Fantastic description Jim. All three parts communicate just how deeply you and your team have gone into this process. I have learned a great deal! I appreciate you as a scientist who speaks equally of the challenges and wins. I see your work as a huge contribution for, not only developing countries, but a renewable energy future everywhere in which dispatchable small scale power to compliment other renewables is require out on the fingers of the grid. Enabling us to decentralise our power generation systems, connect consumers with their energy production and tap into that vast infrastructure you spoke of, the photosynthetic solar collectors we have all around us. Its inspiring to see others doing things I have dreamed of since I was a teenager. I hope I can contribute to this space in a similar fashion. Thanks for a huge head start.
You could almost cut the stress in the air with a knife. Anxiety brought to you by 2.9mm drill bit & a 3.5mm-.6 tap. When it is no problem to break a 3/8-16 tap by hand. These just little things can make or break a project real fast. Awesome video like always.
I have built a gasification test rig. It does not recycle heat efficiently though. It uses solar electricity to char the biomass via pyrolysis - mostly paperboard and wood waste for testing - this evolves a mess of gasses and liquids that are collected over water. The reactor is steel and the heating is done via nichrome wire mounted in a firebrick housing temperature monitoring is via a thermocouple. water vapor, methanol, other liquid hydrocarbons and lots of gas products are collected in the water at this point. In the future I will probably try to condense and separate out those liquid products at some point so they can be separated and useful products saved and the useless ones recycled. The Char that is left in the reactor is mostly carbon and is heated to 1200 degrees Celsius and steam is injected at the bottom below a screen. The gases evolved at this point are collected again, this time almost purely CO and H2. In my case I combine the wood gas and the water gas and can compress it for storage and use it for combustion using a repurposed air compressor where the inlet is from my floating gas storage and the outlet is to a propane tank. The Fuel air mixture for combustion is closer to methane than for propane, but in a propane tank at 125 PSI and dropped through a regulator it will burn in my grill just fine, if a bit leaner. It will not power it nearly as long though as you are compressing a gas and can not take advantage of a phase change with these gases. The mixture is mostly carbon monoxide and hydrogen, but there is a bit of methane and carbon dioxide as well as some other hydrocarbons and nitrogen mixed in there. I could scrub it to remove sour gases, but with my feed stocks that has not really been an issue. The pyrolysis and the generation of the water gas are both endothermic reactions. I input that energy from solar, so I do not leak that much carbon to the atmosphere until of course the end product is burned. In a larger scale one could produce a large variety of products from the syngas generated. I basically have a desktop batch setup that can generate a small volume each batch, but it is proof of concept. It does work well. Improvements would be to recycle the heat better to lower the required energy, and to build a distillation column to separate out the liquid products. Additionally, I have been unable to convert all of the carbon when reacting with steam, I have recycled some of the carbon adding it to the next batch, but my ash still contains a bit of carbon in it. The ash contains the potassium, sodium, phosphorus, calcium and other metal oxides of the elements that were in the wood or paper board. Generally this is suitable for fertilizer to return those elements to the soil where they can be taken up by the next generation of biomass. At any rate this is just an experiment and it takes more in effort at this scale to run it than the fuel is worth at this scale. I also happen to have a large solar power system, so I have access to the solar electricity in the daytime to power this. On a commercial scale you might operate the pyrolysis and the water gas generation as a semi batch style, but you would want to operate the distillation continuous 24/7 which means that you have to have power all the time, not just in the day time.
this is actually really promising. at first I thought "how is this green, its still producing Carbon emissions?" But you have to consider the source. Burning fossil fuel injects long sequestered carbon and other emissions back into the atmosphere, while burning tree waste just recycles the carbon thats already present in the atmosphere that trees use to grow. much like watering fields from a river, as the water will eventually return to that river through the water cycle. super cool stuff, and a good way to transition to electric while still maintaining fossil fuel equipment until replacements are avaliable.
the gas produced is very similar to natural gas. Its called syngas, and you would want to make sure you are filtering all of the soot and tar out of the gas, nobody likes black colored glass!
lalo01231 i get the filtering. thats kind of a given. but my question is (and ive been told by a few people that it doesnt burn as hot as nat gas but im thinking they gotta be misinformed because as far as i can tell its mostly hydrogen?) can i get pressures up high enough to support a good flame? the highest i usually run my regulators for propane is 10psi. now thats pressure not volume. i think, from what i have learned so far, that a gasifier puts out lots of volume but not very high pressures. has anyone tested to see what pressures can be gotten? someone told me i would need to put a blower on to get enough pressure but with that i would also need to make the whole system larger to accommodate the higher airflow. has anyone tested to see how many lpm any given system will produce?
