Harnessing Biomass: The Future of Clean Wood and Vegetative Waste
Biomass covers a wide range of organic plant-like matter, here we are focusing on clean wood and clean vegetative type waste. We generate hundreds of tons of vegetative waste every day according to the World Bank, it represents about 20 percent of all the world’s waste. That’s a lot! But things have been changing and not for the better.
Mother Nature's Balance vs. Human Impact: A Shift in Forest Management
Before man showed up on the Earth all of Earth’s forests and natural lands were very well managed naturally by…… lets call it “Mother Nature” (MN). She did a great job for hundreds of millions of years keeping everything in balance. But then man showed up and we have unfortunately shifted the balance a bit and now we are working hard to get it back. Our forests are a good example, one of the tools MN used was fire. She sent a lightning bolt to the ground, started a fire that would burn away the parasitic plant life like saplings and weeds, that were consuming the natural minerals and soil nutrients the larger trees need to remain healthy. In addition, this fire would burn up the fallen branches turning them into biochar. The biochar helps to return nitrogen to the soil plus it retains water that is consumed later by the remaining plant life, among other things. It's not only needed for the soil but necessary.
The Challenge of Dead Timber and The Urgency of Sustainable Disposal
There are very few things we can do with this waste to recycle it. We can use it in composts, we can put it on our gardens and we can make biomass energy, that’s about it. That doesn’t account for but a few percent of the total. But worse, our totals never include all the dead standing timber currently in our forests and parks around the world. That is an almost unbelievable amount of vegetative waste. To try and give you an idea, the US Forest Service in 2016 counted the dead standing trees in the California Sierra Nevada mountain range. They counted 116 million dead standing trees. That’s about 800 million tons of waste and that is one mountain range in one state. If we don’t get to work removing those trees, the potential for a disaster is enormous. This would be a disaster on the ground and in the air. The particulate matter (smoke) from those trees burning would blanket large sections of North America causing far worse climate impact. Now we have changed the balance in nature with arguably very good intentions but unfortunately with bad results. For the past approximately seventy-five years, we have been working hard to put out ALL the fires in the forest, natural or man-made. It seemed like a good idea, but it turns out it wasn’t. With the obvious exception of people and property, these fires needed to burn to help keep our forests in their natural balance. Now as we try to correct that situation, we are creating millions of tons more vegetative waste.
Air Curtain Burners: Revolutionizing Vegetative Waste Management
We have a large amount of vegetative waste heading for and already at our landfills. We used to send up to 40 percent of it to China, they were supplementing the use of coal to try and reduce their terrible air quality but in late 2017 they passed a legislative policy called “Operation National Sword” which banned certain waste materials from being imported into China. One of the items banned was vegetative waste, along with wood, wood mulch, Biomass covers a wide range of organic plant-like matter, here we are focusing on clean wood and clean vegetative type waste. We generate hundreds of tons of vegetative waste every day according to the World Bank, it represents about 20 percent of all the world’s waste. That’s a lot! But things have been changing and not for the better.
Mother Nature's Balance vs. Human Impact: A Shift in Forest Management
Before man showed up on the Earth all of Earth’s forests and natural lands were very well managed naturally by…… lets call it “Mother Nature” (MN). She did a great job for hundreds of millions of years keeping everything in balance. But then man showed up and we have unfortunately shifted the balance a bit and now we are working hard to get it back. Our forests are a good example, one of the tools MN used was fire. She sent a lightning bolt to the ground, started a fire that would burn away the parasitic plant life like saplings and weeds, that were consuming the natural minerals and soil nutrients the larger trees need to remain healthy. In addition, this fire would burn up the fallen branches turning them into biochar. The biochar helps to return nitrogen to the soil plus it retains water that is consumed later by the remaining plant life, among other things. It's not only needed for the soil but necessary.
