Carbon-Negative Energy Machines Catching On 228
An anonymous reader writes "All Power Labs in Berkeley, California has produced and sold over 500 machines that take in dense biomass and put out energy. What makes the machines special is that instead of releasing carbon back into the atmosphere, it's concentrated into a lump charcoal that makes excellent fertilizer. The energy is produced cheaply, too; many of the machines went to poor nations who normally pay much more per kilowatt. '[T]he PowerPallets are still relatively simple, at least as far as their users are concerned. For one, thing Price explained, much of the machine is made with plumbing fixtures that are the same everywhere in the world. That means they're easy to repair. At the same time, while researchers at the 50 or so institutions that have bought the machines are excited by opening up the computer control system and poking around inside, a guy running a corn mill in Uganda with a PowerPallet "will never need to open that door and never will," Price said.'"
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Re:Fertilizer? (Score:5, Informative)
Charcoal appears to be a very useful soil addition.
For further reading look into terra preta [wikipedia.org] and its modern incarnation biochar [wikipedia.org].
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*laughs* I was just linking to those above, having not seen yours.
Re:Fertilizer? (Score:4, Informative)
Its not pure carbon, you get all the useful trace elements and minerals as well trapped in the carbon matrix and the ash.
Re:Fertilizer? (Score:5, Funny)
It's got what plants need!
But does it have electrolytes?
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Actually, yes, it does have some electrolytes.
Re:Fertilizer? (Score:5, Informative)
interesting point:
but it is indeed so that in the agriculture you burn plants on a field to fertilize the new crops, if you want to reduce your fertilizer-costs.
However this technique is used to increase the nitrogen, and other things level in the field.
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I guess since slash-and-burn growing was discovered.
which is like.. I don't know. couple of thousands of years at least..
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maybe in amazon now, but that's not the general idea.
it's done for planting new forests too, after the sellable trees have been cut. but just clearing wasn't the point in many cultures.
Re: Fertilizer? (Score:4, Informative)
But, in general, it's not the carbon in ash that's a fertilizer - it's potassium.
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And bananas.
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Don't be silly. There are no bananas is Kazakhstan.
Charcoal is a soil conditioner. Not fertilizer. (Score:2)
So this process is definitely not producing loads of free fertilizer. Energy? Sure. Gasification has been around for decades. And it sounds mor
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Right. And the process of rotting (microbes and other small animals eating dead plant matter) releases much of the carbon as CO2 back into the atmosphere.
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the way it was done at a small forest clearing 20 years ago when I was a kid was that we would burn the leftover(from the trees that were sold) in piles. in the traditional finnish method you wouldn't generally just burn huge areas at a time anyways.
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Well, modern, except that it seems to have been done widely in the Amazon in precolumbian times.
Slash and burn as practice more recently seems to be a more recent degraded form of the same, under pressure.
You got Slash and Burn wrong. (Score:2)
Slash and burn will enrich the soil with nitrogen(fertilizer) and pottasium(fertilizer).
The CO2 will go directly into the atmosphere.
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Too bad slash and burn tends to destroy the soil after some five or six cycles.
Re:Fertilizer? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Fertilizer? (Score:5, Interesting)
Since when has charcoal been something to bury instead of burn? Plants get carbon out of the air, they don't need to absorb it through their roots.
-jcr
Uh... Since the dawn of time itself? Plants eat each other's bio-nutrients in an endless cycle. The decay of carbon-rich plant matter creates fertilized soil for new plants.
This post is a good example of how disconnected humanity has become to the way nature actually works.
Better yet, outfit these places with urine-diverting toilets and combine the urine with the pure carbon charcoal, maybe mixed with the fully composted solid waste and you'll end up with not just plant crack but plant super-crack. It creates a carbon-nitrogen-phosphorus fertilizer that's just as good if not better than the most expensive commercially-produced fertilizers, for a tiny fraction of the cost. Essentially, free.
If you think I'm just making things up you'll find if you do some research that many places are already using this process both to reduce dependence on commercial fertilizers and to reduce the energy and money required to process waste. Not just on small scales or undeveloped countries either. I'm now wondering how well this gasification process can scale up.
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The charcoal should really be sealed off from the biosphere somehow, if you burn it or bury it the machine is carbon-neutral rather than carbon-negative.
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Using biochar as a soil amendment does seem, at least in some environments* to sequester carbon for the long term. But I suspect that you are correct that whether this is carbon negative is largely a definitional thing.
* And maintaining soil fertility in tropical climes has historically been particularly difficult. Heck maintaining soil fertility anywhere has been problematic.
