every boss has a bigger boss. My max yield is 0,16 MWh a day.
KISS is the way.
1 Like
Phillip,
That should be doable. Problem is labor. Someone is going to have to tend it constantly. If CoGen maybe economics would be a little more favorable. If used as part of forest management or wild fire control program perhaps already dedicated labor can be usedā¦
100KW x $.03KWhe ==> 3.00$/hr Who works for 3.00$/hr? I suggest 20$/hr. Therefor ~670KW.
Please explain more about this.
Rindert
1 Like
Robert - PURPA money is 90% of retail both on and off peak. There is $.03 per kwh biomass subsidy and $.04 per KWh subsidy for hydrogenā¦ Running generators is easy once things actually start runningā¦ someone like that can run 4 or machine at the same time. I had power plant jobs before. That job comes paranoia because you donāt do much operation work. You wait for things to break.
1 Like
I suspect that you didnāt have to gather, transport, cut biomass. Then you didnāt have to periodically add it to the gasifier? Biomass is ādiffuseā ie. spread out over large areas, much like farm crops. Or lets presume the tree service people will be happy to deliver 3 tons per day of non lumber grade wood to your work yard for free. Its going to take 4.2 very fit and skilled men with a chainsaws, splitter, and chunker to feed a 670KW generator 24/7. Barely doable maybe.
Rindert
2 Likes
Where I live we have excess. Then there is Midwest Biomass Exchange. Waste Management will give routes away if you can collect with responsibility. We have seaweed. California has underbrush. Hurricane and flood blow down. Routine is preferred You can help yourself at the biomass landfill. One ton of chips is 3 cubic yards. 2 lbs wood chips = 1kw. Dump truck is 10 cubic yards. This all has to chopped up and cooked and made into briquettes.
Yea looks like lots of work.
I lived near an aviation fuel plant near lakeside Oregon, they were near a lumber mill. That worked out for them.
1 Like
I see a faint glimmer of hope there. Where I live, in the Rocky Mountain region Coloradoās front range, we have pine beetle kill. Might be in the 100s of billions of tons of standing dead wood, very dry, and just waiting for a wild fire to come through. This has been natures way up here for at least tens of thousands of years. But wouldnāt it be great if we could skip the wild fire part? Maybe mobile units could syngas==>methanol==>dimethyl ether==>synthetic hydrocarbon products. Iāve heard that nature works in very similar ways in the Andes mountains, Australia, Sibera, many other places. There are āzombie firesā in Canada. Do you remember smoke in New York City a few years ago. Thereās so much biomass out there just going up in smoke all the time.
BioChar Now is turning about a 100K tons per year of pine beetle kill into biochar. Great! But it hardly scratches the surface. Why do we even use fossil fuels? Because biomass is diffuse.
Rindert
1 Like
I have an opinion that if you want to start this quickly you should learn to distill hardwood to get methanol. Methanol is a drop in fuel for motorcycle engines. I made a wood cooking oven. From a 55 gallon drum. I have to boot it up and check for leaks.
1 Like
Thatās more or less where Iām at too. I have a charcoal gasifier, and have learned to make charcoal in a TLUD (Top Lit Up Draft). I would be very interested to know as many details as possible about your methanol operation.
Rindert
Hi I donāt have a gasifier, I didnāt make one. You do that, you do a good job. I cant beat you. I canāt add much information or experience.
I use propane for experiments knowing that xfer to gasifiers will happen later if the subsequent processes are viable. My wood cooker used to be a 1 gallon paint can but I upgraded to a 1/3 of a 55 gallon steel drum. I learned you need fresh wood for extractions, the hemicellulose fades fast. You have to pay attention to temps, distillation at 725f then decomposition at 1200 to get CO and H2. They tell you to make charcoal in an oxygen free drum but they donāt explain about lignins - tar and hemicellulose - turpentines softwood and methanol from hardwood. Iāll let you know how that works out. After you get distillates you still have to distill again for acetic acid and formic acid and methanol.
2 Likes
That actually tells me a lot. My TLUD makes a bunch of hydrocarbons that get burned off in the after burner (looks like a chimney in the picture). I keep looking for a ways to use some of that.
Rindert
2 Likes
Looks like good wood cooking hardware !
2 Likes
It makes really nice charcoal. And the after burner burns the off gasses cleanly enough so that my neighbors donāt complain but are maybe even a little supportive. But of course cutting all those wood chunks takes labor. My policy is to tell anyone who wants to know exactly what I am doing and why. People fear and will kill what they donāt know or understand.
