Marissa, a newly minted 2canologist at Shelburne Farms, has just lit about 4 pounds of softwood pellets in the TLUD [Top Lit Up Draft] stove she has just built. In about 75 minutes, this will turn into about 1 pound of biochar suitable for experimenting with.

For more on 2canology at Shelburne Farms, please see this item in inFARMation.

For illustrated documentation and directions for becoming a certified 2canologist yourself — it is easy, fun and very entertaining — you will find Dr. Hugh McLaughlin’s instructions here. 2canology is Dr. McLaughlin’s ingenious and creative gift to the world of biochar.

Biochar is now entering the mainstream media — as evidenced by this front page story in USA Today.

Photos courtesy of Marshall Webb of Shelburne Farms.

In 2009, we are looking at climate disruption most likely driven at least in part by overshooting the capacity of the planet’s sinks for wastes such as carbon dioxide. I expect that these will be just a few of the changes we will face in Vermont from not learning about limits back in 1840.

1. Significant population growth in northern Vermont as people move away from deteriorating conditions to the south. Perhaps as much as 10X by the end of the century;

2. As one forest type dies out to be replaced by another, succession driven by new pests, viruses, fungi, shorter & warmer winters, etc., we will have a great many dead trees to deal with. We have only to look to Colorado’s acre upon acre of dead trees to see what can happen.

3. Just as deer ticks have moved north as the weather has moderated, and as my poison ivy patch is more vigorous than ever, I next expect to see poisonous snakes to also expand north into newly favorable territory.

So what sorts of things might we thing about doing to try to mitigate what we mostly likely can no longer avoid?

First the positive:

Ben Luce at Lyndon State College suggests that if we grow photovoltaics, PV, and wind generating capacity by 20% per year for the next 25 years, we should end up with more power then than we have today, but with a great deal less CO2 being released into the atmosphere. Prof. Luce also sees that some biomass will be required to back up both the PV and the Wind.

Now we have to also work reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere to get it back below 350 parts per million. Possible ideas:

1. A significant fee on any new construction that uses fossil energy for home heating and other space conditioning applications;

2. A significant reward for space conditioning solutions that are provably Carbon Negative.

3. Create incentives to build near zero net energy houses. These typically have at least 12 inches of insulation in their walls, triple glazed windows, etc. Germany is a leading developer of such housing. Such houses can be heated with approximately 1 ton of biomass, where as our current housing stock will require 7 – 10 tons of biofuel per year. We can not afford to spend multiple tons when 1 ton would do.

4. A ban on using biofuels in any device that does not extract at least 75% of the value of the biomass. We simply can not afford to put finite and valuable biomass into devices that first off throw away 2/3s of the value of the fuel as ‘waste’ heat. IE: No more biomass for internal combustion engines. No more biomass for centralized power plants. Both of these technologies are negative legacies of the 20th century.

Biomass fired Combined Heat and Power technology should be able to reach 90%, or better, efficiencies. We can afford nothing less. Further, we should require this technology to be carbon negative as well. Personally, I have been a big fan of Micro-CHP at every point of demand, scaled to the demand.

5. A shift towards a long carbon cycle with carbon sequestration in the soils of the forests and the fields. Perhaps a minimum of a 100 year half life for the carbon. I prefer 500 years.

6. Promote David Yarrow’s concept of a premium for Nutrient Dense, Carbon Negative, Foods and extend it to a generalized carbon negative philosophy of living?

How carbon negative are you?

7. Ban the construction of new atomic and coal fired power plants. If we did a complete end-to-end, full life cycle cost analysis of nuclear and coal power, including de-commissioning, 10s of thousands of years of spent fuel storage, health costs imposed by low level radiation emissions and heavy metals injected into atmosphere etc, then the pricing signal we would get for these power sources would likely we so high we could not afford either of them.

I am sure there are many more ideas that are even better.

With today’s materials, tools, and crafts we can build houses in Vermont, and the rest of the North East, that do not need central heating systems. Should we encourage the building of such housing? There is no longer any excuse for building a house with a furnace. Such ‘traditional’ housing is simply a relic of the fossil fuel age we must move beyond.

Near Zero Net Energy Houses [NZNE] have 12 inch thick walls, triple glazed windows, no furnaces, and can be heated with just 1 ton of biomass fuel, or 100 gallons of oil, in a simple, small stove. Such a house is under construction today in Townsend, MA. Expected cost of construction for this project is about $120 per sq ft for a 1,200 sq ft house with 3 bedrooms, 2 baths, full basement, etc. These homes can, of course, be given any local ‘vernacular’ look desired. The designer, Ben Nickerson, is a friend from Woodstock, Vermont.

To generalize, we should adopt a goal of a NZNE society as a whole — across the entire board — if we are truly serious about mitigating the risks of global disruption. This would, of course, lead us away from centralized power plants to distributed Combined Heat and Power, photovoltaics, wind power, and all of the other forms of renewable power. This broadly distributed peer-to-peer power would naturally lead to the “Electranet” with its 7×24 real time market for power.