The Challenge of Dead Timber and The Urgency of Sustainable Disposal
There are very few things we can do with this waste to recycle it. We can use it in composts, we can put it on our gardens and we can make biomass energy, that’s about it. That doesn’t account for but a few percent of the total. But worse, our totals never include all the dead standing timber currently in our forests and parks around the world. That is an almost unbelievable amount of vegetative waste. To try and give you an idea, the US Forest Service in 2016 counted the dead standing trees in the California Sierra Nevada mountain range. They counted 116 million dead standing trees. That’s about 800 million tons of waste and that is one mountain range in one state. If we don’t get to work removing those trees, the potential for a disaster is enormous. This would be a disaster on the ground and in the air. The particulate matter (smoke) from those trees burning would blanket large sections of North America causing far worse climate impact. Now we have changed the balance in nature with arguably very good intentions but unfortunately with bad results. For the past approximately seventy-five years, we have been working hard to put out ALL the fires in the forest, natural or man-made. It seemed like a good idea, but it turns out it wasn’t. With the obvious exception of people and property, these fires needed to burn to help keep our forests in their natural balance. Now as we try to correct that situation, we are creating millions of tons more vegetative waste.
Air Curtain Burners: Revolutionizing Vegetative Waste Management
We have a large amount of vegetative waste heading for and already at our landfills. We used to send up to 40 percent of it to China, they were supplementing the use of coal to try and reduce their terrible air quality but in late 2017 they passed a legislative policy called “Operation National Sword” which banned certain waste materials from being imported into China. One of the items banned was vegetative waste, along with wood, wood mulch, and wood chips. Up to 2018 the standard practice in the US was to grind vegetative waste and haul it to a landfill. Many landfills in the US already have huge mounds of “chips” and could not take any more. Landfills started banning vegetative waste. Piles of wood chips are bad, they outgas methane as they decay and leachate tannins and lignin into the ground water. In addition to creating bugs and fungus. None of this of course is any good for our environment. Why you may ask? Ground-up wood waste is not a natural product, it's man-made. The natural world is not used to handling it, so it just decays.
Embracing Air Curtain Technology for Eco-friendly Wood Waste Reduction
So what do we do with it? Quite simply we go back to the natural way of taking care of it, we burn it. But we are much smarter now and technology has moved on, we don’t want to “open burn” it, that is definitely bad for our environment. We have a very well tested and cost-effective method called “Air Curtain Burners.” These machines primarily produced by our company Air Burners, Inc. have been around for over 27 years. They have been tested by numerous air agencies including our own USEPA. The machines come in a variety of sizes for all different applications but they all function exactly the same. They use a special curtain of air, like an air lid, to trap the particles of smoke under this air lid, allowing them to be reburned down to a particulate size that does not negatively impact our environment. They are easy to operate and very cost-effective. Sometimes they are called air curtain incinerators, but that is not correct as technically an incinerator needs to provide the primary heat source that consumes the waste. Air Curtain Burners do not have any ability to create fire or heat. Wood waste must burn naturally in our FireBoxes. Our machines simply blow air in a fashion that creates an air curtain to trap and control particles of smoke.
The Carbon Dioxide Paradox: Addressing Misconceptions about Biomass Burning
What about the CO2 you might ask? Good question but why didn’t you ask that about the grinders and the hauling? Because Air Curtain Burners do not produce any additional CO2. But if you are burning large amounts of diesel fuel then you are creating exactly the CO2 that is the problem in our environment today. The CO2 from waste wood is just being recycled, remembering your science class the tree takes in Carbon Dioxide all its life while growing and gives off Oxygen. When it dies the carbon dioxide is returned to our environment, a new tree grows and the cycle continues. But the Carbon Dioxide from our vehicle fuels is at the core of our problem because that CO2 was captured deep in the earth and was not intended for release except in the case of a volcano. Our world can handle the release of some CO2 but with all the cars and trucks and diesel-powered machines we have, it’s just too much. We need to give our planet a chance, we need to reduce our constant releasing of carbon dioxide. Give our planet a chance to catch its breath.
Rethinking Biomass Power: Challenges and Solutions in Energy Production
We cannot just stop using fossil fuels overnight. But we must select certain areas where we can begin to reduce the use of fossil fuels and one of those areas is vegetative waste disposal. We already stopped putting the waste in many of our landfills so we need to work on an alternative and soon. Because as previously mentioned letting it rot is not helping our environment either.