Awesome! I need to generate about 6 KWH/day to power my house. If my initial research is close, @ 2.5 lbs of biomass/KWH, an efficient gasifier would need about 15 lbs of feedstock to produce 6 KWH/day. That's 450 lbs/mo. That's a lot of sticks lol. :) How much time/electricity do you use to collect & cut feedstock? Is it really practical to produce 6 KWH/day using a gasifier or is it more suited for emergency power and powering engines for short periods? Thanks!
The question is... Are you going to continue on the same path your taking now or are you going to modify your power usage in the future? The solution would be to lower your consumption to a sustainable level for your available time dedicated to power generation. I know we all use more power than needed day to day so you have to ask yourself what you can eliminate to lower usage and also get your family to buy in on it. Then maybe you would use 4 or maybe 3 kWh per day.
I have a 3 story house with a full basement and I certainly don't use 6 kwh/day. Maybe 2. I have made a gasifier myself and it's not so bad if you cut up the sticks or rather use a mulcher to hurry this process up. Anyone who has trees knows there's always dead sticks on the ground. This is definitely possible for those who have a half dozen mature trees or more.
Anyone have thoughts on combusting wood gas for CO2 supplementation in a greenhouse as one would with propane or NG? What are the biproducts of burning wood gas? Any toxicities?
If the combustion of the fuel and reduction of H2O and CO2 are equal and opposite energy reactions, why does the combustion chamber get hot? Shouldn't all the combustion energy be using in the reduction?
im going to write a patent on a "nitrogen free gas stream" gassification device . this would allow you to get perhaps 8 hp out of a 10 hp engine rather then only 4 hp out of a 10 hp engine . I need your help i have several very interesting ideas that i think you will be amazed with . we could take gassification to the next level with the ideas im working on but i cant do it alone. I can turn liqiud carbon dioxide into fuel. are you interested ?
I didn't watch the whole thing because I am spoiled by fancy video production, graphics and animation but I think the output is the fuel collected and the whole point of gasification. Hydrogen, carbon monoxide and methane are the desired gases.
During and after ww2 there was over a million Americans using gasification to run vehicles... after ww2 big oil didn't like that so they tried to bury everything about gasification. It's super easy to build a gasifier.schematics are now hard to find. Basically gasification is take smoke from a fire and purifying the gasses in that smoke and using purified smoke to run combustion engines... its not as difficult as this guy makes it seem
Big oil branded gasification the poor man's fuel and tried to eliminate the individual builders (apple). Our government is the only reason this resource is still here.
Am I the only person who finds it annoying when someone pronounces the word processes "process-eez?" When you make a plural of a word that ends in -sis (ie. hypothesis, analysis, prognosis, etc.) you change the i to and e and pronounce it -seez. When you have a word that ends with s and you add an -es to make it plural, the e is reduced vowel.
1. its not going into the atmosphere, the gas is used to drive an engine heat etc. 2. since you obviously buy into the whole global warming farce, its carbon neutral, the plant matter removed co2 from the atmosphere in its growth cycle, so it does not create any new carbon in the process of its use. the only mass left is charcoal (carbon) and ash, the gas put off is hydrogen, and CO burns as a fuel with hydrogen, so Yes it is very clean system.
A wood fire itself is carbon neutral because the fuel (tree) consumes more than the produced waste carbon to regrow. So as long as you grow the same or more trees than you consume you're carbon neutral or even carbon negative (green).
Jim actually cut his hand removing a part a customer had mistakenly added to one of our units. Happily, thanks to multiple surgeries and physical therapy, he's making an almost complete recovery.
***** You are stalking, you did so from one video to the next! And even in fact, you were in wait for me to reply almost to the very second!!! Holy Moly you are that bona fide basement troll everyone talks about!!! It's an honor to meet you; however, I must say goodbye to you and your weird ways at this time before this gets way too out of line even for RUclips's pitiful moderating standards. Nice to meet you tough.
The video is not complete, the flue gases produced will be carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, Sulphur dioxide, Furan. Oxygen injection will need a very expensive air separation plant, need carbon sequestration for large amount of carbon liquid deep storage, hydrogen will need to be supplied by oil refinery, need a long list of scrubbing chemicals and PM ash capture. Rule 101, you can’t gasified inorganic to organic matter. Most white gas from gasification feed stock do not have enough paraffin in naphtha. True Gasification is very expensive with proper extraction and flue gas treatment and very much dependent on high crude oil price to be economically viable. To many paper scholars presenting too many presentations without working in a refinery. Go work in oil and gas industry before presenting.
