RE: grass/wood briquettes/logs

[Anthony Nekut]

Bryan,

I’d be interested in buying a quantity of grass “slugs” if you have them so I can do some burn testing is a couple of woodstoves.  If you don’t have any, would it be possible to bring you some raw material and pay you to manufacture slugs?

 

Roger, Jock, please comment on this if possible.  Thanks.

 

Tony Nekut

Community Biomass Energy

 

From: Bryan Reggie [mailto:b.re...@bhsenergy.com]
Sent: Wednesday, August 04, 2010 9:31 AM
To: Anthony Nekut
Cc: Jerry H. Cherney; Tom Wilson; Elizabeth Keokosky
Subject: Re: grass/wood briquettes/logs

 

Tony,

Some of the questions are likely not for me, but I will put my $0.02 in.  I can only really speak for the BHS Energy Slugger system, so my answers may or may not apply to other briquetters.

1) BHS Energy has not done any combustion testing, but I do know that both the GARN wood boiler ( http://garn.com/ ) and the Brandelle Biomass boiler ( http://www.brandellebiomass.com/ ) have been tested with grass briquettes with very good results.  I believe that the Brandelle unit has been tested by the manufacturer itself and approved for use with briquettes.  The GARN unit should be able to take any size briqutte, but the Brandelle unit has been altered to feed up to 1.5" diameter briquettes but cannot handle anything larger.

2) I can only really speak for the BHS Energy Slugger system - for the Slugger, the moisture content for most materials must be about 15% or less, with 10-13% being ideal.  When the material gets to about 8% or less, the briquette gets somewhat brittle, and with higher moisture it will expand and fall apart as it comes out of the press.  As I understand it, the MC for making pellets requires exacting control, only being able to handle +/- 0.5% or +/- 1% in many cases.

3) Though we should have by now, we have not yet tried a mix.  I do not expect it to be an issue in the Slugger though.  Using the grass dies, I would expect up to a 10-15% wood mix would work, and using the wood dies I would expect up to a 10% grass mix would work.  For closer to 50/50 mixes, we may have to experiment to come up with a hybrid die, which we will eventually do anyway for mixes like this and also for corn stover.  As for mixing a high moisture material with a low moisture material, we have also not specifically tried this so I cannot say for sure.  It may work as long as the overall MC is within range, or it may not work because there is insufficient time for the moisture to be soaked up by the cells of the plant with the lower MC.  We have often found that surface moisture is not sufficient to bind the material together, and if we add water it must have time to soak into the material before it will work.

I am expecting that the others you emailed will have better answers to some of your questions and I look forward to hearing them.

Thanks for the questions and keep us in mind in the future.

_______________________
Bryan Reggie
Managing Member
BHS Energy LLC
http://bhsenergy.com
(570).696.3754

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Anthony Nekut wrote:

Hi –

I was thinking about how to reach local residential heat market with some locally produced biomass fuel product.  We’ve been looking into pelleting but it’s a tough business:  currently a glut, very expensive startup, top quality required for res market, relatively slow current market growth due to economy (the last one is counterintuitive because it’s a cheaper way to heat than oil or propane and there are good stove incentives, but people just get real conservative).  Anyway, I wanted to ask about briquettes/logs as a firewood alternative.  As  I recall, Ernst did some of this, and I know BHS has done some burn testing of their grass slugs.  I think this is also a relatively cheap process with lower capital costs than pellets.  Here are some specific questions. 

1) how much burn testing of pure grass briquettes and logs as been done in residential wood stoves/boilers?

2) how tightly controlled does MC need to be for briquettes (vs pellets) and is it form (slugs, bricks, logs) dependent? 

3) has anyone tried a grass/wood mix?    I can access green wood chips and sawdust (30-40% MC) and was wondering if I mix maybe 50-50 dry grass and this green wood that it might bind in densification.

 

Any other comments or suggestions are most welcome.  Thanks.

