Can I turn my theory into reality? Fossil fuel free, 100% off grid, but modcons

[tree monkey]

Just now, Alistair1357 said:

The argument here isn't really how coal was formed, rather it is whether coal is still forming. As the Wiki page tells us - 90% of the coal formed in a specific prehistoric period when certain conditions were favourable. Those conditions since that period have been sporadic and intermittent since, the coal seams found around the world point to this.

Peat is still being formed, given enough time it is possible it may turn into coal, yes the wiki article suggests the massive deposition of proto (?) Coal was due to a specific issue but it is still being formed, which is why peat lands are massive carbon sinks

[Briss]

2 hours ago, Alistair1357 said:

Er, no, it's not. Coal was formed before evolution developed bacteria to break down dead matter. Once that happened, no more coal.

 

9 minutes ago, Alistair1357 said:

The argument here isn't really how coal was formed, rather it is whether coal is still forming. As the Wiki page tells us - 90% of the coal formed in a specific prehistoric period when certain conditions were favourable. Those conditions since that period have been sporadic and intermittent since, the coal seams found around the world point to this.

 

Er,no ... our discussion was about how coal was formed as from your first post!😀

 

Now I completely agree with the second part of your second post.... we no longer have the huge Carboniferous Period forests and swamps necessary for the large sale production of coal. Digging up all the peat bogs doesn't help either.

 

Edited for clarity.

Edited November 6, 2021 by Briss

[Momac]

13 hours ago, nicknorman said:

It may come from renewable sources, but no doubt its manufacture has a carbon footprint, and that’s before you consider the swathes of the Amazon rainforest cut down to grow the stuff.

Being carbon neutral doesn't necessarily mean zero carbon is used to manufacture something.  Some offsetting is always required . 

HVO is no good if it involves rain forests . Used cooking oil eg from hotels and restaurants (not just chip shops use oil) plus vegetable matter that would otherwis ego to waste may be used .

 HVO seems ideal for use on boats . Far less polluting than diesel.

[Tracy D'arth]

10 minutes ago, MartynG said:

Being carbon neutral doesn't necessarily mean zero carbon is used to manufacture something.  Some offsetting is always required . 

HVO is no good if it involves rain forests . Used cooking oil eg from hotels and restaurants (not just chip shops use oil) plus vegetable matter that would otherwis ego to waste may be used .

 HVO seems ideal for use on boats . Far less polluting than diesel.

I bet HVO rots your wellies though.

[tree monkey]

23 minutes ago, Tracy D'arth said:

I bet HVO rots your wellies though.

Easily solved, don't wear wellies. 

Horrible bloody things anyway

[MtB]

1 hour ago, Briss said:

Er,no ... our discussion was about how coal was formed as from your first post!😀

 

Yes, it was started by my own flippant observation that coal is a renewable fuel just like wood, but with a longer timescale. 

 

I've a flipancy to offer about vegetarianism too. It's fine for vegetarians to eat beef, as the cows only eat grass. Surely that must be true? 

 

Anyway the point I was (too subtly) trying to work around to but got completely subsumed, was that whole concept of wood being a "renewable" fuel seems a fudge and 'weasel words' to me. Once the carbon has been captured in the wood, it appear to me better to leave it in the wood, not release it again by burning it. For the concept of renewability to even apply, surely you have to ensure the wood grows back that you just burned, to even stand still on your carbon emission account. Not just leave it to chance and hope for the best. 

[agg221]

9 minutes ago, MtB said:

 

Yes, it was started by my own flippant observation that coal is a renewable fuel just like wood, but with a longer timescale. 

 

I've a flipancy to offer about vegetarianism too. It's fine for vegetarians to eat beef, as the cows only eat grass. Surely that must be true? 

 

Anyway the point I was (too subtly) trying to work around to but got completely subsumed, was that whole concept of wood being a "renewable" fuel seems a fudge and 'weasel words' to me. Once the carbon has been captured in the wood, it appear to me better to leave it in the wood, not release it again by burning it. For the concept of renewability to even apply, surely you have to ensure the wood grows back that you just burned, to even stand still on your carbon emission account. Not just leave it to chance and hope for the best. 

