Re: [Biofuel] de-polymerizing cellulose not practical at this point

[Brian Rodgers]

Alright! Very cool. Thank  you for the fantastic feedback Kjell. Brian, sorry for chipping (!) in late but your romantic views calls for a comment.   Turn the trees into pellets?  This is a nice idea but give me more info to work with please.  I can take the bait if you like. Wow, do I sound romantic in my views? My wife says we tend toward the socialist side when it comes to living and working conditions.  As Sweden is a socialist country I do have some knowledge living in such a country. And it is not all heaven if you thought that. Neither living in the US, I believe. Actually, I have no idea what it is like in any other country. Unfortunate for me that I have traveled much less than I hoped for in my life. My only excursions have been to Mexico on vacations where I camped and explored as much of the countryside on foot as time permitted. I wish I could get out of the US and see Europe, Asia and Africa. In the meantime I am very fortunate that this group offers us (Ugly(!)) Americans a view of life outside of our mostly self-absorbed lives. For this I thank you all. What I know about pellets is that the forest is harvested using big nasty looking machines. I have seen these forest eaters in action just a few miles from here. The harvesters use hydraulic snips or power saws while a large hydraulic mechanical arm lift the tree up and over the cab into a chipper. Ok, now that I drew that mental image for you I hope we can see that pellet creation is for big business not the kind of fodder I have seen tossed back and forth at the Biofuels group. First of all, our forest processors – nasty looking or not - don’t chip up perfectly good timber, that’s a real waste! The timber is sawed and planed and only the sawdust and the shavings are dried and pressed to pellets.  My God, timber to chips… The machine you talk about was probably a small dedicated chipper for branches and small trees that had to be cleaned away for the planting machine to do his job – the new forest. And pressing pellets can be done small scale in your own back yard. Snoop around on the net for pellet presses/machines! Sorry about the confusion. I didn’t mean to say that forest harvesters are chewing up good timber. We love our timber in New Mexico. My house is built from trees harvested on our property. I will look at home brew pellets. I was re-reading what I wrote here the other day and realized that I sounded pretty closed minded to the creation of pellets from waste wood. This a great idea, I will look at it again. It is my understanding that the bark from our type of pine tree must be removed before processing the sawdust into pellets. Do you know where I might find more info on pellets? It is our opinion people need to process the excess wood by hand thus creating jobs while getting more people outdoors and in the forest. A couple of days worth of good old fashioned hard work and one man with a power saw and a pickup truck can process enough firewood fuel to heat his home for a few months. Then I can tell you about my first (and only) view of a REAL socialistic system, the Communist Republic of the Sovjet Union. When coming in through the western part of that huge country there where very large potato fields, the horizon was the limit of some fields and the harvesting time was imminent. On one endlessly large field was about five people gathered to harvest, no machines in sight, no mechanical devices, the only thing they had to work with was a pick and then a bucket to collect the potatoes in. Is such a “good old fashioned hard work”-socialistic system something to go for in your opinion? I really do not feel stongly about using Americans for manual labor. I don't have a lot of respect for most of the Americans I have met as far as ever being productive hard workers. This idea must be where you got the notion that I am romantic about anything, lol. Again thanks for the feedback. Sincerely, Brian Rodgers P.S. I am rebuilding my website www.outfitnm.com If I can get some more work done in transfering my old Frontpage website to the new Macromedia CSS site you will begin to find interesting info about the forests of the southwest. As of yesterday I had only info concerning my PC service business there.  I got a few things done yesterday and maybe more today.

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