I'd love a scaled down version... (Score:4, Interesting)
$27,000 is pretty steep. If you could scale something down so you could say, dispose of household greenwaste through it and generate power to feed the grid for a few hours a week, you'd really be on to something. Though this is in a big part because I've always dreamed of having my trash go straight to an incinerator...
Re: I'd love a scaled down version... (Score:2)
you would have to sort your trash into foodscraps and plastics as burning plastics could be harmful without catalytic converts and percipitators. and the cost of the control systems wouldnt scale. what would make more sense is the use of one of these units in a neighborhood where people drop off sorted foodscraps into a solar dryer to bleed off energy robbing moisture and are paid an energy credit. sort of like can deposit machines. this would amoratize the cost of the unit over the neighborhood and allow t
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With an Arduino I am sure a control system could be built inexpensively and open source, not that the company making this would like that. You would have to work around or invalidate their patent possibly depending on what they have patented.
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You might be amazed at how little food is considered "scraps" in a really poor neighborhood....
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Just buy photovoltaics for half that price, and use a bit of the half you saved to make compost out of whatever you would burn.
But I'd also avoid making compost in an urban environment. It's neither confortable nor healthy.
The price is right? (Score:2)
From the article ...
For now, All Power Labs is making only 10 kW and 20 kW versions, though the U.S. Department of Energy and the University of Minnesota recently gave the company a grant to build a 100 kW version.
If this thing is the greatest invention since sliced bread, why does the company (selling $5 million worth of machines per year) need a university grant for product development. Something doesn't pencil out here.
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proven wood gas technology since 1839 (Score:5, Informative)
Finland's eco-mobilist association has a gallery [ekoautoilijat.fi] of hobbyist build wood gas mobiles, some even with designs specs and tips. Chairman on the Finland's currently most popular party, which unfortunately isn't The Pirate Party [piraattipuolue.fi] which among others has pirate bay and privacy activist Peter Sunde [wikipedia.org] as a candidate in the coming EU- parliament election, has build his own wood gas automobile - " El Kamina [google.com]" which by the way is build on top Chevrolet El Camino, which...
______________________
No, I didn't just wrote that
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But those combusted all of the wood and did not leave carbon behind as charcoal.
Re: About what I was thinking (Score:2)
wood tar can be captured and gasified if the non gasified portion is caoturedb in a filter medium made of fuel and cycled back into the gasifier. part of your fuel then becomes the filter.
So is the charcoal worth more as a fertilizer? (Score:3)
TIA (Score:2)
I live in Africa and I can verify that this is a foolish thing to say. We have to open all kinds of doors never meant to be opened and fix thing using materials and tools that in any other place might seem like a joke. But we can, and we do, not because we don't know better but because the things we need to fix were engineered to be used in friendly climates by people who grew up with machines and who
Re: TIA (Score:2)
I believe the intention wasn't that africans wouldnt repair the machine. rather that you wouldnt need to rebuild the computerised combustion control system which is probably environmentally sealed. which seems accurate. Am I wrong on that point?
Carbon negative my foot (Score:2)
Smug hipster twat (Score:2)
Actually, the reasons are known. Gas has a poor energy density. This is why you see those huge great balloons on top of WW2 vehicles. Price probably thinks they're to make bombs bounce off.
Compression requires specialized equipment and well made containers, which are expensive. The main active components of the gas are hydrogen (which leaks) and carbon mono
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Why use this for cars? Fixed base load generation is a far better idea (assuming fuel supply and other problems have been solved). And then you can charge an electric car, if you really need one.
Charcoal? (Score:2)
mmmm fire up the grill!
economics generally don't work out (Score:2)
1) Aside from a colocation with an agriculture / waste facility, you will have to scour a large radius to get the amount of biomass to burn reliably. There is significant transport cost to that.
2) For low grade biomass that you're talking about, you're incurring additional fuel and $ to gasify the biomass, to then burn it. This doesn't really make sense. If you're just generating power, you would probably ju
The only thing ... (Score:2)
The crop cycles into which this technology is introduced will have to be examined carefully to evaluate its impact. Is it better to burn or gassify the non-food p
Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
Not ALL the chemical energy of the original fuel, though.
It's a gassifier and engine/gen pair. You heat the fuel in an oxygen-poor environment (the heat comes from burning a part of the fuel itself using what little oxygen is present) which releases volatile compounds and produces carbon monoxide. This syngas is then fed into an internal combustion engine where it's burned to completion to produce power.
Not groundbreaking technology... but proven to work and be a viable means of getting power, especially if you happen to have a lot of biowaste you can throw in there.
