Carbon negative combine harvester

No. Driven full size tractor trailer though. Soloed a glider/ sailplane. I’m a good snow skier. Are there major flaws in my description of the science or technology not in my character or lack of farm cred. Cincinnati is getting a street car and 90% of them have never ridden in one. People are going to be buying electric cars who have never bought or driven one before. There are going to be lots of firsts for everybody coming soon.

Charles,

Put some numbers behind that electrical consumption and I think you will find you need to drop another nuclear fuel rod to power it. Make life easy on yourself…just pelletize the output like in a baler. Sure you might need a binder but that is not the worst thing.

Don’t get me wrong. I still believe in the idea but nothing will happen until metal is cut.

Stephen

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Today’s locomotives are diesel powered generators powering a big electric motor. No fuel rod and no tanker of fuel behind like a coal car. Gassifiers can power a pickup truck. I’m just expanding some existing technology and scaling stuff up or down a little. This machine would be very carbon negative. Bury that carbon in the ground. sequester it. That is the purpose.

Very true, but in the locomotive’s case the Diesel Btu’s are going run the generators and traction motors to do work, not a fuel refinery which can only have efficiency losses.

Most renewable fuel burning things are worried about efficiency. Like electric generators in Alaska. Of course you want to get every BTU out of the fuel your using but not in this harvesters case. There is plenty of fuel and inefficiency probably means more carbon left behind. The more inefficient it is, the more carbon gets sequestered. This harvester needs a small inefficient gassifier.

Hmm, Charlie. The original thread was to find a way to combine crops using ag waste. Very interesting to me. It has morphed into a highly theoretical exercise that lacks a good understanding of the problems involved. Any one of the problems would be difficult, combined they will take years and swallow fortunes. Weld some metal and we’ll talk.
Best regards, David Baillie

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This thread is called “carbon negative combine harvester”. If you google carbon negative combine harvester this thread and my go fund me campaign shows up. I may be less than the ideal person to be pushing this but right now I seem to be it. I don’t see it as a quantum leap to take your existing technology and apply it to what I see as a more appropriate use. The cars of the future don’t run on syn-gas. The combine harvesters of the future however---------------------------

I guess I’m not saying that putting corn cobs and wheat chaff in your gassifiers would work. I’m guessing it won’t. I’m hoping it is just the dynamics of your gassifying fuel needing to also combust to create the heat to gassify material sort of duel use fuel. Your fuel has to burn to create the heat to gassify same fuel. I’m hoping the best gassifiers are completely oxygen free and by having a heat source in the center of gassifier little heat would be lost. Yes I would like to put a wood gas gasssifier if need be on a cheap obsolete harvester now to just demonstrate that it is possible. But That machine won’t dump carbon on field as it operates. There are not many carbon negative technologies. I believe this is one. I hope someone crunches some numbers on the amount of carbon a machine like this could sequester and see if it is significant enough to warrant all the expense. Are we doomed to the effects of global warming or are carbon negative technologies like this able to save us?

Hmmm. Yeah. Well. I’ve been standing aside on this one 'till now.
Now CharlieM you say you are actually DOW site cheerleading for project funding, eh?

Twice now recently you are pushing cooking down to; and then into the ground burying hard won carbons FUELS as a benefit, eh? Sound’s like my fellow Washington State’er “Dr” Heard. That fellow grinds up and cultivates/bury’s in wood charcoal onto some of the already richest river outflow river delta soils in my state.
All the while using Alaskan Dino in his personal vehicles; jetting around (Gore-like on lot’s of Dino) eco-preaching; and home heating with long piped in Canadian “natural gas” That ain’t. Natural that is; as supplied and used. Just ask those living where it is frack’ed/extracted and washed/cleaned to “natural”.

I’m a life long use site grown woods for fuels power guy.
Simple logic test for you.
PNW tree woods only ~1/3 of the stored energy potential is in hydrogen/oxygen wood molecules. ~2/3rd the usable energy is in the plant air removed; solar energy linked carbons chains.
So how can ANY energy system economically work self-sustainable when you carbons sequesters insists on bury locking away 2/3rds your energy, eh? Your new plants growth air carbons, eh? Plants do not directly uptake carbons needed for cells walls from the ground soils. They get their new growth carbons from the air and the waters. Tie up the carbons - de-plant/de-green the planet to cold, dry and arid. Like many places already driven into.

DavidB is right.
Do something personal, useable, and prove your assertions.
Last month I/we replanted 2986 trees to replace 685 harvested.
Cool rain the last three days had me with visiting out of state company building and maintianing low fire woodstove heating to dry and dehumidify: pants, coats, shoes and dogs. Pretty to look at too.
~60 pounds of wood fuel used in every 24 hour period. With ALL of the in stove produced woodchar directly utilized for sensible heat power then within the woodstove. “Saving” back the wood char from experience would have then needed 3X the raw wood input, driving me up to 180 pounds a day wood useage. I ain’t popular culture hydrogen energy sooopid-fied. Ha! Stooped a bit from 45 years wood for personal energy bending/stoop/sweating the fuel woods.

