I work with at least two other approaches to make to make electrcity. These use much less wood.
Recharge lead acid batteries without electricity. HCl cleans PbSO4 off the plates but it doesn’t reset the cathode to PbO2. Acetate does this. The PBSO4 doesn’t go back to PB, it becomes PbCl2 and H2SO4. You get all the sulphuric acid back. It looks like you can get giant quantities of electricity without the drama of generators
The HCl part looks like it reduces electric load by 1/3. The acetate part looks like it needs alcohol. The good news is that the reaction happens in fractions in that great quantities don’t get consumed. Just the material directly at the plate and then a few molecules wide. The bad news is that Cl2(g) needs electricity. I found an Alibaba machine that makes good promises on less amounts of electrcity. You have to make your own HCl for a big margin. The acetate is ethanol…You can say the ratio of these chemicals is much more productive than using a gasoline recharge by ten. Youll have an acre field of 6 foot x 6 foot batteries. After a discharge the separator is removed and the cell is flushed with water, flushed with HCL, PbCl is collected and the cell is flushed again. Then the Cathode is removed via crane then transported to the boiling tank and boiled in acetate while the fresh cathode is placed in the battery . There should be 2X the number of cathodes: one is resetting while other discharges. There will be less syngas gasoline use and more syngas boiling heat.
Methanogenic bacteria plant - you redo the methane cow manure thing on purpose. The bacteria need hydrogen and carbon dioxide and substrate. You saturate the water with bacteria friendly amounts of CO2 and H2, pulp up cardboard or leaves or grass and fill a 4x4x4 Ag pallet box and inoculate with a 5 gallon bucket of fresh cow manure. This should take. The boxes are sealed and stacked three high over an acre.the boxes have to be heated with warm circulation water
This is obsolete if you can get a Sabatier reactor.
Actually whiskey makers are very careful to clean out the copper coil by distilling vinegar through it first. This reduces copper oxide back to base metal and reduces the amount of methanol produced. I think I heard somewhere that brass scrub pads can be treated with ammonia, in a pipe, to produce a catalyst for methanol. This can become contaminated with sulfur and start producing ‘heavies’. I’m curious about these heavies. Are these higher molecular weight, oily type compounds? I wonder just how difficult it really is to make gasoline and diesel substitutes.
Rindert
Most use refineries use reformation. You can probably just distill the wood, dewater it, ie heat it to 105c to get the water out, then take that to a refinery and let them do the heavy lifting. Then use that money to buy fuel or trade them.
Does this produce some sort of biocrude? It sounds like the tars and low molecular weight compounds get boiled out and collected.
Thinking I could condense some of the stack gasses from my tlud and achieve more or less the same thing.
If not mistaken I think @KristijanL proposed something like this at one point.
Rindert
you will get water plus an array of compounds Off the top of my head it was like acetic acid, creosote, ash, and probably a bunch of others. It works better if it is a closed retort. It depends on what is making it out of your retort, your burn is going back through the char bed so you may not get that much.
This looks like the recipe backlash instructions for water distillation of methanol. The instructions don’t mention using fresh wood like cut yesterday. Do that and do not fail. Other than that the instructions are good.
I moved on from methanol as a bulk distillant because the material isn’t there. First you need hardwood, then you need fresh hardwood, then a few species of hardwood work best so you are down to less than 5 percent of available mass. This works if you want paint thinner rather than fuel. Wet distillation has the cost of boiling water.
But still go ahead and do this and get back to us. It’ll be a very good experience
Just from my experience operating this thing I think there will be very little ash.
I think if it were a commercial scale operation a centrifugal separator similar to ones used to separate cream from milk could be used. This would cut down on the energy required.
I suspect that the sulfur content in the crude would be high enough to prevent microbial activity in storage.
Interesting idea you have about taking it to a refinery, just as if it were crude petroleum. That would be so cool!
