gas generators and it is the idea behind
"clean coal" power plants where the coal gas is extracted with
pyrolysis and then burned in a gas turbine and the cooling of the gas
turbine powers a steam turbine.
There is a very hard limit
on biomass from agriculture that can be used as fuel. In almost all
cases we should be using biomass to build soil organic content and not
trying to make fuel out of it. There are some exceptions like flax
where the straw has to be burned (because it does not bio-degrade
readily) and flax in a rotation would make sense as an "energy crop".
Corn stover and cereal straw for most situations should be left in the
field and if we are going to do anything with biomass, adding it to
"marginal" land is the most sustainable long term use for it.
If we are going to use agricultural
biomass for fuel, lowering the cost of the logistics to process the
large quantities of material should be the first step.
Agri-Therm is a Canadian
company that is working on a mobile biomass pyrolysis system mounted on
a trailer. The idea is that with low-density farm waste it is more
economical to have the pyrolysis equipment located close to the
material. The system uses a trailer mounted fluid bed pyrolysis system.
This is a very good idea, but the concept they are trying to achieve is
"harvesting energy" and the machine that they have built is equivalent
to a threshing
machine, where the material is being transported to the equipment.
Transporting the material to the harvesting equipment and the idea of
the threshing machine has long been replaced with modern self-propelled
"combined" harvesting equipment.
The Energy Harvester
The idea is to grow crops specifically for wood gas harvesting,
dessicate the standing crops with a glyphosate
type product to dry them standing and then "harvest" the wood gas with
a self-propelled harvester. The equipment can run on it's own produced
wood gas and either pressurize or cryogenically cool the wood gas which
would then be transported to a pipeline or storage facility.
There is also another possibility of CO2 storage by stopping the
pyrolysis process prior to oxidization of the carbon and grinding the
charcoal and just dropping the finely ground charcoal on the farmland.
There is supposedly some value in adding charcoal to agricultural land
and in the worst case, charcoal is neutral and not going to cause any
environmental problems with the farm land.
This page, images and other documentation on this website are
copyright Robert J.
Rohatensky, October 2006
and are published under the Design Science License.
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