Burning down trees for electricity

[Baby Grand]

There is a cycle of wood growing, consuming carbon dioxide, dying and releasing carbon dioxide - and creating soil components for the next generation of tree growth. If the net amount of trees is stable, this is a carbon neutral cycle. What comes out of the ground goes in the air and back into the ground.

Not so with coal & petroleum products that get "unsequestered" from the ground, released into the air, but don't get returned to the place they came from. Net carbon in the air just keeps going up.

Or so I tell myself as I watch the wood smoke from my chimney.

 

[jinman]

I see a lot of construction/clearing sites that chip up wood and haul it off to be made into compost or mulch. I really prefer that over seeing huge burn piles around cleared areas as we used to see. Of course, a huge dirt filled stump doesn't chip up very well and the stump piles normally get burned around here. Even so, lots of the tree masses are chipped and re-purposed. In one area near my house, several hundred acres burned due to a wild fire. It's a rural area with few homes and the oak trees were just left to stand and rot after they died. It's hard for me to drive by and see that, but there is a green layer starting to regrow under all those dead trees. I guess Mother Nature will eventually put all that dead wood to use.

 

[dmccarty]

The other problem with biomass burners is air quality. Some of the plants burning waste wood have gotten into trouble with the EPA because of air pollution.

Later,
Dan

 

[dave1949]

From a forestry perspective, it is better to leave "slash" lay on the ground. The current thinking is at least 1/3 of what would be considered waste wood from tree tops and limbs should be left in the woods, not in piles though, just leave it spread out.

This feeds the soil and provides shelter for natural regeneration of seedlings. That advice is for New England, of course.

 

[KennyG]

In some cases, burning is better for "global warming" issue. If you have a situation where the biomass is buried it will tend to decompose in the absence of oxygen, resulting in methane instead of CO2 and methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. That's why putting wood, grass, etc into landfills is a really bad idea.

 

[Bob77064]

Maybe it would be more cost efficient to pay people to bring the dead trees to the electric generating plant. Especially if the plant was in an area with lots of trees.

 

[2LaneCruzer]

You're only about 150 years late there bud....

View attachment 303133

Interesting. Looks like that old smoothie has be retrofitted with some solid rubber pads to enable it to run on pavement. Reminded me of something I hadn't thought of for years...when I was a kid back in the 40's and 50's, I recall road signs in rural areas that read as follows: "Tractors with lugs prohibited". Didn't mean much then, but I can imagine what one of those old tractors with steel wheels and big lugs would do to a blacktop road.

 

[newbury]

Search for wood-gas generator.
I'm on a different computer and can't find it immediately, but there's a LOT of info on it and there are some small units to generate about 10KW of power.

That despised organisation, FEMA, published http://www.woodgas.net/files/FEMA_emergency_gassifer.pdf

There's
http://www.gvepinternational.org/si...eb_final.pdf?gclid=COaE9sO5uLUCFcGqPAodyXUAGg

One of the "problems" was that with the abundance of cheap oil it wasn't worth it to chip wood for gas and electricity.

 

[Larry Caldwell]

Local mills have gotten so efficient they no longer make enough wood waste to run the boilers. They chip trash trees and haul in fuel to run the mill. They use the boilers to run generators, steam kilns, steam presses for chip board, fuel pellets, resin stills and use waste heat to dry the fuel before it goes into the boiler. They ship logs in one end and the only thing that comes out the other is the sweet smell of new milled lumber. Bark gets ground up and shipped to landscape suppliers, and the ash gets spread back on the timber land.

During the Enron energy crisis in California, they were firing up mothballed mills just to run the generators.

Co-generation is very profitable if you have some use for the waste heat, like heating buildings.

 

[turnkey4099]

Originally Posted by dirtyoldman

You're only about 150 years late there bud....

Attachment 303133

Interesting. Looks like that old smoothie has be retrofitted with some solid rubber pads to enable it to run on pavement. Reminded me of something I hadn't thought of for years...when I was a kid back in the 40's and 50's, I recall road signs in rural areas that read as follows: "Tractors with lugs prohibited". Didn't mean much then, but I can imagine what one of those old tractors with steel wheels and big lugs would do to a blacktop road.

I must be missing something. I saw that in the

original post and was wondering. What does that have to do with generating electricity other than it _could_ be used to drive a generator. It certainly doesn't show any sign of an on-board generator.

Harry K