Maybe I’m mistaken, but my understanding is that it is a mixture of hydrocarbons, similar too crude petroleum, but derived from a biological source, in this case wood.
Rindert
The water effect goes away away in a few minutes… You aren’t doing mass production, you are doing an experiment for learning. Its ok to blow a few minutes for this reason but you’ll get frustrated later when the methanol doesn’t show up. That’s because the methanol, which is fragile to natural decomposition, has left already and it doesn’t tell you that ahead of time.
Methanol, acetone, acetic acid, methane, various tars, and water would be the products of your proposed set up. Of course, you’d have a lot full of charcoal too.
It should get some decent results.
I talked to a refinery here, they will buy it. The trick was it has to be dewatered. I believe it has to be in 500 gallon allotments, which here at least, requires a permit to transport it.
I once did some consulting (please hold your laughter until the end of the post ) for a gentleman that worked for a refinery. Is big interest was designing a microwave moisture sensor for feedstock. I think it was a carbonyl compound, but I’m not sure, nor do I remember what it is. Anyway, the point is, water, at the ppm level, would poison their catalyst bed, crippling the process. And is was a Big process they didn’t want going down. So when a refinery says dewatered, they may really mean it.
They buy it as crude, and crude oil must not contain more than 0.5 to 1% of water. It corrodes the catalyst bed so yeah they want to know -exactly-. But I think .5% can be done by boiling it out, and you still get the methanol and ethanol because those have a lower boiling point then water.
It’s not how it works, the water comes off first, but I’m not in a position to prove it right now. But, give me a bit. I am going to pursue the wood chip angle over the next few weeks.
You are right. It doesn’t =completely= work. The water gets trapped by the oil, and can’t leave the solution. The use it with an emulsifier or they agitate it. There are like 6 ways to dewater. The best one is letting it settle.
Yup, water is a problem. But this has been the case since earliest petroleum refining. If you’ve ever seen petroleum at the well head, it looks like mud, or maybe like something that came out of a marine engine with a cracked block. I just know there are old, well established methods for separating it out.
It just comes down to scale. Do you have enough crude to justify buying the equipment to dewater it?
Or maybe you know someone, who has a well, frac tanks, & etc. This kind of people are around, depending on where you live. I happen to live in Colorado where the Niobrara Formation holds down a bunch of oil an gas.
Anyhoo, I’m fairly confident that someone like BioChar Now, at 500k tons of wood per year, can make something happen.
Come to think of it I’d be very surprised if there aren’t people out there quietly doing this already.
Rindert
You have to figure out what you get when you condense it out which is going to be the wood vinegar stuff.
The by-products might be considered organic. Organic acetic acid or methanol would fetch a premium on the market. but there are also a bunch of aromatics hat might have even a higher value.
They may want to do an initial dewatering onsite, just to reduce transport costs.
Thank you for introducing me to BioCharUSA. I don’t want to soil my appreciation for the contribution. I apologize.
Im suspicious as to the low Biocrude and low Wood Vinegar reclamation rates I always see. People that sell charcoal ovens ignore distillates. There are supposed to be lots of distillates, even 50% of the mass. But I never see it. The paper pulp people seem to find it but they never distill it. They burned it all as boiler fuel.
The old timers extract turpentine from living trees.
Softwood hemicelluloses are a basket case . There are at least five different kinds, the biggest being called Primus . These chemicals are familiar but very fragile in that they have intermediate decomposition compounds meaning that before they get heated into CO and H2 they change into other compounds. Hardwoods have less variations; methanol, acetic acid and formic acid.
I did four distillations with old wood, I didn’t get jack.
) for a gentleman that worked for a refinery. Is big interest was designing a microwave moisture sensor for feedstock. I think it was a carbonyl compound, but I’m not sure, nor do I remember what it is. Anyway, the point is, water, at the ppm level, would poison their catalyst bed, crippling the process. And is was a Big process they didn’t want going down. So when a refinery says dewatered, they may really mean it.