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I know there have been some feasibilty studies done around the state (of Oregon) to determine whether it would be cost effective to use some of the 'waste' wood from fire suppression projects and other sources to make power, but i'm not sure whether the results of those studies have been made publically available.

Informal conversations with experts in this area suggest that small timber operators could effectively operate on this basis, but larger ones would be hard pressed to find enough work there to justfy the effort.

posted 2 years, 11 months ago
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I'm glad your discussion is about using woody biomass to generate power. Back when Oregon was primarily a timber based economy, and my grandfathers were coaxing both heat and power out of wood fired boilers, there was a great reserve of engineering knowlege gained about how to capture energy out of wood very efficiently, and it it's clean burning.

When your wood stove or power plant is operating efficiently, it is burning all of the available carbon in the fuel, and there is no smoke. The white puffy stuff you see at the top of  stacks is water vapor. If there is smoke, there's a problem with the equipment, and in an industrial environment, that is often resolved very quickly because it's really expensive to operate otherwise.

In addition to that, there are often scrubbers and other techniques used to clean up the outflow air from a power plant, which usually exceeds current environmental regulations.

Wood is a nice fuel because it actually contains much less of the minerals and other chemicals which are important nutrients for the plant, but are problematic in a power plant environment.

Nitrogen and potassium which help the plants grow (you often buy them in fertilizer) can help make big huge deposits (or rocks) on the inside of your power plant or heating boiler. The rule of thumb is that you need to install more powerful tools to clean the outflow air when you ar burning non-woody biomass like agricultural wastes and residues.

posted 2 years, 11 months ago
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It's clear by some of the comments posted so far, that there are people out there curious about energy from wood and biomass gasification.

Wikipedia is a good source for some of the basic information about this type of renewable energy, and the carbon cycle.

We help host the Gasification Discussion Mailing List, which is an active list, running since 1998, of a global group of experts, and tinkerers in the field, and a good collection of current information on the topic ( http://gasifiers.bioenergylists.org/ )

Using trees to fix carbon, and then burning them in controlled way is a proven carbon-neutral technology, and there are people right now figuring out how to burn tree wast in a way that fixes some of the carbon into charcoal, often called biochar.

Biochar is important because it uses simple and proven technology to fix some of the excess carbonin the atmosphere, and the soil scientists are telling us that while charcoal doesn't have any nutrients in it, it provides the type of environment that soil micro-organisms really like to to grow in. A lot of this is an area of current research and development, but the preliminary results are very exciting. There are a number of web sites that track information about this project, one of them is (http://terrapreta.bioenergylists.org/)

posted 2 years, 11 months ago
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