Invitation to discuss Methanol and Forestry, Fuel and heat for drying timber.

timfromtang

Greetings all,

On my mind for a long time is the desire to get rid of the diesel and petrol usage from forestry operations.

Please feel free to invite others to this discussion.

increasing carbon storage in forest soils would be useful.

turns out Methanol can be "relatively easily" produced from timber using a catalyst and destructive distillation (to greatly simplyify)

turns out Methanol will work as a fuel in both Diesel and Petrol engines (with caveats and modifications of course)

The methanol can be made from the brash portion of the trees (twigs and branches) utilising an otherwise unused rescource, with a little process sophistication there will be a significant charcoal byproduct suitable for biochar or metallurgy (even a BBQ if you must). Returning this charcoal to the forest soil as biochar would be ideal from ecological and silvicultural perspectives.

there is waste heat available from the destructive distillation process which could be profitably used

Significant challenges exist to pull it all together into a closed operational system

industrial scale? farm scale?

tim

síocháin agus saoirse

www.youtube.com/c/timfromtang

Fuinseog abú

timfromtang

https://www.iea-amf.org/app/webroot/files/file/Annex%20Reports/AMF_Annex_56.pdf

tim

blue5000

I think my grandfather did it during ww2. There's two big round pits where the charcoal was made anyway.