 

Tony Nekut

Community Biomass Energy

 

[Guillermo Metz]

Interesting thread, Tony. Thanks for cc-ing me. One thought we had about a year ago, you may recall, was making firestarter or fireplace logs with a mixture of grass and binding, combustible natural vegetable oils. I hate to think what the emissions would be but these things are being made now from far worse and sell for a premium (even the "green" options are basically bound waste waxed papers, which, judging from some of the bright colors of the flames they throw off, should probably not be burned). 

Are the briquettes you're talking about meant to replace wood in a woodstove? What are the economics vs. cord wood? 
-Guillermo

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[Jim Wuertele]

All,

   The analysis I did with one family farmer, who needed cord wood for the house and green house, was that he , with his own small tractor, saw, and splitter, took 10 (10 hour) days a year to prepare 10 cords from his adjacent wood lot.

Jim

James W. Wuertele

Vermont Agrifuels Institute

198 Church Street

St. Johnsbury, VT

05819, USA

802-748-8813

jww...@myfairpoint.net

[Anthony Nekut]

Guillermo,

My rough economics and model are:   $80/ton for poor quality hay, dry enough for densification;  $100k total capital expense for 1 ton/hr capacity line using all used/refurb equipment (grant or open ended loan) and volunteer construction/installation;   operating costs $30/hr (power and maint.);  $20/ton delivery cost; sell at heating parity with cordwood,  roughly 1 ton briquettes/eco-logs = 1 cord avg firewood = $180 delivered; volunteer part time operator labor, 500 tons/year total initial production x $50 net/ton = $25000/yr to grow production, etc.

Tony

(sitting in Phoenix airport)

[Jim Wuertele]

Another angle:

   A consideration of waste stream should be similar to that of wood burning, depending on the nature of the burn: incomplete, producing black dry ash ground up might be more useful in the garden; high temperature and well oxidized producing white dry ash not really charcoal and thus less available carbon and better as fill somewhere or returned with the delivery packaging.

   Around many houses from the 19th century and pre-war have layers of coal ash buried in their lots (ugh!), no need to repeat that choice if another is available from any newly developed system.

   Sustainability should be an added constraint in these early/heady days of planning. 

Jim

[Guillermo Metz]

Impressive. I would have thought the briquettes would be much more expensive than cord wood. Only difference remains that some people are able to cut their own wood, but there are plenty who don't. Thanks. (I hope you're out of the airport by now!)
-Guillermo

[Mark Carlisle]

All,

 

We have experimented with the BHS slugs in a 800K horizontal fire tube boiler and had great results.  The challenge is that we ended up with little "fibers" that collected in the fire tubes.  We believe that we have addressed this problem with our residential boiler by having vertical tubes and turbolators (to scrape the residue into a ash collection system), and if necessary adding a very small bag house as we see that this may be required regardless of what form of grass is used as the fuel.  Either boilers are built to accommodate the slugs or their role may be in a more commercial, farming application, only time will tell.  However, it is our goal to be able to use a wide variety of fuels, including the slugs. Unfortunately, progress on our boiler has been both challenging and painfully slow.

 

But, there is a bigger problem here that has been mentioned before.  The wood and grass pellet industry can ill afford having the grass pellet negatively affecting the pellet industry altogether for the lack of education (using grass pellets instead of wood pellets in a wood pellet stove). In some respects I think we are trying to "reinvent the wheel".  For years there has been a pellet used for cattle and other animals called a range cube.  This is like a super sized standard pellet (instead of being 1/4" it is around 3/4"). What this will accomplish is: higher production levels vs. its smaller counterpart, avoid any mix ups by having someone trying to use it in a wood pellet stove as it will not feed, and using existing technology that as been around for years.

 

As everyone knows, the pellet form is here to stay. We need to use this same form carefully without compromising the whole industry before it is able to reach its true potential.

 

Mark H. Carlisle

BEW    

On Wed, Aug 4, 2010 at 9:40 AM, Anthony Nekut <Anthon...@vectormagnetics.com> wrote:

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ISS
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