We're not entirely clear on your thesis here, Thomas but you are correct that "Gasification 101 - Part 1" is not complete: please see the rest of our helpful and instructional videos as well as the wiki community we have to learn more from experts, hobbyists, and well-wishers in the biomass processing world.
All Power Labs is an American entity and so we will inevitably have to interact with imperial units for heat, lengths of tubes, screw sizes, etc. We publish all our work in SI/metric units, as does the rest of the scientific community. Neither of those systems of measure was in use in the Stone Age.
Наука
This lecture, 10 years later, is still the best I know of on the topic. I rewatch it every few years!
Its the best to fall asleep with, way better then melatonin
Gasification explanation starts at 14:00.
Fantastic description Jim. All three parts communicate just how deeply you and your team have gone into this process. I have learned a great deal! I appreciate you as a scientist who speaks equally of the challenges and wins. I see your work as a huge contribution for, not only developing countries, but a renewable energy future everywhere in which dispatchable small scale power to compliment other renewables is require out on the fingers of the grid. Enabling us to decentralise our power generation systems, connect consumers with their energy production and tap into that vast infrastructure you spoke of, the photosynthetic solar collectors we have all around us. Its inspiring to see others doing things I have dreamed of since I was a teenager. I hope I can contribute to this space in a similar fashion. Thanks for a huge head start.
We need more people like this in the world to make a Difference in other peoples' lifes! GOD BLESS THIS MAN!
Mostly, I'm impressed at a man describing thermal processes while nursing third degree burns on his right hand.
Ya get burned either way.
This video helped me quit smoking.
Lmfao
You could almost cut the stress in the air with a knife. Anxiety brought to you by 2.9mm drill bit & a 3.5mm-.6 tap.
When it is no problem to break a 3/8-16 tap by hand. These just little things can make or break a project real fast.
Awesome video like always.
I have built a gasification test rig. It does not recycle heat efficiently though. It uses solar electricity to char the biomass via pyrolysis - mostly paperboard and wood waste for testing - this evolves a mess of gasses and liquids that are collected over water. The reactor is steel and the heating is done via nichrome wire mounted in a firebrick housing temperature monitoring is via a thermocouple. water vapor, methanol, other liquid hydrocarbons and lots of gas products are collected in the water at this point. In the future I will probably try to condense and separate out those liquid products at some point so they can be separated and useful products saved and the useless ones recycled. The Char that is left in the reactor is mostly carbon and is heated to 1200 degrees Celsius and steam is injected at the bottom below a screen. The gases evolved at this point are collected again, this time almost purely CO and H2. In my case I combine the wood gas and the water gas and can compress it for storage and use it for combustion using a repurposed air compressor where the inlet is from my floating gas storage and the outlet is to a propane tank. The Fuel air mixture for combustion is closer to methane than for propane, but in a propane tank at 125 PSI and dropped through a regulator it will burn in my grill just fine, if a bit leaner. It will not power it nearly as long though as you are compressing a gas and can not take advantage of a phase change with these gases. The mixture is mostly carbon monoxide and hydrogen, but there is a bit of methane and carbon dioxide as well as some other hydrocarbons and nitrogen mixed in there. I could scrub it to remove sour gases, but with my feed stocks that has not really been an issue. The pyrolysis and the generation of the water gas are both endothermic reactions. I input that energy from solar, so I do not leak that much carbon to the atmosphere until of course the end product is burned. In a larger scale one could produce a large variety of products from the syngas generated. I basically have a desktop batch setup that can generate a small volume each batch, but it is proof of concept. It does work well. Improvements would be to recycle the heat better to lower the required energy, and to build a distillation column to separate out the liquid products. Additionally, I have been unable to convert all of the carbon when reacting with steam, I have recycled some of the carbon adding it to the next batch, but my ash still contains a bit of carbon in it. The ash contains the potassium, sodium, phosphorus, calcium and other metal oxides of the elements that were in the wood or paper board. Generally this is suitable for fertilizer to return those elements to the soil where they can be taken up by the next generation of biomass. At any rate this is just an experiment and it takes more in effort at this scale to run it than the fuel is worth at this scale. I also happen to have a large solar power system, so I have access to the solar electricity in the daytime to power this. On a commercial scale you might operate the pyrolysis and the water gas generation as a semi batch style, but you would want to operate the distillation continuous 24/7 which means that you have to have power all the time, not just in the day time.
Try a refrigeration compressor for more efficient storage.
Very informative. Thank you for making this information public.
Bio Power-it's just one of the many things we need to get around to more often-thanks for the reminder!
Very well done Jim. Thanks.