Sure, you CAN burn the charcoal leftovers. Might be useful as a cooking fuel, for example. Even if you did that, you're still only carbon neutral. It can also be used to improve soil quality to help grow food or cash crops... which seems like a better use IMHO.
=Smidge=
Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
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Nothing about this machine is vaguely high tech or new. Linked to is a basic how to put together by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA208249 [dtic.mil]
And during WW2, the were used in the US, UK, FR, and DE for were attached to vehicles to provide a fuel source.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_gas_generator#Origins [wikipedia.org]
Re: Bullshit (Score:5, Informative)
Not quite. the innovations are in the control systems. that is what they have patents for. also standard gasification tech tends to convert the biomass to ash. this machine converts it into charcoal which both creates fertilizer and locks a portion of the carbon away mostly creating hydrogen and co. which are combusted into water and co2. the control over the combustion process that allows charcoal production over ash production is imporant as gasifier ash shakedown to make room for more fuel is the biggest problem keeping gasifiers from being used in diy stationary power generation. This tech they have developed dodges this problem.
Re:Not Bullshit... Hot TOTTI (Score:3)
Here's the innovative high tech part:
"These smarts are further extended by a multi-stage gasification architecture, and an innovative “waste heat” capture and recycling system — what we call the Tower of Total Thermal Integration (Hot TOTTI). In traditional systems, hot engine exhaust and hot output wood gas have been “problems” requiring extra space and cooling components to counter. With the GEK Hot TOTTI, we’ve transformed these “wastes” into useful new
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Batch biochar production has been steadily increasing for a decade, so that is not new.
But All Power Labs has developed a continuous flow process, and that is breaking new ground. These rigs could be quite useful in reducing the expense of waste management.
Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
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It makes me a little gassy.
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You heat the fuel in an oxygen-poor environment (the heat comes from burning a part of the fuel itself using what little oxygen is present) which releases volatile compounds and produces carbon monoxide. This syngas is then fed into an internal combustion engine where it's burned to completion to produce power.
So, not carbon-neutral, just carbon-reduced. And definitely not carbon-negative. Carbon-reduced can still be useful, of course.
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So, not carbon-neutral, just carbon-reduced. And definitely not carbon-negative. Carbon-reduced can still be useful, of course.
Are you sure you know what those terms mean?
Burning biomass and having carbon left over means it's carbon negative. The carbon emitted as CO2 minus the carbon absorbed from growing the biomass is a negative number.
=Smidge=
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Yeah, no. The point is that you run it on biomass, so the whole cycle is carbon-neutral or carbon-negative:
CO2 + H2O --photosynthesis-> biomass --power-pallet-> CO2 + H2O + charcoal
Stop there, and you've got some energy out, and if you bury the charcoal, it's carbon-negative. Or use the charcoal as fuel, e.g. for cooking/heating (hopefully replacing fossil fuel currently used in those roles), and you get
CO2 + H2O --photosynthesis-> biomass --power-pallet-> CO2 + H2O + charcoal --charcoal-burning
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No.
Plus, I've been doing it on Slashdot much longer than on Fark. Neener neener.
=Smidge=
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"Lump charcoal" is carbon that still has the chemical energy in it.
They're not claiming to extract all the energy.
They're claiming to produce a useful amount of energy from widely available material and be carbon-negative, and help crops grow . Win-win-win.
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Whether it's a win or a lose depends on how much energy you need, now much fuel you have lying around and how much the "fertilizer" is worth to you.
A third-world farmer might see a win where a first world energy junkie doesn't.
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The points that aren't being stressed here is that the biochar sequesters a significant amount of carbon in the soil for the long term, and can significantly improves soil structure and nutrient availability. (It's not a fertilizer, though for a popular article I guess that might be a fine hair to split.) The terms to look up are biochar and terra preta.
I would still prefer to see their numbers, as whether they're "carbon" negative is almost certainly a matter of definition. My guess would be that they're s
Re:Key phrase (Score:5, Insightful)
many energy sources in the developing world can cost 50 or 60 cents per kilowatt, a PowerPallet can do it for a dime
Which does not really add up with costing "less than $2 a watt", unless it should have said "a lot less" in which case $2 is just misleading. I would be interested to know which is true, though. The technology seems both interesting and useful.
Re:Key phrase (Score:5, Informative)
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It's a 10kW system, and looks like it costs $27,000.
$27,000 / 10kW is $2.70 per watt, right? That's not less than $2/watt.
That was probably supposed to be 50 or 60 cents per kWh. 10 cents per kWh is not bad. You can probably even harness the heat from the unit, too.
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You're interested in producing energy. Watts are not a measure of energy, but of rate of change (production or dissipation) of energy.
