I’m not sure I didn’t hear that term associated with a process of converting household garbage into crude oil using high pressure. I will look to see if I can find an old link…
That was why I posted it I was interested to see what people here might know. I am not a big fan of the bird dung though too many respiratory issues can result from cleaning a chick coop you have to be very careful not to breath too much of that stuff.
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We’re wandering into the weeds, and the widening discussion will never come to a consensus.
The great thing about this group of people is the wide variety of views and approaches, all here are contributing good to the cause and planet, if its strictly self interest, tinkering, or other motivation.
Individualism vs group effort. Individuals can only achieve limited results. I can never build a highway bridge, but I can in short order and to highest standards with many others through my taxes and competent leadership. Were it not for this system our world would be a shambles.
It’s interesting that in the 1970’s and 80’s energy efficiency became a focus. Vehicles became much more efficient even after the energy crisis ended, as if the ethos of waste had been collectively broken. It took a long time to fully return. But I don’t think the smaller vehicles of that age marked a time of suffering, just collective responsibility. In fact they were just picking the low hanging fruit and could have gone farther.
Gentle hints and individual persuasion will have limited effect. Just as the credit counselor or accountant may warn about coming financial disaster, many people choose to ignore warnings, then fall in real trouble. Personal or national politics aside, there may be real impacting consequences if change is not enacted soon enough.
It is going to be an impossible environment for significant change in North America while political and corporate interests are fighting for the status quo. It is quite possible that will change if there are many more 4 ft rain events, too many too frequent one in a thousand year floods and droughts, forest die offs, and as the cost of coastal property loss as sea level rise accelerates finally becoming unsustainable to insurance companies and the economy.
As individuals all we can do is tinker and hopefully come up with roll out solutions for some of these things, and hope for the best.
But I would say the true solutions can’t be organized or scaled from the individual. Just issues of individual ability and payback get in the way. Cost is skewed in our social constructs, individuals are left to make resource decisions not on true or full cost so that what makes sense individually may be very bad for the group.
My 2 cents.
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Garry, I had to look the number up but it seems 5-10% of our yearly electric demand is covered by biomass steam generating stations. The 5% diff is because electric prices don´t always justify running the turbines and the stations often produce heat only.
Most big and small cities in Sweden have their own district heat grids. Household garbage, wood chips or pellets used for fuel. Additional household garbage is actually imported from heavily populated neighbouring countries like Poland and Germany.
Cities that still have big nearby industrial plants, like paper mills, often rely on heat from them. The paper mill where I work supplies 60% of the heat to the nearby 50,000 people city. The oversized steam boilers run on damp spruce bark waste. The local energy company installed a heatex that lowers the steamy exhaust temp from 200C to 50C, why a plastic chimney is used to be able to handle the corrosive condensation.
Almost all public or apartment buildings and about 75% of private houses are connected to the heat grid. Work mates of mine who are connected heat their houses for less than 800 US a year (incl hot tap water). I wonder what happens when the mill shuts down.
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Yeah Garry, I pretty well agree with all that. My point wasn’t to find fault with people trying to do good, even corporately. I think group efforts are good and necessary. Also, I wasn’t really trying to get into political subjects. I’m not really even taking a side in the battle over the right/wrong facts of the subject matter… I’m totally in favor of group efforts toward good goals, using good methods although it’s obvious to everyone that the definition of “good” is different from person to person.
I was just making a point about practical reality of do-ability. That’s all. I was not at all trying to spark a political debate. Maybe that would be inevitable in a discussion about effectiveness of efforts…? Not sure. And I’m sure not trying to dissuade anyone from working toward good. All I was getting at is that I think if you want to get something done, you do yourself a dis service to not take into account the reality of human selfishness. And it won’t hurt my feelings if I am wrong about that…I mean if it turns out that people are actually better than I give them credit for…
In any case guys, I wasn’t trying to steer toward the weeds. Sorry if I did. I was just thinking on the keyboard a little bit…
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JO, You lost a large number of employees a short time ago. How did that affect the ‘‘heating grid’’. TomC
Wow, I wish we were as advanced as Sweden. Talk about using resources intelligently.
My city has 50,000 inhabitants. And right beside is a Koch fertilizer plant using a 48" pipeline of natural gas to produce nitrate fertilizer. All the waste process heat goes straight to the atmosphere. Quite a sight all winter long, the steam plume can be seen from 30 miles away.
A coal fired steam generating station is being retired, the province set a deadline for burning coal. Across the road literally within 100m is the city landfill, running out of capacity, being capped and buried, just to produce methane gas mostly lost to the atmosphere. In some years a new site will have to be prepared at great cost. A natural gas generating station was built to replace the coal station, I am sure they destroy the old station.
And within 10 km of the city enough straw is burnt annually to fire the plant, same as for every town and city in western Canada.
There is no district heating, here people behaved selfishly and each buys and maintains their own heating. (Though electric is very cheap, even my exceptionally insulated house costs perhaps $1,200 per year (Cdn), and energy costs rising).
I don’t believe we will ever rival the level of intelligence of your countries’ civic planning.
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Maybe about a year ago there was an article in the paper here about plans to run Oregon’s one (and only) coal fired power plant out in Boardman for a day on charcoal. I never did hear any follow up, and it sounds like maybe the test got cancelled or at least postponed because of the severity of the winter last year. Sounds like there is no shortage of controversy with the idea, and perhaps rightly so. I guess just using logging waste would not come close to keeping the thing fed - so you would have to start cutting down trees on a pretty major scale.
Where I hope the world is headed is towards a better understanding of how much energy people are actually using. I dont think anyone I have ever asked has known how many kwhs they use in a day, month, or year. I think industrial biomass could work, but only if we are willing to live with a much smaller energy footprint.
The same could probably be said for driving on wood. A quick search turned up a number of 3,130,509,000,000 highway vehicle miles being driven in the US in 2015. If we wanted to do that kind of driving on wood, could it even be done?
Well, as gloomy as this topic has gotten, I do think there is hope. People have a great capacity for change.
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Nor am I Billy. Just like it isn’t politics when the accountant warns about cash flow or the credit card bill. You can get it paid or straightened out any way that works, and if you don’t, natural consequences.
It’s unfortunate that in North America the issue has become much like tobacco was 40 years ago.
Time will probably change perspectives, but hopefully it isn’t a situation like having ignored the bill collector too long.
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Assuming an energy crisis exists, I would equally agree with both these quotes. But my significant doubt in the willingness of people to live out Carl’s point is my main point. Maybe that just makes me a hopeless cynic. At least that’s not where I find my hope…
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It seems to be human nature to waste, mostly because we are short sighted, or especially because other people generally admire excess.
I’ve always admired the smartest and most efficient ways of getting things done, and picking the appropriate battles. Just because we can do some things, or there’s tradition behind doing them certain ways is no rational basis for continuing. Whatever the resource situation.
I believe we can have 90% for 10%, but it requires a ground up re examination and societal effort. Otherwise we may be just changing seats on a train ride.
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Why is wood better than petro? For me, it’s the “upper hand.” I do not like some one having the upper hand over me. Save the world, good luck. Free a few slaves, maybe.
Today, l’m thankful for trees ! ! !
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I like wood cause i have personal access to it directly. I like it because billions of other people in the world have the same while not having easy access to petroleum and this offers possibilities that petroleum does not… I like it cause it’s just cool tech. And because I get to hang out with a bunch of “weird” folks like all of you. I like it because it offers a better use for an amazingly abundant waste product than just burning it up to get rid of it. And it’s just fun.
I like petroleum for the same reason everyone else does. Cause it’s easy, it’s accessible, it’s “cheap”, it’s convenient, it fits seamlessly into the paradigm we currently exist in, and more than 99% of the trillions of combustion engines in the world are already fitted to operate on it.
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Billy I have been staying out of this to not get into a debate about climate change we had that discussion a while back there is a very long thread where you can see where people stand in here somewhere.
I do have two points on the topic of energy and cost. Cost first. I agree with you the best way to get people to change is to show them a personal benefit to doing so. What type of light bulb will you buy tomorrow if one of your lights goes out tonight? I am willing to bet most of us would not think twice about buying LED bulbs. I have followed then for about 17 years but only in the last 5 years have they gone from geek to common everyday and that happened very fast once people realized how it would lower their light bill and how long they last.
I believe we will see the same thing with EV right now they are in the early days. But in 20 years everyone will want them not to save the planet but because they see benifets to driving one. No motor noise compared to a gas motor. The cost of fueling is way less per mile then gas. The list will go on and on but what will make them sell is when the total cost of ownership is lower for the EV then the cars we have today. That day is coming not next week but 20 years from now I would say no question in my mind. The same with solar and wind they are becoming the cheapest new power to build. Offshore is now the cheapest new power to build. So power companies are seeing that and starting to build way more renewable energy. It isn’t to save the planet it is to make a bigger profit margin. But that is fine by me.
The second major point I would like to make is aside from storage issues and yes I know we don’t have the answer to them today. I don’t see us having to go without our current quality of life in order to stop using ff. There is more wind and solar energy resources for us on this planet then we can use and far more then we currently use in ff. It is a question of cost and effort to develop the resources.
Ok one more point then I am done. Wood. It is a great resource for those of us who have it and we should make the most of it in a sustainable way. I want our children and grandchildren to also enjoy the joy of wood so please don’t burn all the trees… can we meet all our energy need as mankind from wood no not even close we proved that at the dawn of the industrial revolution. Europe was basicly clear cut before they switched to coal. People where shocked to find the old growth forests in the new world.
So wood is great use it wisely and respect the forest so your kids can do the same. Now I need to go toss a couple more logs on the fire so I don’t freeze tonight.
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Hey, amen to all of that. I don’t know anything about the state of the EV industry, but I’m with you on everything else. I love utilizing “other” ways of doing things. Here we have piles of wood. Koen has bamboo. Someone else has the power of the tides. Folks in the bread basket have wind. I say use it all…Make it profitable and everyone else will too.
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Now that is a point i disagree with 
They are all designed to run on woodgas / wood fuel, period 
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LOL…I’m with you Koen…
Kristijan, I believe the term you need to search in order to find info is “hydrothermal carbonization.”
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Tom, the mill is down to 70% annualy tonnage (35% work force) but the boilers still run full blast to cover citiy heat demand.
But yes, with yet another cut down in production it won´t be possible to run 100% waste bark. We are approaching the limit. The fuel cost will be a lot higher buying external biomass and my work mates will be paying a more expensive heat bill.
My guess is, if the mill shuts down, the local power company will probably buy the boiler section of the plant and run chips and other forestry waste. Household garbage is not an option here because the boilers are mild steel and can´t handle the acids.
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JO I really hope that the company will take into account the service and revineu they are getting from this boiler heat. In this country, their biggest concern seems to be how much money they can recuperate by selling the equipment over seas and then maybe finding a buyer for the old building. Generally the buildings sit for several years before they find a use/buyer and in several cases the buildings have been torn down. I don’t understand why these plants are closing. We use a lot of paper and I see train loads of logs being shipped out of our town every day for pulp wood. I believe a lot of it here is the unions have gotten the pay scale so high and benefits so liberal. My thoughts are with you. TomC
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