Little about this is 101. It's largely self-satisfying techno babble. Grateful anyway for the presentation.
could you run the reduction exhaust with outside air through a condenser and get fresh water?
this is actually really promising. at first I thought "how is this green, its still producing Carbon emissions?" But you have to consider the source. Burning fossil fuel injects long sequestered carbon and other emissions back into the atmosphere, while burning tree waste just recycles the carbon thats already present in the atmosphere that trees use to grow. much like watering fields from a river, as the water will eventually return to that river through the water cycle.
super cool stuff, and a good way to transition to electric while still maintaining fossil fuel equipment until replacements are avaliable.
Love the topic, just wondering if the bandage on the right hand is from a third degree gasifier burn? Should there be a fire warning? :)
Gasification is serious business, but the wound was unrelated and superficial.
I would love to attend one of these lectures.
So where does the Flux Capacitor come into play?
Probably the current most efficient way to convert cellulose feedstocks right now.
Interesting stuff
Technical Difficulty with the audio at 52:57
could a glass torch be run off of this process? without compressing it first? how much pressure does it have? under 1psi?
the gas produced is very similar to natural gas. Its called syngas, and you would want to make sure you are filtering all of the soot and tar out of the gas, nobody likes black colored glass!
lalo01231 i get the filtering. thats kind of a given. but my question is (and ive been told by a few people that it doesnt burn as hot as nat gas but im thinking they gotta be misinformed because as far as i can tell its mostly hydrogen?) can i get pressures up high enough to support a good flame? the highest i usually run my regulators for propane is 10psi. now thats pressure not volume. i think, from what i have learned so far, that a gasifier puts out lots of volume but not very high pressures. has anyone tested to see what pressures can be gotten? someone told me i would need to put a blower on to get enough pressure but with that i would also need to make the whole system larger to accommodate the higher airflow. has anyone tested to see how many lpm any given system will produce?
Why you got to be so racist? Black Glass Matters!
reverse flow forge bring the small iron manufacture fed with gasification just add minerals to your furnace
Awesome! I need to generate about 6 KWH/day to power my house. If my initial research is close, @ 2.5 lbs of biomass/KWH, an efficient gasifier would need about 15 lbs of feedstock to produce 6 KWH/day. That's 450 lbs/mo. That's a lot of sticks lol. :) How much time/electricity do you use to collect & cut feedstock? Is it really practical to produce 6 KWH/day using a gasifier or is it more suited for emergency power and powering engines for short periods? Thanks!
The question is... Are you going to continue on the same path your taking now or are you going to modify your power usage in the future? The solution would be to lower your consumption to a sustainable level for your available time dedicated to power generation. I know we all use more power than needed day to day so you have to ask yourself what you can eliminate to lower usage and also get your family to buy in on it. Then maybe you would use 4 or maybe 3 kWh per day.
Pellets seem like the obvious answer. But I'm a noob. So, I don't know.
I live in a forest, plenty of dead wood out here.
I have a 3 story house with a full basement and I certainly don't use 6 kwh/day. Maybe 2.
I have made a gasifier myself and it's not so bad if you cut up the sticks or rather use a mulcher to hurry this process up. Anyone who has trees knows there's always dead sticks on the ground. This is definitely possible for those who have a half dozen mature trees or more.
Anyone have thoughts on combusting wood gas for CO2 supplementation in a greenhouse as one would with propane or NG? What are the biproducts of burning wood gas? Any toxicities?
Doesn't matter because man made global warming is a lie.
If the combustion of the fuel and reduction of H2O and CO2 are equal and opposite energy reactions, why does the combustion chamber get hot? Shouldn't all the combustion energy be using in the reduction?
Nevermind, he answered my question at 45:30.
What about partial oxidation?
What happened to Jim's arm? Regards from Russia.
very interesting !!
Less than 3,000 views?
:( that number makes me sad
123K, you let's rejoice
Still going
mkay!
I miss your videos
good tutorial
im going to write a patent on a "nitrogen free gas stream" gassification device . this would allow you to get perhaps 8 hp out of a 10 hp engine rather then only 4 hp out of a 10 hp engine . I need your help i have several very interesting ideas that i think you will be amazed with . we could take gassification to the next level with the ideas im working on but i cant do it alone. I can turn liqiud carbon dioxide into fuel. are you interested ?
Mr Mackey?!
define gasification please.
You couldn't have done it without government! Hahaha!
Why do you have to Output H2 + Co? You can put them back into their secondary burning chamber and get more energy out of that s***!
I didn't watch the whole thing because I am spoiled by fancy video production, graphics and animation but I think the output is the fuel collected and the whole point of gasification. Hydrogen, carbon monoxide and methane are the desired gases.