Wood can be viably described as renewable, but it does depend on sourcing.

If you have a managed woodland, the wood grows, is harvested and used and the cycle repeats. If you have woodland being cleared to create farmland it does not.

Leaving it in the woodland does not usually retain the carbon - wood if left rots down quite quickly (except the heartwood of a few species). This releases the carbon on a slightly longer timescale than burning, but still very rapid compared with the climate change timescale.

There are huge acreages of unmanaged coppice in the UK alone, which are gradually degrading and reverting to poor quality forest. Their rate of carbon capture peaked decades ago and is now very slow. If you were to fell, use the wood (fuel) and allow regeneration they would grow far more vigorously and capture the carbon again. The same applies with short-rotation willow and poplar coppice which is planted in reasonable acreages now for biomass heating.

Where this works well is in niche applications such as off-grid, e.g. boats, where the volumes are small and other solutions are difficult to apply, and in very large power plants where it is cost-effective to scrub the exhaust gases, such as power stations converted to biomass (leaving aside the point that a lot of the biomass is currently imported rather than domestically produced). Where it doesn't work is as a mass option for domestic heating - too high a level of emissions to disperse.

 

Alec

[Tracy D'arth]

37 minutes ago, tree monkey said:

Easily solved, don't wear wellies. 

Horrible bloody things anyway

I have some nice wellies.

A pair of green Hunters and a pair of their gayly patterned ones, pink red green and blue spots.

I also have a pair of standard Dunlop in black, they are the softest of the lot.

Then there are my my galoshes, overshoes for when I have to go out dressed up in smart shoes.

I thought they were essential boating gear? 

[tree monkey]

10 minutes ago, MtB said:

 

 

 

Anyway the point I was (too subtly) trying to work around to but got completely subsumed, was that whole concept of wood being a "renewable" fuel seems a fudge and 'weasel words' to me. Once the carbon has been captured in the wood, it appear to me better to leave it in the wood, not release it again by burning it. For the concept of renewability to even apply, surely you have to ensure the wood grows back that you just burned, to even stand still on your carbon emission account. Not just leave it to chance and hope for the best. 

Wood is a completely renewable fuel...

With caveats, basically the tree has to be replaced by another, this almost always happens in the UK and Europe when coming from a commercial forest or the very rare small woodland managed for coppice, not so in rainforest areas.

 

It does get shaky to describe for example Arb waste as renewable because not all trees felled by Arbs will be replaced and it's unlikely Mrs miggins will allow natural regeneration in her back garden but none the less Arb waste is just that a waste product that would otherwise be dumped into landfill or more rarely sent to Drax or similar on the other hand most councils will replant the trees they fell, using it as firewood is a compromise or balance between carbon capture/waste disposal 

 

Trees in Unmanaged Woodlands eventually die anyway and will release some of their carbon into the atmosphere anyway, some will be caught in the organic content of the soil by the decomposition process, eventually that carbon will be taken up by the natural regeneration that will happen and the process will continue to cycle.

 

Arguably the best way to capture carbon in timber is to process the wood into building materials, this will then lock that carbon into the structure of the house as long as the house stands.

 

The concept of carbon netural fuel as far as timber is concerned is a bit of a fudge but it's basically correct as long as certain criteria is met, fundamentally timber is a short term carbon store, and the cycle of grow, fell, burn is (massive fudge here) a closed cycle.

 

The only way timber can be used as a carbon store to help reduce existing carbon levels is to plant more trees, this in itself is dodgy because, 

1, planting trees is fairly carbon heavy

2, many community type plantings get ignored after the initial enthusiasm and fail.

3, planting in the wrong areas often causes more ecological damage to the site and can cause the lose of a valuable habitat 

 

 

All if the above ignores the actual carbon cost of processing the timber of course because that would largely be from fossil fuel sources 

 

I could go on and on and on

 

 

 

 

[Momac]

1 hour ago, Tracy D'arth said:

I bet HVO rots your wellies though.

