As you say, Pete, charcoal manufacture has been around for millennia.
And there's a great range of techniques employed these days. There's
sites in Africa making char using small-scale methods that would have
been recognisable to "colliers" operating in British forests centuries
ago. One approach a few years ago to a State Forestry body in Australia
wanted guaranteed access to 250ktonnes/annum for a modern charcoal
plant. As well as the USFS reference you provided, the UN FAO has a
number of useful references for charcoal manufacture at smaller scales.
Depending on factors such as manufacturing technique charcoals can have
a range of material characteristics suiting them to various uses such as
fuel - well-made char burns very clean and is still a popular fuel for
artisan blacksmiths as well as cooking and so on - or as a filtering agent.
If to be used as a soil conditioner, biochars ideally have a number of
characteristics with consequent effects on suitable biochar
manufacturing techniques. If woody biomass is the feedstock there are
claims that the tree species may have an effect on the quality of the
biochar. And there are claims that biochars may benefit with respect to
soil conditioning utility from various amendments added before the
biochar manufacturing process such as clay, manures and so on. Which
would, I suspect, have an influence on the gasification process if the
char was to be made in a gasifier :)
I'm confident I can make charcoal from waste woody biomass using a
vernacular method at small-scale. I'm exploring what quality of biochar
I could make at smaller scale using vernacular methods. And I'm very
interested in where the technology is for integrating biochar
manufacture with gasification with a view to using the producer gas for
energy generation (thermal and electricity) and what this integration
means with respect to biochar characteristics and quality of producer
gas. Hence my questions over the last few months on various aspects of
this technology stack from feedstock preparation onwards
Regards
David
On 15/03/2014 5:00 AM, [email protected] wrote:
Message: 5
Date: Fri, 14 Mar 2014 12:09:08 -0500
From: "Pete& Sheri"<[email protected]>
To:<[email protected]>, "'Discussion of biomass pyrolysis and
gasification'" <[email protected]>,
"'Discussion
of biomass cooking stoves'"<[email protected]>
Subject: [Gasification] Charcoal making techniques
Message-ID:<000701cf3fa8$1f55dc50$5e0194f0$@net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
I see a lot of posts about making charcoal lately. I just thought I?d point
out that charcoal making has been around for quite a while, for those who might
be new to the process.
Here?s a US Forestry department document on the subject in some detail:
<http://www.fpl.fs.fed.us/documnts/fplr/fplr2213.pdf>
www.fpl.fs.fed.us/documnts/fplr/fplr2213.pdf
Pete Stanaitis
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