The next question is: Just what sort of biomass might we want to use to heat these NZNE buildings? Is our only choice 1/4 wood pellets made in large, centralized, factories that cost on the order of 14 million dollars each, take about two years to complete, and require significant amounts of fossil fuel for drying the raw materials as well as for transportation of both raw materials and finished products?

I have recently received from BHS Energy in PA some samples of 1.5 inch diameter by 3/4 inch switchgrass “tablets”  made with a prototype mini-plugger they have in development.

This emerging small scale tablet technology, supported by some USDA funds, looks very promising indeed as a lower cost and distributed way to “densify” biomass for use as a heating fuel – once the systems for burning tablets reach commercialization. These new tablet capable stoves and boilers are expected to have initial and limited availability in late 2008 and early 2009.

In the Community Supported Energy model I am sketching out below, a local biomass tablet production facility would serve a radius of about 5 miles and draw its fiber from about 238 acres of local grass lands. This 238 acres of biomass fiber production represents just 0.47% of the land mass in an area with a 5 mile radius.

In my spreadsheet, I assume a base rate of 650 pounds of tablets produced per hour = 2.6 tons per day or 13 tons per week  - on a one shift per week schedule. No drying required, just hammer milling through a 3/4 inch screen.  Raw material can have a moisture range of 8% – 14%. At an average of 650 tons per year per machine [50 weeks X 13 tons per week], over 7 years, the amortized equipment cost per ton is just $10.99 [assumes $50K all in cost of production facility]. Labor, 1.5 FTEs at $15 per hour, would be $46.15 per ton + $75 per ton for energy hay + fuel cost to manufacture etc. and we are looking at something like a $202.24 per ton delivered price to a CSE member living within 5 miles of the production center.    These energy tablets have an energy value of about 15.58 MM BTUs per ton or 113 gallons of oil energy equivalent.  Thus $202.24 per ton is equal to heating oil at $1.79 per gallon.  Note:  The energy used to produce the tablets is estimated to be about 3% of their gross energy content.

Obviously, these numbers are very rough, back of the envelope, estimates.  If production per hour goes up and the cost of feed stock goes down, free paper waste from the transfer station?, the picture gets even better. If other costs increase, the opposite is true. Now here is a key point.  A conventional industrial pellet plant will cost on the order of $14 million dollars.  It will operate three shifts per day and produce on the order of 100K tons of pellet fuel per year.   Or we could use the $14 million to set up about 280 Mini Slugger tablet production centers @ an estimated $50K each.

280 distributed tablet production centers could produce, in aggregate, on the order of 182,000 tons of tablets per year!  This would be enough to heat about  20.5 thousand conventional VT homes, each burning 9 tons of grass tablets per year. Of course, it would be better to heat Near Zero Net Energy homes requiring just one ton of tablets per year.  This would allow us to heat 9X more homes for the same effort and stress on our limited fiber shed.

Importantly, the distributed tablet solution will create the BTU equivalent of 172,900 tons of wood pellets, a 73% increase in yield over that of a single, large, centralized pellet plant.  This distributed scenario is thus a more robust, more resilient and more secure energy strategy.  It also substantially reduces the fossil fuel used in transportation of both raw and finished materials.  This strategy thus appears to deliver greater economic benefits to a greater number of communities.

Of course, the missing link at the moment is heating systems, stoves and boilers, that can safely burn grass in the tablet form for domestic heating.  My hope is that a firm in MA will be able to commercialize their work in this area in 2009.

All of this suggests we need to be flexible enough to consider all of: green wood chips, pellets and tablets when we consider biomass heating fuels.  There is a role for all three fuel types — three sources of silver buck shot. Taken together, the net value should be greater than the sum of the pieces.

I am currently working to pull everything together for a first demo of proto-types this this Fall.

KWB-micro-CHP, originally uploaded by Jock Gill.

Wood pellet powered Stirling engine micro-CHP is now a commercial product in Europe! This very strategic product is made by KWB of Austria, who currently refuse to sell into the North American market.

Prof. Jerry Cherney of Cornell University learned of this product last week and shared it with me today at Power Shift. This commercially available wood pellet fired micro-CHP system validates the subtitle of my 2006 Grass Energy Working Paper.

For more, see: http://www.stirlingpowermodule.com/

“The combination of the SPM module with a KWB pellet heating system ensures that wood, a renewable and domestic energy source, is optimally used for the production of heat AND energy, also in single-family homes. This power station makes it possible to produce a significant part of the annual energy requirement of an average single-family home by using the energy from a pellet heating unit.”

While this product is NOT offered in the US today, it clearly proves the point and shows what we could be doing!

This is a powerful concept and would enable us to build a bioenergy powered micro-grtrid solution for Vermont! Or we could start building out Al Gore’s Electranet today.

[Photo credit: KWB web site.]

South late sun ,

Thanks for looking, Jock