My actual hardware here is very simple, just a tank from an old water heater. The after burner is just old coffee cans tack welded together. Itās all about making little tweaks based on experience.
Rindert
5 Likes
@r_wesseling,
I think I missed the premise about why you needed the methanol. Regardless, I too am very interested in methanol. Here, itās $320 per 55gal drum, which works out to $5.81/gal. I have not done a study in years, so I donāt know if the cost of making biodiesel (my primary need for MeOH) is less than the pump price or not, but $5.81/gal is the price to beat, if we were to try compare the various methods of making MeOH.
So letās pretend we cannot buy MeOH, and our time is worthless. I have been looking for my old rigels handbook of industrial chemistry, to verify, but I am pretty sure one ton of hardwood yielded 20 gallons of methanol. It seems pretty obvious to me we are not going to be able to destructively distill one ton of hardwood. So our reactor would be quite a bit smaller. So, I kind of think the first step in producing methanol via destructive distillation, would be to acquire a accurate scale. Perhaps a feed store scale? I suppose dealing with the other products is beneficial too. I definitely could use tar for fenceposts, and acetone for solvent. Then of course, what to do with the overwhelming yield of charcoal.
The other method of making methanol is to react carbon monoxide and hydrogen over a catalyst. So we would be making producer gas and then taking that and reacting that over a catalyst under pressure and heat to form methanol. Although I am not afraid of building a reformer, I am suspect about the yield. I know I said our time would be worthless doing this, but it is still time spent and the yield might not be enough to get anything done with.
6 Likes
A lot of people out there see the āmethanol economyā as the way we are going to do it in the not so distant future. I think it would be cool if āthe little guyā could get in on it.
And thanks for Riegelās Handbook of Industrial Chemistry.
Rindert
1 Like
I introduced the idea of methanol extraction because of all of the byproducts made with gasification methanol seems to be the easiest to extract via dry distillation. I framed it as a busy job to show you have mastery of things. Thatās all. Itās just a product to make you feel proud.
I wonāt dismiss your incentive to make bulk methanol at all. Noneā¦ Iām a follower in methanol catalytic reforming. I wonāt try to stop you. If you can find a good machine or a licensed engineering firm to build one you should file for a rural energy grant and you get 50% funding.
When I search for catalytic reactors I get pictures of four acre plants with four story columns and lots of pipes. I hate that.
1 Like
Hi I have the option We donāt get no respect from these engineering firms. I send out messages about WGS reactors and membrane separation and various reactors but the replies I get are ā¦not there. Asplundh, made no return, WM yes but I didnāt follow up, I found a receptive cryogenic businessā¦ Maybe itās not all bad. Alibaba drops off right away. It would be good to have this on a pallet. Iām venting you donāt have to reply.
1 Like
@r_wesseling please look for a Riegelās from the 1920s. Those editions had the simplest descriptions of how to do things. They were very practical.
For small scale, I would probably try a pot still and wood chips. I was thinking of weighing the chips and drying them. I would dry them by forcing the water over the condenser first. Then weigh again. Once they stayed light over time, then I would change receivers and run the heat up and force everything else over. I havenāt done this yet but I would guess that the top of the pot would to be 170F~ in order to get the MeOH into the condenser.
Perhaps multiple receivers during the heat run up, and find out at what temp and time the MeOH is coming over. If itās like mash, you probably will have to make three runs to get it up to the azeotrope. The first two runs could be done with primitive pot stills, and an electric water heater. The third could be done with the distillation column sold by AliExpress.
The catalyst for CO+H2 reforming is copper. I wonder how easy it would be to draw producer gas through some copper tubing being heated with charcoal.
5 Likes
Thatās a good post thanks
I asked chatgpt about yield. A little less than a pint for 100# of wet wood chips.
Here is a screenshot of itās sources.
Lol, I would need 7200# of chips to make enough MeOH to make one batch of biodiesel. I get tuckered out making three yards of chipsā¦ Iād be pretty pooched out after making that many chips. They need to keep fracking!
8 Likes
You are better off making whiskey!
The amount of methanol in 5 gallons of mash varies significantly by source material, with fruit mashes producing much more methanol (around 5.5 ml per gallon) than grain mashes (about 0.38 ml per gallon). During distillation, this methanol is concentrated in the āheadsā or first runnings and can be separated by discarding the initial portions of the distillate.
If I did my math right that would be 18k gallons of grain whiskey. You might not ever be able to make biodiesel, but you would have happy neighbors. 
4 Likes