I would expect diesel would be worse 

Edited November 6, 2021 by MartynG

[tree monkey]

20 minutes ago, Tracy D'arth said:

I have some nice wellies.

A pair of green Hunters and a pair of their gayly patterned ones, pink red green and blue spots.

I also have a pair of standard Dunlop in black, they are the softest of the lot.

Then there are my my galoshes, overshoes for when I have to go out dressed up in smart shoes.

I thought they were essential boating gear? 

I really don't like them, I did have a pair of Hunters and to be fair the were the best I had ever worn, until they got punctured by a blackthorn which happened in the first day of wearing.

Decent gortex lined proper leather boots, thems the things

[john.k]

Anyway,why wait for coal.....you can burn the wood right now....Seems much simpler......there is a wood fired power station not too far from here......but their main income stream is from waste disposal charges ...........it was a sugar mill,and still is in cane season.

[MtB]

6 minutes ago, tree monkey said:

I could go on and on and on

 

Please do, the whole concept of renewable fuels comes across to me as a political fudge, but I am poorly edumacated on the subject and keen to learn more. 

 

This biomass thing especially. Is that not just a fudgy term for wood chips? How come we are importing biomass in ships to run power stations? That seems bonkers (if true).

 

It still strikes me as better to leave the carbon already captured in the wood to be released over a years or few decades than to burn it and release it TODAY.

 

Also, I gather China has a massive, massive underground coal mine fire which they don't put out for reasons I don't fully understand, that is said to be chucking out more carbon dioxide than the whole of the German economy, I heard in the pub the other day. Is that anywhere near the truth?! 

[Alan de Enfield]

6 minutes ago, MtB said:

Please do, the whole concept of renewable fuels comes across to me as a political fudge, but I am poorly edumacated on the subject and keen to learn more. 

 

Same here ................

 

Our recently opened local power station runs on straw, being in a rural 'crop growing' area there is a fair bit available, with tens of thousands of bales stored around the surrounding counties (until the local scrotes decide to set fire to them, and it takes weeks to bun out with daylight converted to darnkness for all those downwind).

 

Anyway - it now requires 1000's of lorry / tractor & trailer movements per week to keep the boilers fed. All those vehicles burning diesel at a prodigious rate can hardly be 'green'.

 

From what I can see every attempt to 'go green' has serious implications somewhere else in the supply chain, be it lorries delivering straw, or Lithium mines countryside destruction & pollution for battery production.

[tree monkey]

21 minutes ago, MtB said:

 

Please do, the whole concept of renewable fuels comes across to me as a political fudge, but I am poorly edumacated on the subject and keen to learn more. 

 

This biomass thing especially. Is that not just a fudgy term for wood chips? How come we are importing biomass in ships to run power stations? That seems bonkers (if true).

 

It still strikes me as better to leave the carbon already captured in the wood to be released over a years or few decades than to burn it and release it TODAY.

 

Also, I gather China has a massive, massive underground coal mine fire which they don't put out for reasons I don't fully understand, that is said to be chucking out more carbon dioxide than the whole of the German economy, I heard in the pub the other day. Is that anywhere near the truth?! 

The biomass thing is insane,  it's about scale, a small scale biomass plant on a farm for example where they can produce their own fuel from either clear fell plantation or rotational coppice is fine but as always industry has taken the subsidies and gone big, so yes they import biomass from abroad, that is this madness from an ecology point of view, never mind the carbon cost. 

 

As for leaving the timber in the tree, yes ideally but people need fuel and small scale timber harvesting can answer that need, all we are doing is introducing a step into the cycle, the carbon would be cycled anyway, it also adds a value to a woodland and makes it more likely for a landowner to be willing to invest and actually keep the wood, possibly increase the woodland cover.

 

There's more than one underground coal fire, I know of one in the states, apparently there's no practical way of putting it out.

