Finns Focus on Forest Fuels - via Wood Alcohol

[Billhook]

This from Climate News Network looks very promising indeed. It has been awaited since the last Wood Alcohol (aka Methanol) plant at Lydbrook in the Forest of Dean's coppices got shut down by cheap North Sea Gas in the '70s.

I've put this under Climate as it's a critical component of mitigation via Carbon Recovery, but given the scale of liquid fuel potential from afforestation of high moorlands it is just as relevant to fuel security.

New technology boosts renewables

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

By Tim Radford

Finnish researchers say they have found how to produce biofuel cheaply.

LONDON, 3 August - Finnish scientists have found a way to turn dead wood into high quality biofuel for less than one euro a litre. They believe they can convert more than half the energy of raw wood - ligno-cellulosic biomass, if you prefer the technical term - into something that will drive a taxi, a tractor or a tank.

Biofuels were long ago proposed as an alternative to fossil fuels: they are not exactly carbon-free, but they exploit the carbon freshly captured by plants so the carbon dioxide returned to the atmosphere was going to get back there anyway, from compost, leaf litter, food waste or firewood.

In the years of agricultural surplus in Europe and the US, farmers embraced the idea as an alternative source of income; environmentalists cheered them on because large stands of trees, shrubs or grasses provided at least some fresh habitat for birds and insects as well as ground cover to prevent erosion; economists applauded because real estate was being used for some form of income.

One new candidate for farm-grown biomass is the black locust – Robinia pseudoacacia – which in the US Midwest grows swiftly and puts on weight three times more lustily than the next best species, and is now under test at the University of Illinois as a potential biofuel crop.

But opponents argued that land needed for crops to feed an increasingly hungry world was being employed wastefully and promoted instead the idea of biofuels made from leftovers, from straw, corn husks, wood chippings, bean stalks, food scraps and so on.

The Finnish solution - ready for commercial-scale production, says the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland - is a good compromise for Finland, a country with a big timber business with a lot of waste, a very large forested hinterland, a very cold winter and a government that has endorsed the low-carbon economy by setting a target of 20% of transport fuels from renewable energy by 2020.

The VTT scientists and engineers reckon they can use pressurised fluidised bed gasification technology to deliver commercial quantities of methanol, dimethyl ether, synthetic gasoline and some of the low-sulphur hydrocarbons known as Fischer-Tropsch liquids.

They tested the process in prototype plants in Finland and in the US. They will be able, they believe on the basis of case studies, to achieve energy efficiencies of 50% to 67% from bark and waste wood bio-refineries and - if the surplus heat from the process is then captured for district heating or other uses - raise the overall efficiency to 74-80%.

Bio-refineries with 300 MW capacity could supply fuel for 150,000 cars at a cost of 58 to 78 euros per MWh, or 50 to 70 cents a litre.
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UK Forestry Comn is selling cordwood at roadside at ~£40/tonne, which holds about 4.9MwHrs/T potential.
Converting say 57% of that energy to Methanol (CH3OH) at say 68 Euros/MW looks very positive.
One of the major shifts still needed is in minaturizing and modularizing the plant down to village scale
to match both the feedstock production and social necessities.

Regards,

Lewis

[kenneal - lagger]

Another alternative to this is the production of biochar and biodiesel. This might be more useful in the UK as the biochar would be a very useful soil additive and the whole process would be carbon negative. I don't know about process efficiencies and costs with this system.

[woodburner]

It's not more fuels that's needed, it's ways of living without them. Renewables will never power all the cars about today, there's not enough land available. As for providing habitat for birds and insects, mono-culture crops do very badly when compared to meadows and livestock. Much of the reason there has been such a huge reduction in birds and insects in the UK since WW2.

[Little John]

Oh lovely. This would mean we are going to find ways of turning what little remains of land that is otherwise inhospitable to human farming and cover it with an ecological desert of mono cultural trees so densely packed that bugger all else will be able to make a living on it (have you seen what little lives on the floor of a commercial forest?). The soils will be degraded and denuded of complex fungal, bacterial and insectivorous eco-systems as the land is churned up every few years to harvest said mono cultural crop.

We need to live different. We don't need to find ever more ecologically destructive ways ways of not having to.

[Billhook]

Kenneal - Agreed. Biochar is the necessary main product from forestry resources (alongside sawn lumber) but its production in an efficient retort puts around 28% of the feedstock's energy potential into woodgas.