For example, store all this unit's energy in the mother of all capacitors, and discharge that by shorting it, and you'll get a mind-boggling number of watts. So you would justifiably be able to reword the meaningless press-release statement as "less than a tiny frac
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For example, store all this unit's energy in the mother of all capacitors, and discharge that by shorting it, and you'll get a mind-boggling number of watts.
Yeah, 0W really is a "mind-boggling number". Maybe not as high as you expected, though.
Re: Key phrase (Score:3)
I think you're mistaken as all powerplants are judged by this metric. Dollars per watt is the cost to add x amount of generating capacity to your grid.
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And one-time overheads *were* mentioned, therefore the more useful metric is the joule-based one, rather than the
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Time has nothing to do with grid capacity.
You can't call up your customers and tell them to turn half their lights off but let them turn them on for twice a long because you're provisioning your power output in W/h instead of watts.
Generation must be able to copy with peak demand.
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The cost of eletricity generators are usualy measured over their peak power. $2/W is exactly the number you need to know for determining how much power you can buy, and exactly the number you need to compare with alternatives (for example, $2/W makes it a quite expensive power source to aquire - near double the price of photovoltaics).
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The cost of power plants are always quoted as $/W of installed capacity. Nuclear works out to be about $10/W, solar $3/W, etc.
The 10 kW system is $19,000 ($1.90/W), 20 kW system is $27,000 ($1.35/W). This is a low cost power plant.
Also, considering that the fuel should be free or very low cost since it is agricultural waste, the power produced should also be very low cost.
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The fuel will be free right up to the point there's a demand then it will go up. Turkey guts, fry oil, etc are no longer cheap or free. Hell I can't even get scrap or chipped wood like I used to from a landscaping company at the low price I was paying. They're selling all their scrap to a company making wood pellets for stoves.
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That's not simplifying, that's removing any reference to a rate of change. And thus completely changing the meaning.
And if you think your solar cell is a power *source*, you are so freaking off base, there's no point in attempting meaningful scientific dialogue with you, you have no respect for terminology at all.
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You seem to be hung up on the precise scientific terminology. But the metric used ($/watt hour) is not a scientific metric and doesn't pretend to be. It is a valid way of evaluating and comparing the relative financial viability of various technologies.
Being able to compare the startup and operating costs to produce a watt is useful. After all, isn't that's how consumers are charged for electricity?
Is it scientifically accurate? Probably not. Is it useful in the context it's being used? I think so.
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Further down the journalist writes:
many energy sources in the developing world can cost 50 or 60 cents per kilowatt, a PowerPallet can do it for a dime
Which does not really add up with costing "less than $2 a watt", unless it should have said "a lot less" in which case $2 is just misleading. I would be interested to know which is true, though. The technology seems both interesting and useful.
another post cleared up the "less than $2 a watt" as being the initial machine cost
I suspect that the comparison in the developing world of "50 to 60 cents per kilowatt" is a typo, they probably meant "50 to 60 cents per kilowatt-hour" which is the cost of electricity. That the gasifier can do it for 10 cents per kWr is pretty amazing, I pay more than that...but I guess biomass\feedstock for the gasifer is probably super-cheap in the developing world
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Re:Key phrase (Score:5, Informative)
10kW is essentially the "top speed", and the kWh is the "fuel economy" or more like the miles travelled. You don't have to go at top speed, and if you're going at half speed you're only putting out 5kW, but will still get the same amount of power after 2 hours instead of 1.
The fuel consumption is also important to compute cost. For the 20kW machine, it burns 50 lbs of biomass per hour, which means 50 lbs of biomass is converted to 20kW for an hour, or 50 lbs to get 20kWh. (You can probably burn this over longer times than an hour.)
That's actually a fair amount of power, and 20kWh can power several houses for that one hour. If it's linearly scalable to smaller numbers, that would be very good since a house might only use 20kWh over an entire day. It would allow someone to run solar power during the day, and this thing at night (putting out 1kW) and during rainy days, with only a small battery farm.
But there are too many unknowns in the article to make a good guess.
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Please explain.
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That quote cannot be explained because it's dead wrong.
Google on "biochar". That is what All Power Labs is producing. It is a soil amendment with remarkable properties.
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And you get the bonus gasifier acid ash that you can use to destroy neighbors soil.
Summary says: "...concentrated into a lump charcoal that makes excellent fertilizer".
I wonder who's right?