 

Underground coal fire in America 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia_mine_fire

Edited November 6, 2021 by tree monkey

[Briss]

13 minutes ago, MtB said:

Also, I gather China has a massive, massive underground coal mine fire which they don't put out for reasons I don't fully understand, that is said to be chucking out more carbon dioxide than the whole of the German economy, I heard in the pub the other day. Is that anywhere near the truth?! 

It's on t'interweb.... so it must be true....🤔

 

The world’s longest burning fires: China’s unseen story Coal extraction remains a higher priority than putting out China's huge underground coal fires

[tree monkey]

1 minute ago, Alan de Enfield said:

 

Same here ................

 

Our recently opened local power station runs on straw, being in a rural 'crop growing' area there is a fair bit available, with tens of thousands of bales stored around the surrounding counties (until the local scrotes decide to set fire to them, and it takes weeks to bun out with daylight converted to darnkness for all those downwind).

 

Anyway - it now requires 1000's of lorry / tractor & trailer movements per week to keep the boilers fed. All those vehicles burning diesel at a prodigious rate can hardly be 'green'.

 

From what I can see every attempt to 'go green' has serious implications somewhere else in the supply chain, be it lorries delivering straw, or Lithium mines countryside destruction & pollution for battery production.

This I see as the real issue, not the process more the scale, we seem incapable of keeping it local and small scale, I know I mention Drax a lot but that's the classic example, we as a country could never provide sufficient biomass for that scale, it either should never have been built or used as some sort of back up, never as a long term producer 

[john.k]

Around 2032 or so ,it will be obvious none of the chicanery and greenness is working,and there will then be nuclear power generation everywhere....Which is what should have been done first,but is politically sensitive.

[Momac]

19 minutes ago, MtB said:

 

 

 

This biomass thing especially. Is that not just a fudgy term for wood chips? How come we are importing biomass in ships to run power stations? That seems bonkers (if true).

 

 

It is, unfortunately, true

[Briss]

2 minutes ago, john.k said:

Around 2032 or so ,it will be obvious none of the chicanery and greenness is working,and there will then be nuclear power generation everywhere....Which is what should have been done first,but is politically sensitive.

Nuclear fusion, (not fission) is making huge advances. There is lots of research trying to use Artificial Intelligence to control the plasma containment.

 

A headline from New Scientist:

Why cracking nuclear fusion will depend on artificial intelligence:

The promise of clean, green nuclear fusion has been touted for decades, but the rise of AI means the challenges could finally be overcome.

[john.k]

The best way to store carbon in wood ,is to cut down the large trees ,use the wood for house building,and allow new trees to grow in the space in the forest..........however this is politically unpalatable ,with greenies chained to trees on the telly.

[MtB]

6 minutes ago, john.k said:

Around 2032 or so ,it will be obvious none of the chicanery and greenness is working,and there will then be nuclear power generation everywhere....Which is what should have been done first,but is politically sensitive.

 

This is my opinion too. Nuclear is the only answer be it fission or fusion. Abundant leccy for near zero CO2 emission.

 

It will take the lights going out for yer average geezer on that apocryphal omnibus to vote for it though. Probably a generation or perhaps two before politicians get desperate enough pull the levers to actually do anything, then another generation for the nuclear to actually get built and come on line.  

[tree monkey]

6 minutes ago, john.k said:

The best way to store carbon in wood ,is to cut down the large trees ,use the wood for house building,and allow new trees to grow in the space in the forest..........however this is politically unpalatable ,with greenies chained to trees on the telly.

Most of the protests you see are for trees that would never see a saw bench, the building industry or more specifically the timber industry has no interest in old open grown or old knarley timber.

There is a very niche industry for the more interesting timber but it is very small.

 

Actually my comments are specifically about the UK the current protests in the US and Canada is about felling old growth (our ancient), there is plenty of second growth forest in the states, the old growth felling is just greed

[ditchcrawler]

I bit on Gardening world about how we can do our bit and a question of what sort of trees to set, The reply was ones that make a lot of wood and younger trees would take up more carbon that older ones. No idea if its right, the person who asked though that maybe an evergreen would be better as leaves all year

[Briss]

Does that mean we've all got to start growing those huge Leylandii conifer hedges again?😀