During and after ww2 there was over a million Americans using gasification to run vehicles... after ww2 big oil didn't like that so they tried to bury everything about gasification. It's super easy to build a gasifier.schematics are now hard to find. Basically gasification is take smoke from a fire and purifying the gasses in that smoke and using purified smoke to run combustion engines... its not as difficult as this guy makes it seem
Big oil branded gasification the poor man's fuel and tried to eliminate the individual builders (apple). Our government is the only reason this resource is still here.
Fire Marshall Bill
++good
being given instructions from a guy with a burned hand..
🏃< im going this way🕺🌋
His hand wasn't burned; Jim cut the tendons in his hand during a serious accident with an angle grinder. (I work at APL.)
How does this serve Joe Lunchbucket- the people who need it most? Smart people. . . oh boy!
CO2. Global warming/ climate change. Deforestation of the rainforests. Does no one see the correlation?
this man does not sound like he has ever made one. They exist all over the planet. Here is a path mr egg head. Junk mail provides tons of fuel. lol
To me, this guy sounds like he's got a lot more going on than you can guess.
Am I the only person who finds it annoying when someone pronounces the word processes "process-eez?" When you make a plural of a word that ends in -sis (ie. hypothesis, analysis, prognosis, etc.) you change the i to and e and pronounce it -seez. When you have a word that ends with s and you add an -es to make it plural, the e is reduced vowel.
+dovregubben78 grammer NAZI
Godwin's law. You lose, babyboombuster. And it's "grammar." ;-)
see i told ya! GRAMMUR NAZI lol
yes... as soon as i heard his pronunciation of processes....just could get through the video
It's easy mmkay?
Mmmkaaay....
How is inefficiently burning carbon into the atmosphere "green"?
1. its not going into the atmosphere, the gas is used to drive an engine heat etc.
2. since you obviously buy into the whole global warming farce, its carbon neutral, the plant matter removed co2 from the atmosphere in its growth cycle, so it does not create any new carbon in the process of its use.
the only mass left is charcoal (carbon) and ash, the gas put off is hydrogen, and CO burns as a fuel with hydrogen, so Yes it is very clean system.
Where did you learn your "science"? Home "school"?
Where did you learn your indoctrination from?
Thanks for the confirmation.
A wood fire itself is carbon neutral because the fuel (tree) consumes more than the produced waste carbon to regrow. So as long as you grow the same or more trees than you consume you're carbon neutral or even carbon negative (green).
Looks like Jim Mason burned his hand again on the gasifier. Some CEO's really just need to stay in the office... stay out of trouble.
Jim actually cut his hand removing a part a customer had mistakenly added to one of our units. Happily, thanks to multiple surgeries and physical therapy, he's making an almost complete recovery.
*****
Stalk much??
*****
You are stalking, you did so from one video to the next! And even in fact, you were in wait for me to reply almost to the very second!!!
Holy Moly you are that bona fide basement troll everyone talks about!!! It's an honor to meet you; however, I must say goodbye to you and your weird ways at this time before this gets way too out of line even for RUclips's pitiful moderating standards.
Nice to meet you tough.
The video is not complete, the flue gases produced will be carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, Sulphur dioxide, Furan. Oxygen injection will need a very expensive air separation plant, need carbon sequestration for large amount of carbon liquid deep storage, hydrogen will need to be supplied by oil refinery, need a long list of scrubbing chemicals and PM ash capture. Rule 101, you can’t gasified inorganic to organic matter. Most white gas from gasification feed stock do not have enough paraffin in naphtha. True Gasification is very expensive with proper extraction and flue gas treatment and very much dependent on high crude oil price to be economically viable. To many paper scholars presenting too many presentations without working in a refinery. Go work in oil and gas industry before presenting.
We're not entirely clear on your thesis here, Thomas but you are correct that "Gasification 101 - Part 1" is not complete: please see the rest of our helpful and instructional videos as well as the wiki community we have to learn more from experts, hobbyists, and well-wishers in the biomass processing world.
All comments still in stone ages using imperial units ie lbs, Hp, Psi etc. The world already move on long ago in Metric system.
All Power Labs is an American entity and so we will inevitably have to interact with imperial units for heat, lengths of tubes, screw sizes, etc. We publish all our work in SI/metric units, as does the rest of the scientific community. Neither of those systems of measure was in use in the Stone Age.
So , burn wood, to produce gas , to burn later....waste of time and effort
But as I understood you also use the heat from burning wood, so gas is just byproduct, a valuable byproduct which was escaping unused until now....