The latter can be used for anything from space heating to electricity generation, but the extremely dispersed nature of the feedstock output (area of forest) means that its conversion to liquid fuel will give the greatest benefit per unit of input, and thus the best incentive for afforestation for biochar & coproduct silvifuel.

The merit of the Finn development is simply the demonstration of the technology for methanol production as a practical output - the F-T tech being effectively out of patent this is an option for all nations, unlike the closely patented 'cellulosic ethanol' jam-tomorrow scam.

Quite why this option has been off the table since the US mega-corporation International Harvester went ahead with a small RD&D program of modular wood alcohol plants in the '70s - and promptly suffered a massive unexplained run on its shares and went bust - remains to be seen.

Regards,

Lewis

[woodburner]

Never mind Steve, some people just can't see the wood for the trees. Aye, we're doomed.

[Billhook]

Woodburner - we certainly need to learn to do without fossil fuels ASAP and one fraction of that is sustainable liquid fuel supply.
It would be foolish to pretend this can replace more than a fraction, and being the product of a finite area of land
it can never support an endless-growth economy.

Yet where it can be produced sustainably (i.e. from native coppice forestry on non-farmland as the coproduct of biochar for Carbon Recovery)
it's going to be of vital importance in maximizing the viable rate of withdrawal from fossil fuel dependence.

Regards,

Lewis

[woodburner]

I think not. It is a route to further ecological damage for the benefit of someone who thinks their idea will save the world. Why the Finns are doing it, they can say, but it has nothing to do with coppice woodland.

We need to do with lagge quantities of fuel, fullstop. Just stopping using fossil fuels and then substituting non-fossil fuels, causing huge enironmental damage does not make for a comfortable vision of future living conditions.

[kenneal - lagger]

........... Why the Finns are doing it, they can say, but it has nothing to do with coppice woodland.

They have a huge area of sustainably managed forest and a population small enough to keep it that way while providing a large proportion or even all their fuel needs.

We need to do with lagge (???) quantities of fuel, fullstop. Just stopping using fossil fuels and then substituting non-fossil fuels, causing huge enironmental damage does not make for a comfortable vision of future living conditions.

In an ideal world we would reforest our uplands with the natural forest, largely silver birch and other such pioneer species, which was cut down in the past. This would be managed by coppicing, as they do in Sweden with their similar forests, and the cuttings could be used for biochar/methanol production. The afforestation would also help prevent the flooding which now afflicts the Severn, Wye and other valleys on a regular basis by slowing the flow of water off the uplands. It would also slow the release of carbon from upland bogs as they dry out and start oxidizing. This ideal would undoubtedly and unfortunately be compromised by the use of clear felling and the complete use of the available timber for burning in one way or another with no returns to the soil.

We are greedy humans and know not what the word restraint means. Yes, we are yeast and we are doomed as we will poison our own bottle.

[Tarrel]

Doesn't have to be mono-culture. Afforestation of upland moorland areas is a positive move. In Scotland, for example, there would naturally be far more trees on higher ground if it were not for over-grazing by deer (since their natural predators have been removed). Trees For Life is working to re-establish some of the indigenous Caledonian pine forest in areas such as Glen Affric, but it does require deer control.

I don't advocate using such fuels to power personal cars, but they could operate agricultural machinery or be used for electricity production.

I doubt that this type of fuel production would make sense in the current paradigm, in which economies of scale, profitability and externalisation of costs, such as pollution, are dominant. Clear-felling of mono-cultures, for example, is a far more efficient approach when viewed through this paradigm. (Although even the Forestry Commission is rethinking this approach).

The sustainably managed biomass harvesting alluded to would make far more sense in a community-based cooperative, in which there is as much to be gained by the improvement in biodiversity and local environment as there is to be gained from the use/sale of the fuel itself.

Up here I can imagine this kind of "terra-forming" operating in situations such as Assynt, where the community has bought out an estate extending to practically half a county from the previous landowner. At the moment they seem to be running it as "Business As Usual". Some of the land is taken by crofts, including individual croft-holdings plus the common grazings, and a lot of it is wild hill country. The community trust is encouraging tourism and developing some of the traditional highland "industries" such as stalking and fishing, but I suspect they could do a lot more. The focus is on food production rather than energy production, and there is probably scope for both IMO.