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From Turbines and Straw, Danish Self-Sufficiency
chrnb writes "Last year, the Danish island of Samso (pronounced SOME-suh) completed a 10-year experiment to see whether it could become energy self-sufficient. The islanders, with generous amounts of aid from mainland Denmark, busily set themselves about erecting wind turbines, installing nonpolluting straw-burning furnaces to heat their sturdy brick houses and placing panels here and there to create electricity from the island's sparse sunshine. By their own accounts, the islanders have met the goal. For energy experts, the crucial measurement is called energy density, or the amount of energy produced per unit of area, and it should be at least 2 watts for every square meter, or 11 square feet. 'We just met it,' said Soren Hermansen, the director of the local Energy Academy, a former farmer who is a consultant to the islanders."
"Nonpolluting straw-burning furnaces"? Given that wood-burning has a pollution profile as bad as coal burning (the exact amount of different pollutants in each case varying depending on pollution controls), I seriously doubt straw burning is all that clean.
You don't have to interpret this as "straw-burning furnaces, which by nature of burning straw, are clean...". What you could just as easily interpret is "straw-burning furances, which have been modified to burn cleanly..".
Wood can burn horribly, generating thick black plumes of carcinogenic smoke, for example, when it's too wet. However, under controlled environments, wood can burn *very* cleanly. Take a look at a pellet stove - basically a wood burning stove, with the wood pellets providing a much more optimal burning profile that produces dramatically fewer pollutants.
On the flip side, you can purposefully create smoke, and use it as fuel in an internal combustion engine. This is called "wood gassification" and it's being used right now to drive a truck across the country. The Mother Earth News (magazine) built one more than 25 years ago back when the memory of the 70's oil embargo was still fresh and painful.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Another name for it is "water gas" and it was originally used in homes before natural gas became common. Sources of Carbon are heated with water to very high temperatures ~1000C and react to form CO,CO2,H2,CH4... The CO and hydrocarbons in the gas can be removed and further reacted with water to produce a mix of CO2 and H2. Or the mixture can be reacted in the presence of an Ni/Al catalyst to form hydrocarbons and water. New Zealand produces approximately 1/3 of its petrol in this fashion. The advantage to synthesizing "water gas" or "syn gas" as it is often called is that you can convert many Carbon sources to liquid or gaseous fuel and can strip out the more toxic chemicals normally found in coal and other Carbon sources. As conventional sources of petrol become less available, this process may account for a significant quantity of the liquid and gaseous fuel consumed in the world.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Indeed indeed. Too few people realize that you can *make* hydrocarbons, from almost any source of carbon. Just burn it with insufficient oxygen for full combustion, and you have your (pick a name): "wood gas", "town gas", "water gas", "coal gas", etc. The challenges are when you want to use biomass for that source of carbon. You can just mine or pump up fossil carbon sources. Growing fuel crops takes a ton of land (habitat), water, leads to runoff, and all sorts of other problems.
But, if we end up in that situation, we may not have a choice. Humans are not going to choose a stone-age existence. If it comes down to either doing actions with major adverse environmental consequences or tossing society in the gutter, humans can be counted on to choose the former every time.
"I'm GOD! Yapple Dapple!" -- God, "Jesus Christ Supercop"
...is Capitol Hill's very own coal-fired power plant,. Sucker is still belching tons of pollutants without producing a watt of electricity, thank you very much Senators Byrd & McConnell. And take a look at all the other coal-fired plants in the US. Awesome. Obviously, doing nothing is a bad idea. Even if what the Danes have pulled off isn't truly 100% clean & pollution free, could it possibly be as bad as what we have now?
Odi profanum vulgus et arceo