A Million Herreshoff Furnaces
Don Libby
"Million Solar Roofs" initiative, first announced by President Clinton in
June of 1997 to create 3,000 Megawatts of solar electricity - enough to
displace two or three large coal-fired power plants.
Today I would like to announce an initiative that would actually have a hope
of making a dent in the CO2 problem: a Million Herreshoff Furnaces!
A Herreshoff Furnace is a continuous multiple-hearth charcoal kiln, capable
of producing about 3,000 metric tons of charcoal per year, equivalent to
about 9,000 tons of CO2, or the lifetime per-capita CO2 emissions of 5
Americans. Operating a million of these continuously for 60 years and
burying the charcoal would completely remove the CO2 emissions of 300
Million Americans from the global atmosphere.
Currently about 800,000 metric tons of charcoal are produced in the US per
year. A Million Herreshoff Furnaces would produce roughly 3,750 times more
charcoal per year. So, with a four-thousand fold expansion of the US
charcoal industry, a four-fold expansion of the global nuclear power
industry would have a hope of making a dent in the CO2 problem.
Industrial Charcoal Making:
http://www.fao.org/docrep/X5555E/x5555e00.htm#Contents
-dl
hgerh...@yahoo.co.uk
> of making a dent in the CO2 problem: a Million Herreshoff Furnaces!
the H2 for energy and bury the CO2? If you bury the C you also bury
nearly all of the energy content of the biomass.
Mind you, I am aware of reasons why you'd rather bury the charcoal (H2
is difficult to store, gasfication is capital intensive, it also costs
some energy to bury the CO2).
Don Libby
About half the C is used in the syngas stream that drives the pyrolytic
production cycle (and ultimately returned to the atmosphere), the other half
is buried for the express purpose of REMOVING carbon from the atmosphere.
It is not enough for our energy supply simply to go carbon neutral - we must
quickly go carbon negative if we are to avoid greater than 2 degrees Celsius
warming.
You are right, of course, from a practical economic perspective, it would
make much more sense to either combust the biomass directly or to create a
useful fuel for sale, rather than dump carbonized biomass in a landfill.
Some combination of fuel production, char sequestration in agricultural
soils, and carbon offset credits would make economic sense (here are some
potentially economical ways of doing this: http://www.dynamotive.com/
http://www.bestenergies.com/.)
My point is that we have been pulling carbon out of the ground and putting
it into the atmosphere on an industrial scale for many decades, and now it
is time to start pulling carbon out of the atmosphere and putting it into
the ground on an industrial scale for many decades.
-dl