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Carbon-Negative Energy Machines Catching On
An anonymous reader writes "All Power Labs in Berkeley, California has produced and sold over 500 machines that take in dense biomass and put out energy. What makes the machines special is that instead of releasing carbon back into the atmosphere, it's concentrated into a lump charcoal that makes excellent fertilizer. The energy is produced cheaply, too; many of the machines went to poor nations who normally pay much more per kilowatt. '[T]he PowerPallets are still relatively simple, at least as far as their users are concerned. For one, thing Price explained, much of the machine is made with plumbing fixtures that are the same everywhere in the world. That means they're easy to repair. At the same time, while researchers at the 50 or so institutions that have bought the machines are excited by opening up the computer control system and poking around inside, a guy running a corn mill in Uganda with a PowerPallet "will never need to open that door and never will," Price said.'"
Not ALL the chemical energy of the original fuel, though.
It's a gassifier and engine/gen pair. You heat the fuel in an oxygen-poor environment (the heat comes from burning a part of the fuel itself using what little oxygen is present) which releases volatile compounds and produces carbon monoxide. This syngas is then fed into an internal combustion engine where it's burned to completion to produce power.
Not groundbreaking technology... but proven to work and be a viable means of getting power, especially if you happen to have a lot of biowaste you can throw in there.
Sure, you CAN burn the charcoal leftovers. Might be useful as a cooking fuel, for example. Even if you did that, you're still only carbon neutral. It can also be used to improve soil quality to help grow food or cash crops... which seems like a better use IMHO.
=Smidge=
Charcoal appears to be a very useful soil addition.
For further reading look into terra preta and its modern incarnation biochar.
Its not pure carbon, you get all the useful trace elements and minerals as well trapped in the carbon matrix and the ash.
interesting point:
but it is indeed so that in the agriculture you burn plants on a field to fertilize the new crops, if you want to reduce your fertilizer-costs.
However this technique is used to increase the nitrogen, and other things level in the field.
many energy sources in the developing world can cost 50 or 60 cents per kilowatt, a PowerPallet can do it for a dime
Which does not really add up with costing "less than $2 a watt", unless it should have said "a lot less" in which case $2 is just misleading. I would be interested to know which is true, though. The technology seems both interesting and useful.
The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head
Slash and burn is more about clearing forest for cropland.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
$27,000 is pretty steep. If you could scale something down so you could say, dispose of household greenwaste through it and generate power to feed the grid for a few hours a week, you'd really be on to something. Though this is in a big part because I've always dreamed of having my trash go straight to an incinerator...
Not groundbreaking, but the company claims that their machine is reliable and very easy to field-repair. For a small-scale machine used in developing countries, this is crucial. Farms or small businesses in those countries sometimes receive high tech equipment from well-meaning charities, only to have then break down, at which point they find they lack the skill, parts or money to keep the equipment in good repair.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
I found the answer on the producers home page. The "less than $2 a watt" is the initial expense when investing in a plant: A 10 kW plant costs $19,000 and a 20 kW plant costs $29,000, corresponding to $1.9 or $1.45 per watt capacity (source). So, it adds up.
The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head
But, in general, it's not the carbon in ash that's a fertilizer - it's potassium.
#DeleteChrome
It's a 10kW system, and looks like it costs $27,000.
$27,000 / 10kW is $2.70 per watt, right? That's not less than $2/watt.
That was probably supposed to be 50 or 60 cents per kWh. 10 cents per kWh is not bad. You can probably even harness the heat from the unit, too.
It is carbon negative if you bury the waste charcoal.
It works. During the WWII there were around 700,000 wood gas powered automobiles in Germany, France, Sweden and Finland. As those were back then able to power buses and trucks, it's plausible to think modern designs also producing 20kW of bio power - as advertised.
Finland's eco-mobilist association has a gallery of hobbyist build wood gas mobiles, some even with designs specs and tips. Chairman on the Finland's currently most popular party, which unfortunately isn't The Pirate Party which among others has pirate bay and privacy activist Peter Sunde as a candidate in the coming EU- parliament election, has build his own wood gas automobile - " El Kamina" which by the way is build on top Chevrolet El Camino, which...
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No, I didn't just wrote that
Operational research I did for a ( very ) large Austrian farm showed that carbon intake in the form of humus can be 100-200 kg / hectare / year, in pure carbon. Adding pure carbon ( without going through the humus stage by e.g. first producing compost ) to the soil can help farmers reach that number: bacteria will fix the carbon, plants - around their own roots - will form symbiosis with the bacteria, and when at harvest time the plant or its grain is harvested, the bacteria around the root will die and be turned into humic acid. The whole humus-as-a-carbon-sink thing is, climatically, all the more interesting as the carbon remains fixed in the soil for many 10,000s of years. Humus survives ice ages and periods of global warming.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
See my comment above. Plants, indeed, can not absorb it through their roots. But the bacteria they live in symbiosis with, can. And that is of benefit to the plant ( its bacteria guests are healthier ), to the bacteria ( absorbing carbon from the soil is energy-cheaper than absorbing it from air ) and to the farmer ( the bacteria decompose into humus i.e. humic acid ) after harvest time . Win-win-win, so to say.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
No. The process creates charcoal, not ash. When this charcoal is used as a soil amendment, the carbon is fixed for approximately 10 000 years. Read more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar
Nothing about this machine is vaguely high tech or new. Linked to is a basic how to put together by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA208249
And during WW2, the were used in the US, UK, FR, and DE for were attached to vehicles to provide a fuel source.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_gas_generator#Origins
10kW is essentially the "top speed", and the kWh is the "fuel economy" or more like the miles travelled. You don't have to go at top speed, and if you're going at half speed you're only putting out 5kW, but will still get the same amount of power after 2 hours instead of 1.
