As usual, I read articles like this one with a dash of skepticism. But still, I found it interesting enough to post it here.


http://www.sciencealert.com/renewable-instant-coal-the-fuel-of-the-future


I wonder what @GopherT has to say.

 

What they don't tell you is how much energy is needed to do the heating and drying to produce the stuff .

 

As usual, I read articles like this one with a dash of skepticism. But still, I found it interesting enough to post it here.


http://www.sciencealert.com/renewable-instant-coal-the-fuel-of-the-future


I wonder what @GopherT has to say.

It's all about total energy cycle. So, I need to know how much energy it takes to roast these things at 250C and how long (and the efficiency of the oven). This is subtracted to all the CO2 "savings". Alternatively, they can use their own extra wood-pellets to do the heating. Hopefully there are enough pellets left over to sell.


Then, how much energy does it take to cut massive swaths of Forrest to make the same amount of energy as a 100 rail cars of coal (used by a mid- to large-sized power plant each day). And what kind of outrage will we see when 100 railcars of wood chips are cut each day. And the erosion and the energy and labor needed to replant the hillsides with new saplings to start over. And the 30 to 50 years to restart.

 

A 50' pine tree weights 1 to 2 tons and takes 30 years to grow.

Since green, fresh sawn pine is about 50% water,
And the Oxygen content of cellulose is a bit over 50% (oxygen is baked out (as H2O) as it is roasted - along with methanol),

So, to fill a hopper car with 80 tons of wood-based coal pellets, they will need ((80 tons/50%)/50%) = 320 tons of fresh cut pine or 150 to 300 trees.

To fill 100 railcars we are up to 15000 to 30000 trees per day.

Oh, wait, the energy density is only 2/3 of coal so we'll need 50% more (150 railcars per day)

22000 to 45000 trees per day.

7,5M to 15M trees per year!

Now there is a solid strategy to keep a coal-fired power plant burning with green energy.

 

It would work to a point being it apparently works with most any cellulosic biomass material which between modern farming and the huge amount of natural non domesticated but harvestable/collectible plant biomass that dies every year and is recycled by nature anyway, the raw tonnages of material are technically very much available.

The problem is the collection process and what that would cost which has been the #1 stumbling block of all mega scale full renewable and AE fuels/energy concepts.
Too often the natural renewable sources are cost prohibitive to work with on large scales simply due the the overall effort and costs required to just collect and process them into what we need.
Everything that would work for the base input stock is too spread out to be economically practical on the collection end of the system.

That's the primary limitation I see in the whole concept being the process of making charcoal is well understood and in use, but just not scaled or easily scalable to this sort of industrial application required to replace existing coal usage which in the US has been steadily dropping for several decades.

Plus if the end goal is just burning the biomass to make heat why waste the time, effort and energy of processing the biomass into charcoal briquettes rather than just burning it (or minimally processing it to be burnable) directly where it's needed given raw biomass fueled industrial boilers and power plant tech is already well understood anyway?

http://biomassmagazine.com/plants/listplants/biomass/US/