[Gasification] Help with Reproductive Biomass and Pine Cones

[Thomas Reed]

Dear All:

Mother Nature makes two kinds of biomass - *constructive*, very strong 
and ~25% lignin; and *reproductive*, full of starch and oil and 
hemiscellulose, but less or no lignin.  Constructive biomass is trees 
and stalks where strength is paramount;  reproductive comes in *seeds*, 
*shells*,  *cobs* and *cones*, where the structure has been adapted to 
the needs of the next generation. 

My 40,000 Btu/hr pellet stove is a useful test bed for some of these 
fuels.  Cherry pits work quite well though they are higher in ash than 
wood pellets for which it was designed.  The high starch pits and corn 
leave too much ash.  I gather that some pellet stoves have a much wider 
appetite and can burn corn.  I'm going to test small wood chips (<1/2" 
max). 

Our 3 kW WoodGas stove requires smaller particle size biomass and can 
use material generally ignored as fuel.  We have been using cherry pits 
and tropical fruit pits with great success, both in our gasifiers and 
stoves.  I recently collected a bushel of Eucalyptus seeds under a 
single tree in Santa Cruz and tested them in the stove.  They are very 
dense and burn as long as wood pellets.  My son in Long Beach regularly 
burns (top down) the *Magnolia cones *that litter the sidewalks and 
parks there for morning heat.  We have burned *oat hulls *(from 
Heartland Farms) successfully in the camp stove.  Food processing plants 
are buried in these specialized forms of biomass.  They probably 
constitute > 10% of each plant and are available at harvest time for 
processing into useful biofuel.
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On a recent walk I picked up a dozen Ponderosa pine cones.  The "petals" 
look like they would be a great fuel - if you could separate them from 
the central stalk.  I spend 1/2 an hour trying to pull off the petals, 
drilling out the central tube that supports them.  I learned a lot about 
the structure - but also that the petals are very firmly attached.  I 
put 80 g of the petals in the stove, making a pile 3.8 inches in 
diameter by 3.5 tall - a very low density of 0.13 g/liter. They only 
burned about 10 minutes.
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Grrr.  If we are going to learn to use the generous supplies of 
reproductive biomass, we need to learn how to process them simply and 
which ones are dense and useful. 

I would appreciate comments from this group on the various forms of 
reproductive biomass they have used for energy. 


Yours for a biomass future...

TOM REED               THE BIOMASS ENERGY FOUNDATION