I wish I'd said that.

Wow. So many implications. The general public (me!) hears a nice cozy story about alternative fuels but don't always consider the far-reaching intricacies of actually using that fuel.

Thanks for the education!

You did, I wrote that before I read your post. Let's just say I was agreeing with you.

I guess we can consider it as independent confirmation.

And you didn't waste as many words saying it.

What's the outlook for home-based bio mass conversion?

Griff - there are some things that you can do right now, for instance wood for heat, which is not new of course, but conversion methods are getting cleaner and more efficient. These methods include pellet stoves and stoker stoves (also called outdoor boilers, stick boilers, etc.). Some of the stoker stoves (generally these are boilers that are located outside the house and are fed whole logs once or twice per day) are very dirty, and they've been banned in several states. But the Colorado Governor's Energy Office is testing equipment from 3 manufacturers, including (I think) Tarm, because the Department of Public Health wants to ban them here also. Here is a link to one discussion of some outdoor boilers.

Residential pellet stoves have been around for a long time, but now there are a few pellet furnaces and pellet boilers available in the US. Some of the pellet manufacturers are investigating bulk pellet delivery, so that you don't have to deal with the 40-lb bags. Bulk delivery should reduce the cost of pellets, but I don't know if it's available anywhere yet. In addition to wood pellets, some of the pellet stoves can also burn corn and some can burn coal.

As for transportation fuels, you can make biodiesel in your kitchen. There are books and videos available if you want to learn how to do that, and you might be able to find websites with that information. Biodiesel isn't the same as diesel - it has a different pour point and cold flow properties, and is not as stable. This means that you have to have two fuel tanks - one for biodiesel and one for regular diesel - and the biodiesel tank might need a heater if it's to be operated in a cold climate.

Making corn ethanol isn't too hard - hill people have been doing it for a long time - but reducing the water content to almost zero (resulting in 200 proof alcohol) might be a challenge. If you do a search for "homemade ethanol" you'll find lots of links.

I'm not aware of any commercially available kits or equipment for making ethanol, but I'd be interested to hear if anyone else knows of something.

Last I heard, Takoma Park, MD, which is a bastion of liberals and hippies, has a silo for distribution of wood pellets to home owners with wood pellet stoves. They have some sort of wood pellet co-op. You still have to go to the silo to pick up your pellets. They need to offer home delivery. The bulk is considerable. It's not like filling a heating oil tank in your basement once or twice a season. You need to take weekly trips to the wood pellet silo to get your fuel.

I just looked it up, and I'm wrong... It's a corn silo that Takoma Park has.

HLJ- I built a Russian style fireplace, using a Temp-Cast kit, when I built my house and have a pellet stove in the basement for backup. I was wondering more along the lines of breaking down organic waste/scraps to make electricity?

Griff, I just spent some time looking at the Temp-Cast site and at this site, which shows some more detail about the workings. Those Russian stoves look really nice. What are your experiences with it so far? Are you happy with it?

As far as electricity from biomass, there is nothing that I'm aware of in the home size. Community Power Corporation has been developing some village power-scale equipment (5- to 100-kW), that consists of a feed bin, an auger, a gasifier, an engine (the 25-kW system uses a GM V6 engine) and a generator. The gasifier takes a small wood chip (or they can be designed to use coconut husks or pecan shells, etc.) as fuel. In addition to electricity, you can also use the heat (from the radiator or the exhaust) for domestic or process loads. Unfortunately, they cost $100,000 or $200,000. That's for the small ones. Plus, they require a lot of attention. And they're loud.

Pig and dairy farms have been using anaerobic digesters for a long time, primarily as a means of controlling odors and reducing material bulk. The digester is used to treat animal waste (e.g. pig poop), and works best where the waste is easily collected, such as a farrow barn. Bacteria in the waste (the bugs) digest the waste and produce methane, which can be used to fire a modified diesel engine/genset (typically 80- to 200-kW). Some sewage treatment plants use a similar system, but I don't know if you could do the same thing with your home septic system.

glatt - transport of pellets is definitely a problem. We've considered commercial pellet systems for a few clients, but, as there is no bulk pellet delivery infrastructure in Colorado or New Mexico, we haven't looked at the available hardware. Rob Davis, of Show Low, Arizona, has modified a cement truck for bulk delivery. If something like that becomes more widely available I think it would greatly expand opportunities for pellet boilers and larger commercial systems.

Back in '73... piped up the old fart... we were discussing alternative heat sources and of course wood stoves came up. My Grandmother, having heated and cooked with a wood stove for near 70 years, before moving to a small house with oil heat and a gas stove, said, "What are you crazy? Turn up the damn thermostat."

She was well aware of the difficulty, mess and drawbacks of wood. So am I.

Wood pellet manufacture and transportation is how energy intensive?

A lot less energy intensive than oil drilling, transportation, refining, and more transportation.

There are three primary energy uses in pellet manufacture: chipping/grinding, extruding and drying. The wood starts out at 40 or 50 % moisture content and the pellet finishes with a MC of around 10%. The drying can be fuelled with gas, but it's more efficient to use excess wood (such as bark and fines) to fuel the dryer. The chipping and grinding will either be powered by a diesel or electric engine and the extruder is electric. I have numbers for these processes back at the office, as we've just finished a couple of pellet studies, but I don't have them here.

There's also energy used in the collection and transportation of the wood, but this is often being done already by the State and US Forest Services, utilities or private companies for fire mitigation, forest health, line clearing and landscaping work. In the Intermountain West there are millions of trees that have been killed (or soon will be) by ips beetles, mountain pine beetles, dwarf mistletoe, drought and blowdown. These trees are a huge fire risk, so there is already a lot of work being done to remove them from the forest. In some areas, such as Grand County, Colorado, up to 90% of the trees will be lost.

What's the advantage of wood over something like recycled newspaper for making pellets? Sap?

All of the recycled newspaper is being made into power bars.

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If I had to guess, I would say that the fiber in newspaper is not sufficient to make pellets. But it's a good question. I'll ask Rob Davis next time I see him.

Extremely, I finished ours in fieldstone, making it a nice centerpiece in the house. We use less than 6 face cords each winter to heat our small efficient house. In the coldest part of winter you need two fires per day to keep it at the 68F target. The pellet stove is in the basement and will bring the house up to temp if we're away a while or hit a really brutal cold snap.

Don't you still need electric to operate the fans/blowers to distribute the heat? And if you loose electric you lose the ability to distribute the heat about the house, no?