DavidB is right.
Make your self Real, familiarized by wood for power actually doing things. And do this like all DOers here, on your own dimes.

Regards
Steve Unruh

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Many poor areas of the world use charcoal for cooking. If your 1/3 , 2/3 numbers are right this makes me feel a little better that only 1/3 of energy is lost in the making of charcoal leaving the other 2/3 for cooking. What do you get when you gassify carbon? Carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide? Only carbon monoxide is combustible. I sort of thought that the cream or more usable gasses where produced first before carbon gets gassified. Maybe the carbon in your gassifier is the clean burning cooking fuel that is gasifying off your 1/3 of more usable gas.
Burying carbon is sequestering carbon. Terra preta of the Amazon basin some of the most fertile soil in the world in an area of not so fertile soil is soil that has been turned black with charcoal added by man over thousands of years. So there may be added benefits to burying carbon in soil.
Even if only 1/3 of energy of byharvest is used I think there would be ample supply and lots of carbon produced. We could all go carbon neutral today and it would take decades to reduce co2 in air. Only carbon negative technologies give us a chance at normalizing co2 levels. Yes there appears to be barriers but unless someone has a better carbon negative technology maybe this is a technology that will have most impact.
Think of all the acreage in corn,wheat,soybean, and any crop that is harvested dried. Could this technology work?

how much carbon dioxide do you think is in the air? my understanding it is about .04%. Just as a point of reference there is .9% or there abouts of argon… we use argon as insulation of a sorts in windows.

people don’t realize that its our oceans that regulate the amount of co2 in our atmosphere… maybe we should consider not poluting out oceans as a way to clean up our atmosphere as far as co2 is considered.

all that being said, if there isn’t any co2 we don’t have any plants either… plants make… oxygen… my understanding is oxygen is kinda important to us.

co2 is plant food…

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Started a long rant but erased it. Too much to get done.

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RI (rantus interruptus)

I don’t know why someone would be a wood gasser if they didn’t believe in global warming. What are you trying to prevent? Acid rain? The oceans have absorbed a lot of co2 and at first we thought this was a regulator but this is pollution too turning the ocean acidic. This vastly changes the chemistry of the ocean making it hard for shell fish and plankton to make their shells of calcium carbonate from calcium and carbonate. Carbonate combines with I believe hydrogen ions forming carbonic acid which is acidic and uses valuable carbonate which would have helped sea life. The warming seas have also bleached out coral and vastly changed our oceans.
Just saying how little co2 is in air means nothing. I only gave him 3 mg of cyanide but he drank 1000 mg of water it must be the water that killed him. The science of global warming is sound and accepted by vast majority of scientists. What isn’t happening is a Manhattan project style reaction to problem. Where are our carbon negative technologies? Oh I might have one . How about building a carbon negative combine harvester?

Charles,

Suppress the good intentions. Put it in a wrapper of good economics and you will get what you are looking for. It’s all about spin and selling it. Greed is good…sometimes.

Stephen

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You say the melting Ice caps are just our normal ice age ebb and flow. Not so. We are heading towards an ice age not away from one. We should be getting colder but for global warming. I would explain global warming like this. Ever put glycerin on your hands like glycerin soap? Your hands feel warmer like the glycerin is warm. Glycerin reflects radiant infra red heat back at you trapping your own heat. The glycerin isn’t warm you are. Co2 reflects radiant infra red heat back at earth not letting it escape. When I learned the science at CU Boulder in 80’s there were ideas that maybe more heat would cause more clouds that would block sun regulating this effect. Well I think the melting ice caps, the rising oceans, the acidification of oceans ,the changing weather patterns have proven that global warming is real and we have to have solutions. We are in the midst of the next mass extinction. Can we save our planet and ourselves?

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I get economics but economics didn’t give us the nuclear bomb or put us on the moon. Carbon credits and a larger fuel tax would economically stimulate conservation but we can’t even do these common sense economic moves. Polluting can’t be free. That is good economics.

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Is there any Kool Aid left?

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I’m sorry if this seems blunt, I’m fairly certain I can’t save the world. What I can do is save myself and my pocket book. I have made the choice to make steps to be more independent for my existence. I can’t help what the big corporations do but can choose not to support them. I plan to feed myself and be responsible for my own power needs.
Is the earth cooling or warming? It depends on what website one chooses to click on. I believe the earth is evolving just as it has since the beginning of time.
I’m here to learn about wood/charcoal gas, that’s what this site is for. If for some reason I ever end up needing a combine, then I may try and figure out how to feed it wood gas. Until then, I will absorb whatever this community wants to share with me. When I first ran my engine on wood gas, I realized the membership to this site was well invested. The people on this site are builders not theorists, therefor you may feel a little resistance.
When you build this machine you desire to harvest corn and show us a video, I can almost guarantee you will earn a ‘Featured Project’ on this site.

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Here’s the thing, if I wanted to build a gasified combine, I could… without any help from anyone else, I’d just need the materials to do that.

So what are you exactly asking for here? Just curious… Have you bought the book here yet? or are you asking for someone here to help you develop your idea? I must have missed something.

My reasons for building gasifiers are my own… and yes, I can and do build gasifiers.

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