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It's not exactly fertilizer, though I'd consider that an acceptable shorthand for a popular piece. Adding charcoal to soil can both improve nutrient availability and long term soil structure. (I'm including two link,s biochar being the general concept, and terra preta being a particularly interesting historical example.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta [wikipedia.org]
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If you instead of releasing that CO2 are turning the CO2 (directly or indirectly) into C you are removing all of that CO2 from the normal carbon cycle.
Imagine doing this to every plant for 1Million years. At some point all the carbon in the world would be in the form of charcoal, and there would be no CO2 in the atmosphere. Not advised, but thats how.
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And this is why it's important to understand that while biochar improves soil fertility, it is not fertilizer, and is a viable long term form of carbon sequestration.
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Imagine using this burn every plant for a lot of years. At some point all the carbon in the world would be in the form of charcoal, and there would be no CO2 in the atmosphere.
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Just because a tree did it in the past, doesn't mean this device is doing it by using a tree.
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Carbon neutral and non-neutral relate to releasing carbon that is trapped (i.e. oil, coal) and doesnt participate in the "short-term" carbon cycle. You can plant and burn trees for eternity and the amount of carbon going into and from the air will be (almost) neutral. If you turn trees into coal, but can grow more trees, you will slowly deplete carbon from the atmosphere, and have it in your trunk.
If instead you take all the oil and coa
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Yes, but as soon as you cut down your source it no longer is converting, so if you are going to use the plant's CO2 in your favor, you must also include the loss of CO2 opportunity capture - all of the CO2 the plant DIDN'T capture if you'd let it run it's normal life course.
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If instead when they die (at your hand or otherwise) you convert them to a block of Carbon then that CO2 is removed from the cycle.
Its true, not all carbon in the carbon cycle is in the atmosphe
Re: no thats carbon neutral (Score:2)
If being wrong about electric vehicle pollution makes you an eco-tard, congratulations. You're an eco-tard.
Sierra Club [sierraclub.org]
Popular Science [popsci.com]
Or maybe we can all just conduct ourselves with a little more respect. That would be really nice.
Re:It's not negative, it's neutral at best (Score:5, Informative)
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I thought the same thing. Unless you're pulling carbon out of the air and sequestering it, it's not negative. The amount of carbon burned or lost is probably negligible enough to call it "neutral" but it certainly isn't negative.
FWIW - this is similar to how amateur pyrotechnicians make certain types of charcoal for special firework effects. Most commercial charcoal isn't really speciated, so if you want willow charcoal, you have to make it yourself.
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Actually, plumbing fixtures are one of the (few) exceptions: Coarse treading on plumbing is not metric in most places. Fine threading is, but coarse threading with inch-sized pipes is available basically everywhere.
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The world is metric
That's true. While only a tiny minority of the world is still stuck on imperial units, the plumbing fittings of those sizes seem to be standard. At least in (metric) europe - not just the UK, fittings are available in "inches". Since they're all made in china, it would follow that the sizes are also available globally, too.
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When I was doing some renovation, everything I bought was in metric units, including plumbing pipes, joints etc, as well as wood and other stuff. I live in Sweden though
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In metric countries 1/2" is called 15/21 and 1" is called 26/34 but othewise they are the same.
The two numbers correspond to the approximate interior and exterior diameter in mm.
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Call it 1"NPS or DIN 25, steel pipe dimensions and threads are the same almost everywhere. (Note that the Nominal Pipe Sizes of common small steel pipes are not all that close to the actual ID or OD, anyway.)
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I live in metric world, and as a solar thermal installer, I can verify that all plumbing fixtures are indeed measured in inches. Knowing thermal installations made in the US, I can say we use the same copper fixtures.
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I was wondering about that, thanks for clearing it up. But even if it's not as "carbon negative" as claimed, it's still a very useful technology with a large niche to fill, especially in the developing world. I'm curious though how it compares to methanol fermentation in terms of conversion efficiency. Both are fairly low-tech solutions, suitable for DIY in 3rd-world areas, and both can drive existing gasoline engines with minor modifications. But methanol can use a somewhat wider range of feedstocks, and h
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And biochar is fertilizer *nods earnestly* (Though to be fair, for a popular article that bit at least might be a fine hair to split.)
My guess is the claim of carbon negativity is that they're sequestering more carbon than they're releasing. (I have no idea if this is true.)
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It doesn't say that in the article. That's the point. The parent is saying the article is wrong because the thing does release some carbon into the air, and he bases this claim on the fact that he has done hands-on research with this very product. IANA chemical engineer, but I know enough about wood combustion to suspect he's right about this. It doesn't mean the apparatus is useless, it just means the person who wrote the article didn't do his/her homework well enough. (Yeah, I know... that never happens w
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There is global warming and it hasn't even stopped for the past 15 years.