[Gasification] Charcoal Gasifier No 2.

[Harmon Seaver]

Ken Boak wrote:
> Harmon, Rolf & list,
> 
>>From my experience of small scale diesel generators, such as the slow speed 
> Lister 6hp, you will be lucky to achieve a conversion efficiency of better 
> than 20 to 25% of your fuel energy into electrical energy, and that is 
> liquid fuel such as diesel or waste vegetable oil.
> 
> When you move to biomass, whether by gasification or methane from anaerobic 
> digestion there are going to be further inefficiencies and complications in 
> maintaining a consistent quality of gas to keep the efficiency up.
> 
> Added to this are the energy inputs required to mechanically process the 
> fuel and deliver it to the gasifier.

    What's the difference? If you have a lot of biomass, that costs you
nothing to produce except the labor to harvest it, and because of the
huge transportation problem with biomass, you really have no other
viable market....
    Maybe the market will change, because of the energy crunch, but
transportation costs will accelerate right along with it. So you would
be in the position, say, of having to run a gasifier on your tractor to
haul the wood out of the forest, then another gasifier on the truck to
haul it to market -- seems a lot simpler to turn it into electricity
right where it is and sell that. But who knows how it will all play out?
    What else I foresee is that in the not-to-distant future you will
also run a heavy risk of being hijacked on the way to market and lose
everything, maybe even your life.



> 
> I doubt whether a 10kW or 15kW gasifier could be produced from junk, that 
> didn't require constant poking, adjusting and 100% supervision - thus 
> incurring a heavy labour cost. This might not be such of an issue in rural 
> India, where there is likely to be someone available to stand over the 
> gasifier, but not so cost effective in the West.

   What else will people have to do with their time? And really -- you
don't think an automated shaker/prodder would be simple enough to rig?


> 
> Ankur Scientific seem to have a fair amount of success with their small 
> gasifier installations, and provide some useful guidance to operating (fuel) 
> costs compared to diesel.
> 
> There is in my opinion a considerable amount of development work needed to 
> make small scale biomass systems less labour intensive, and cost effective 
> in terms of their fuel handling systems.
> 
> However I belive that the small home made gasifier, currrently  is unlikely 
> to be a source of income - more a pastime for enthusiasts, remembering that 
> it was only the dire fuel shortages of WW2 that promoted its early 
> development.

   Those same "dire fuel shortages" will be the norm by 2015, probably
within 5 years, according to the big oil company's recent report, as
well as the international energy agency's new report.


-- 
Harmon Seaver