Why don’t we start eliminating it in biomass power-generating facilities? Because they all closed. Biomass energy is too expensive to make. Unfortunately, we spent all our alternative energy monies developing solar power and wind power but nothing on biomass power. Which is unfortunate because solar and wind only solve one problem, energy. Biomass power solves at least two problems, energy and elimination of waste. Why does biomass energy cost so much? Remember we are focusing on vegetative waste type biomass. There are a few different types of biomass but I would argue one of our biggest problems is with this type of biomass waste. The reason biomass energy is currently so expensive to produce is because of all the preprocessing that needs to be done before you can even begin to make heat and subsequently energy with today’s biomass energy technology. The vegetative type biomass needs to go through two grinding processes to get it small enough for a conveyor to run it through a system. Then, ironically, after all the processing into small chips the normally very burnable waste is now extremely difficult to burn. If you have ever seen a “mulch” fire its nothing but smoke as the mulch is too dense to burn efficiently. So now you have spent a lot of money and environmental credit using fossil fuels to turn this waste into “fuel” for the incinerator but you still need to add 10 to 20 percent more fossil fuel, usually natural gas, to support the combustion. Now finally you are making heat and can turn that into electricity. Very costly, but there is still another issue. Current biomass incinerators are designed to be as efficient as possible which sounds great but, what it really means is that for the energy we are creating we are burning very little wood waste. Remember our main problem is not necessarily energy, we need to get rid of the waste. What we really need, for a long time to come, is a power-generating system designed first, to eliminate vegetative waste at a high rate and second to produce some low-cost energy. Stay tuned, we have just the system.
Air Burners’ Innovative Solutions: The PGFireBox® and BioCharger® Systems
At Air Burners we manufacture two power-generating systems; the PGFireBox® and the BioCharger®. The PGFireBox is an “On Grid” system and the BioCharger is an “Off-Grid” system. Neither system requires any permanent facilities and both systems accept the waste without any pre-processing. Both systems have very high throughput levels when compared to classic biomass incinerators. The Air Burners BioCharger for instance can eliminate up to 15 tons of unprocessed biomass waste per hour. If you eliminate all the waste in a particular area, you pack up the system in 4 hours and move.
The BioCharger is an ideal system for municipalities looking to eliminate waste and shift to battery-powered vehicles. Your waste stream becomes your “fuel” to power your all-electric machines. Now your municipality can trade in their diesel-powered loaders and excavators for battery-powered units and the BioCharger will generate the electricity needed to run itself and recharge your machines. The BioCharger has a “Battery Storage Module” (BSM) with an internal battery designed by Rolls Royce. All day you eliminate your waste and put electricity into the BSM. At night you plug your machines into the BSM and they will be recharged and ready to go in the morning. The Battery Storage Module will always retain enough energy to allow for startup and operation until enough energy is being produced to send extra to the BSM.
The BioCharger is an easy system to operate it has been designed to function around the “red button green button” concept meaning you basically push a green button to start and a red button to stop. The only other interface with the machine is to load wood waste. The system is connected to the factory via the internet therefore we can always provide help. More importantly, if something goes wrong we will be notified at the factory and will immediately focus on solving any problems to minimize your downtime.
Electric Forest: A Vision for Sustainable Forestry and Land Clearing
When I first came up with this design, I was calling it the “Electric Forest.” We put the first conceptual drawings up on our website and you would not believe how many people responded. In particular, we heard from other equipment manufacturers who were building battery-powered machines for use in remote areas like the forest. How would they charge their batteries? Could this be the answer? Yes, it is. Many of the forestry and land clearing operations are also generating significant amounts of vegetative waste. With the BioCharger, they can eliminate their waste and charge their machines while protecting the environment.
Will it work you may ask? Yes, it does. We have a half dozen of these machines in the field operating now and we are building more. The waste is truly their fuel and they are having a positive impact on our environment today.