The fuel consumption is also important to compute cost. For the 20kW machine, it burns 50 lbs of biomass per hour, which means 50 lbs of biomass is converted to 20kW for an hour, or 50 lbs to get 20kWh. (You can probably burn this over longer times than an hour.)
That's actually a fair amount of power, and 20kWh can power several houses for that one hour. If it's linearly scalable to smaller numbers, that would be very good since a house might only use 20kWh over an entire day. It would allow someone to run solar power during the day, and this thing at night (putting out 1kW) and during rainy days, with only a small battery farm.
But there are too many unknowns in the article to make a good guess.
Because if it's worth more a fuel I'm pretty sure what the people running these things will do and it isn't use it fertilizer for the good of the planet.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Actually, plumbing fixtures are one of the (few) exceptions: Coarse treading on plumbing is not metric in most places. Fine threading is, but coarse threading with inch-sized pipes is available basically everywhere.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
It's got what plants need!
But does it have electrolytes?
You are welcome on my lawn.
And bananas.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Since when has charcoal been something to bury instead of burn? Plants get carbon out of the air, they don't need to absorb it through their roots.
-jcr
Uh... Since the dawn of time itself? Plants eat each other's bio-nutrients in an endless cycle. The decay of carbon-rich plant matter creates fertilized soil for new plants.
This post is a good example of how disconnected humanity has become to the way nature actually works.
Better yet, outfit these places with urine-diverting toilets and combine the urine with the pure carbon charcoal, maybe mixed with the fully composted solid waste and you'll end up with not just plant crack but plant super-crack. It creates a carbon-nitrogen-phosphorus fertilizer that's just as good if not better than the most expensive commercially-produced fertilizers, for a tiny fraction of the cost. Essentially, free.
If you think I'm just making things up you'll find if you do some research that many places are already using this process both to reduce dependence on commercial fertilizers and to reduce the energy and money required to process waste. Not just on small scales or undeveloped countries either. I'm now wondering how well this gasification process can scale up.
I think you're mistaken as all powerplants are judged by this metric. Dollars per watt is the cost to add x amount of generating capacity to your grid.
Not quite. the innovations are in the control systems. that is what they have patents for. also standard gasification tech tends to convert the biomass to ash. this machine converts it into charcoal which both creates fertilizer and locks a portion of the carbon away mostly creating hydrogen and co. which are combusted into water and co2. the control over the combustion process that allows charcoal production over ash production is imporant as gasifier ash shakedown to make room for more fuel is the biggest problem keeping gasifiers from being used in diy stationary power generation. This tech they have developed dodges this problem.
Don't be silly. There are no bananas is Kazakhstan.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Once again, the journalist messes up his units. He obviously meant to say kWh, kilowatt-hours, a unit of energy, instead of just kilowatt, a unit of power.
It's not exactly fertilizer, though I'd consider that an acceptable shorthand for a popular piece. Adding charcoal to soil can both improve nutrient availability and long term soil structure. (I'm including two link,s biochar being the general concept, and terra preta being a particularly interesting historical example.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta
There is global warming and it hasn't even stopped for the past 15 years.
Yeah, no. The point is that you run it on biomass, so the whole cycle is carbon-neutral or carbon-negative:
CO2 + H2O --photosynthesis-> biomass --power-pallet-> CO2 + H2O + charcoal
Stop there, and you've got some energy out, and if you bury the charcoal, it's carbon-negative. Or use the charcoal as fuel, e.g. for cooking/heating (hopefully replacing fossil fuel currently used in those roles), and you get
CO2 + H2O --photosynthesis-> biomass --power-pallet-> CO2 + H2O + charcoal --charcoal-burning-> CO2 + H2O
Which is carbon neutral, bringing us right back where we started.
The only way you can call it "only carbon-reduced" is if you don't look at the whole cycle, or if you're actually feeding it fossil hydrocarbons instead of biomass, and not burning the coal that comes out -- and it's not clear that that would make any economic sense.
The cost of power plants are always quoted as $/W of installed capacity. Nuclear works out to be about $10/W, solar $3/W, etc.
The 10 kW system is $19,000 ($1.90/W), 20 kW system is $27,000 ($1.35/W). This is a low cost power plant.
Also, considering that the fuel should be free or very low cost since it is agricultural waste, the power produced should also be very low cost.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Here's the innovative high tech part:
"These smarts are further extended by a multi-stage gasification architecture, and an innovative “waste heat” capture and recycling system — what we call the Tower of Total Thermal Integration (Hot TOTTI). In traditional systems, hot engine exhaust and hot output wood gas have been “problems” requiring extra space and cooling components to counter. With the GEK Hot TOTTI, we’ve transformed these “wastes” into useful new inputs to the gasification process. It’s like adding a new “free” heat source to fix the old and well known thermal challenges of a gasifier."
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Time has nothing to do with grid capacity.
You can't call up your customers and tell them to turn half their lights off but let them turn them on for twice a long because you're provisioning your power output in W/h instead of watts.
Generation must be able to copy with peak demand.
The fuel will be free right up to the point there's a demand then it will go up. Turkey guts, fry oil, etc are no longer cheap or free. Hell I can't even get scrap or chipped wood like I used to from a landscaping company at the low price I was paying. They're selling all their scrap to a company making wood pellets for stoves.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty