[HN Gopher] Bio-coal: A renewable and producible fuel from ligno...
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Bio-coal: A renewable and producible fuel from lignocellulosic
biomass
Author : rch
Score : 63 points
Date : 2020-01-05 16:50 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (advances.sciencemag.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (advances.sciencemag.org)
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| Bio-coal is possible, and may be economically viable (especially
| when produced from biowaste as here), but only makes sense for an
| extremely brief transition window. So these guys need to go from
| the current five-gram scale to the estimated one million tonnes
| per day scale in less than five years. Maybe in China that's
| possible.
| elric wrote:
| I'm not sure whether I agree with your timeline. Coal will
| likely remain useful for a variety of industrial processes,
| like steel production.
| MertsA wrote:
| Even with steel there's direct reduced iron and electrolytic
| steel production is already on the horizon.
| neltnerb wrote:
| Is this what you're talking about?
|
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/cleaner-
| cheaper-w...
|
| Looks like another great way to use excess renewable power
| when the grid is underutilized but the wind is blowing and
| the sun is shining. Build enough of these to matter and you
| could probably get away with a fair bit less battery
| storage as long as you still have natural gas peakers.
| jacobush wrote:
| http://www.hybritdevelopment.com
|
| _" If successful, HYBRIT means that together we can
| reduce Sweden's CO2 emissions by 10% and Finland's by
| 7%."_
| neltnerb wrote:
| Nice! I saw a great presentation from some researchers
| that figured out how to make electrolytic Boron as well
| using molten oxide electrolysis.
|
| http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/64889/34540
| 560... (warning, link to a thesis)
| jacobush wrote:
| How old are you? ;-)
| neltnerb wrote:
| Why?
| jacobush wrote:
| _" I saw a great presentation from some researchers "_
| and the paper you linked to was from 1940. :-)
| pjc50 wrote:
| Before coal, there was charcoal; the process works perfectly
| well with it. We switched because the energy-ROI and
| logistics are much easier than the manual charcoal production
| process was.
| neltnerb wrote:
| But that's because of it's usefulness as a chemical precursor
| (i.e. carbon) rather than because it was worth it to burn for
| straight heating energy in a power plant.
|
| I am pretty much okay with (or at least resigned to)
| petrochemicals/coal being used for the next 30 years to
| produce chemicals and other products. _Burning_ it is a waste
| of a very useful chemical feedstock.
|
| The lowest value (and by extension least valuable) thing you
| can do with a material like coal is burn it. If it's used
| because of it's properties _other_ than it 's fuel content of
| course it's value is higher and economics will make it more
| compelling. These are entirely different markets in size and
| kind.
| acvny wrote:
| Although biofuels prevent consumption of fossil fuels, they still
| contribute to CO2 emmissions. Another side effect is that the
| land resources used to grow those biofuels are consumed. Also
| they lead to food prices increase and shortages. The good thing
| is when the raw material is made of leftovers from normal food
| oriented farming. However when farmers replace corn cultures with
| rapeseed that's bad.
| doctor_eval wrote:
| This doesn't make sense to me.
|
| First, the CO2 released from burning farmed plants does not
| increase the CO2 in the atmosphere. It's a cycle.
|
| Second, climate change will also cause food prices to increase.
| There is going to be an equilibrium point at which the
| increased cost of food due to land use changes outweighs the
| benefit of reduced emissions, but that point is almost
| certainly not zero.
|
| In theory, farmers could replace corn with rapeseed at no cost
| to consumers if doing so mitigates climate change, the main
| problem is that the net cost of doing so needs to be averaged
| out over decades :(
| oconnore wrote:
| That's exactly why newer biofuels rely on sources that don't
| require high investment crop land -- e.g. switchgrass and other
| "weeds". You could also plant switchgrass in highway medians,
| for example.
| jacknews wrote:
| Just charcoal the biowaste, and bury it.
|
| Much less tech needed, and it actually reduces co2 not just
| circulates it.
|
| Profit is via increased crop yields.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| The paper talks about this option (well, burying the output of
| this process).
|
| It's carbon negative to use it as a soil additive, but you
| don't get to burn the bio-coal for energy, so it's slightly
| less profitable.
|
| I guess you could do a bit of both and be exactly carbon
| neutral.
| swiley wrote:
| If it's prepared with renewable/carbon neutral processes then
| using it to generate heat will be renewable/carbon neutral. If
| it's used to replace petrochemicals instead of heat (which they
| pointed out was uneconomical anyway) it sequesters carbon, so
| it's a good thing.
|
| It's always better to have options.
| [deleted]
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Bio-coal is charcoal, just produced by different means than
| charring the biomass. Typically, bio-coal production manages to
| convert more of the carbon into coal, while less of it is
| burned.
| samatman wrote:
| Fairly sure GP's point was that sequestering the resulting
| carbon is a better move than burning it back into the
| atmosphere.
|
| Meeting CO2 goals requires removing carbon actively from the
| atmosphere, and drastically reducing our use of CO2-producing
| energy sources. Burning bio-coal does neither of these
| things; burying it accomplishes the former, and is at least
| not working against the latter.
| barry-cotter wrote:
| > Meeting CO2 goals requires removing carbon actively from
| the atmosphere, and drastically reducing our use of
| CO2-producing energy sources.
|
| No. Either one could be sufficient alone, just as you can
| lose weight either by exercising more or eating less alone,
| though generally the combination is better.
|
| For removing carbon from the atmosphere we could dump
| olivine sand into coastal waters where it would sequester
| carbon as it was weathered. If we want to reduce our use of
| CO2 producing energy sources without massive declines in
| quality of life or vast environmental damage there's only
| one choice, nuclear.
| jointpdf wrote:
| > _If we want to reduce our use of CO2 producing energy
| sources without massive declines in quality of life or
| vast environmental damage there's only one choice,
| nuclear._
|
| Unsubstantiated claim detected.
|
| Solar, wind, hydroelectric, and geothermal are all
| cheaper than nuclear (and even coal) for new generation
| capacity. That includes capital, operation and
| maintenance, and transmission costs. See tables starting
| on page 8 for the numbers (https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/a
| eo/pdf/electricity_generation....).
| Krssst wrote:
| What about storage cost to make it viable for base load?
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| In that vein I reduced the amount of CO2 my car produced
| per year by one simple trick. I moved closer to work. I
| was commuting 8000 miles a year. Now I'm commuting 4000
| miles. And it's 10 minutes to work instead of 30.
| barry-cotter wrote:
| Solar requires the clearing of huge amounts of land, with
| the associated destruction of wildlife. To the best of my
| knowledge there has been no progress made in figuring out
| what to do with solar panels at the end of their working
| lives either and they all use lots of toxic heavy metals.
| Wind doesn't leave lots of toxic waste but it does kill
| millions of birds and bats a year, disproportionately
| effecting large birds with long generation times, most of
| which are predators like eagles. Hydroelectric is at
| least less soul crushingly ugly but the environmental
| effects of flooding huge amounts of land are hardly
| positive. It's also basically played out in developed
| countries. All of the suitable sites for hydroelectric
| power have been developed. Besides turning mountain
| ecosystems into lakes HEP is hideously dangerous in ways
| that are basically unavoidable. The failures of the
| Banqiao and Shimantan Dams killed 170-230K people in
| 1971[1]
|
| Solar, wind and hydro all entail a lot of damage to the
| environment, far more than is necessary from nuclear,
| just because they require much greater areas as they're
| less energy dense.
|
| I don't deny that nuclear is more expensive on those
| grounds. I just think that relative safety is more
| important. So by the most expansive counts Chernobyl
| killed 4,000[2] people while air pollution kills about 7
| million a year, every year[3]. Germany's closing of its
| nuclear power plants has lead to an additional 1,000
| deaths a year[4]
|
| Nuclear is safer than any alternative source of energy,
| wind, solar and hydro included. If you include those
| costs nuclear looks amazing in comparison[6].
|
| [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam
|
| [2]https://ourworldindata.org/what-was-the-death-toll-
| from-cher...
|
| [3]https://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2014/air
| -pollu...
|
| [4]https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/energy/germa
| n-nucl...
|
| [5]http://papers.nber.org/tmp/26395-w26598.pdf
|
| [6]https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-
| worldw...
| Certhas wrote:
| Nuclear solves nothing. It has its role as a stop gap but
| renewables are cheaper safer and easier.
|
| The main challenge in a decarbonized energy sector
| (including heat!) is not week to week or day to day
| variability but season to season. That's best solved with
| power 2 gas and storage whether the major source of
| energy is nuclear (leaving nuclear reactors on idle for
| half the year is expensive) or renewables.
| 08-15 wrote:
| Germany has the most expensive electricity in the world
| (excluding Diesel powered islands). Electricity in
| neighboring France is a third or so of the price. Is that
| because France gets so much more sunlight?
| Certhas wrote:
| Besides what the sibling pointed out: choices and
| subsidies, determine consumer prices. Coal subsidies
| still are vastly larger than renewable subsidies world
| wide. Compare the price of new wind and new nuclear
| stations.
|
| That admittedly doesn't give you total system cost, but
| you need solid models for that anyways, as
| electrification of mobility and heating will completely
| change demand structure in the electricity secto.
|
| The consumer price of electricity in Germany and France
| tells you absolutely nothing about any of that.
| aurelwu wrote:
| That's vastly inaccurate. It is correct for household
| prices, but for energy intensive industry the difference
| is much smaller, something around 2 cents.
| Pfhreak wrote:
| I've been learning about biochar/syngas production from biomass.
|
| It turns out there's methods that range from 'burn slash in a
| giant metal bucket' to large industrial gassifiers for producing
| biochar.
|
| There's a part of me that wants to exit the tech sector, buy a
| couple hundred acres nearby, live modestly, and tinker with
| biochar production/sequestration.
| SuoDuanDao wrote:
| I met a guy who made biochar on the woodlot of someone he had
| an arrangement with - woodlot owners are always looking for new
| ways to monetise their lots, you may be able to tinker with
| biochar production/sequestration without the big upfront
| investment, this guy did it with a few weekends (and free
| labour from people who wanted to learn the technique) a year.
| swiley wrote:
| Drying plants in the sun is a surprisingly effective way to
| heat a building, I grew up with it.
|
| The problems are: burning wet stuff is terrible (surface
| wetness isn't bad, it's the moisture inside the biomass that
| causes problems.) Secondly you can't just straight up burn it
| because you'll get a lot of heat that you don't need so you'll
| usually burn it in cycles and you'll get a lot of soot at the
| beginning and end of the cycles so you need to either wash the
| exhaust or make sure you don't have nearby neighbors downwind
| (in places like this that means within a quarter mile or so.)
| Pfhreak wrote:
| For sure, excess heat is something that is interesting to
| explore.
|
| Oregon Kilns are basically just a big metal bucket that burns
| top down and produces biochar, but burns off the syngas.
|
| https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/detail/or/newsroom.
| ..
|
| Other systems try to capture the syngas/bio oil to generate
| electricity or capture the heat for heating/other uses.
| jabl wrote:
| This seems like a nice improvement for processing biomass waste
|
| - less of the input energy wasted compared to traditional
| charcoal production.
|
| - retains coal advantages compared to less processed biomass,
| namely higher heating value meaning cheaper to transport, and
| easier to store (doesn't rot if it sits in a pile outside)
|
| However, as a side note I'm very sceptical wrt bioenergy. Using
| biomass waste for energy is fine if there's no other use for it,
| but growing biomass for energy production really isn't. Next to
| climate breakdown, the most serious ecological problem we're
| facing is biodiversity loss, largely due to conversion of
| wilderness to farmland. We really need to get past the idea that
| every hectare of land has to be put to "productive" use. Much
| better to produce our energy with wind, solar, hydro, geothermal,
| and nuclear, and rewild nature to the extent possible.
| swiley wrote:
| It's important to note that (although I only skimmed it and am
| not a professional chemist) they only talk about hydrocarbons up
| to 6 carbons long (hexane) where coal/coke from the ground can
| have much longer hydrocarbons (what paraffin wax is made of.)
| This is because the hexane comes (probably) from sugar molecules
| (or monomers in things like cellulose) which are chains or rings
| of six carbon atoms (with other stuff bonded to them.)
|
| It's possible to lengthen the hydrocarbon chains but it's very
| expensive.
|
| EDIT: yeah after reading more carefully they're doing what I
| thought (side note: the dick bar was pretty annoying, at least it
| goes away when you scroll down but coming back when scroll up and
| covering the text I was trying to read is just dumb.) They're
| drying/dehydrating the biomass by heating it without oxygen and
| then distilling off the VOCs. Then they take the remaining gunk,
| crush it up, sift it, and dry it.
| hootbootscoot wrote:
| climate crisis, hello... fossil fuels are a dangerous anachronism
| to be gotten over, hello...
|
| (renewable or not, net carbon emitter and HOW...)
| agumonkey wrote:
| while we're on cellulose, anyone heard of homelab-scale methods
| to produce cellulasic enzymes ?
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