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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
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
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
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.
It's got what plants need!
But does it have electrolytes?
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.
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.