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Corn Cobs: Fuel of Nightmares

charmindustrial.com

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Re: Corn Cobs: Fuel of Nightmares

#51

Post by stonemetal12 »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #22
rexreed wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If corn stover is a critical importance to your business and business model, wouldn't it be more effective, efficient, and beneficial to your business to be where the critical resource and information and experience is? Basically why not move to Kansas instead of stay put in California?

Come on. No one wants to live in Kansas. And it's extremely difficult to build in a rural setting. You try prototyping an experimental cutting-edge technology in the middle of a corn field 2 hours from the nearest Home Depot or metal fabricator.

The wikipedia page for Wichita, Kansas claims Boeing, Airbus, and Learjet among others operate design and manufacturing facilities there. You should be able to find a metal fabricator and a home depot.

Re: Corn Cobs: Fuel of Nightmares

#52

Post by ed »

pkrein wrote: post #28
ed wrote: post #11

So the ELI5 is they burn crop waste, harvest the heat and bury the carbon-rich ash. This process is called BECCS. (Not totally right - see 'pkrein’s comment below.) The upper bound on capture is pretty good! Almost 70% of yearly CO2 emissions. > Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), suggests a potential range of negative emissions from BECCS of 0 to 22 gigatonnes per year [1] > Human activities emit over…

Actually we aren’t burning the biomass, we’re heating it without oxygen (pyrolysis) to create a transportable biomass intermediate called bio-oil. That bio-oil is rich in carbon, molasses-like consistency, and the overwhelming odor of barbecue sauce. Today we primarily pump that bbq sauce underground as carbon removal (Biomass Carbon Removal and Storage - BiCRS), but in the future it could be used for BECCS processes…

Oh, this is your company! I heard you were working on this and thought dang way to go Peter.

Are there companies buying bio-oil yet? If I understand correctly, I like that you’re plugging into a larger system and applying engineering to make a piece of it more efficient. It’s always easier to get bigger than it is to get smaller!

Re: Corn Cobs: Fuel of Nightmares

#53

Post by hinkley »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #22
rexreed wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If corn stover is a critical importance to your business and business model, wouldn't it be more effective, efficient, and beneficial to your business to be where the critical resource and information and experience is? Basically why not move to Kansas instead of stay put in California?

Come on. No one wants to live in Kansas. And it's extremely difficult to build in a rural setting. You try prototyping an experimental cutting-edge technology in the middle of a corn field 2 hours from the nearest Home Depot or metal fabricator.

There are less drastic options than Kansas that would work fine. Chicago has an international airport. Indianapolis as well (though it’s not listed in Wikipedia, which makes me wonder how complete that is). St Louis and Minneapolis are major hubs. Large airports besides those I’m less familiar with, but if you’re planning to process corn waste what you need is rail access, not air. So then you can add a lot more of the midwest and still maybe be able to find Bulgogi for lunch. The Quad Cities, Peoria, Milwaukee, Des Moines, Omaha.

Re: Corn Cobs: Fuel of Nightmares

#54

Post by hinkley »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #29
rexreed wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If corn stover is a critical importance to your business and business model, wouldn't it be more effective, efficient, and beneficial to your business to be where the critical resource and information and experience is? Basically why not move to Kansas instead of stay put in California?

Because Charm is being run as a VC tech startup rather than a traditional industrial company and there's a recent movement of trying to do ag-tech in the bay rather than places like the Midwest or even central valley. Probably doesn't hurt that the CEO/co-founder already lives in the bay.

Why you wouldn’t do ag tech in Chicago is beyond me.

Re: Corn Cobs: Fuel of Nightmares

#55

Post by hinkley »

> Light and flexible pieces of wheat straw in San Francisco had easily been conveyed pneumatically from the tub grinder into the hammer mill.

Okay, that is a very basic failure of engineering/imagination. I’m not saying shame is in order here, but several someone’s should be made to feel uncomfortable over this cock-up. Including the hiring manager because they went for kids instead of people with experience.

Why on earth would you assume you could move corn residues with air? Have you seen a corn field before? Have you touched corn? This is the other problem of moving engineering far away from the problem. SF only sees so many refugees from Iowa and Illinois. Most of those go to Chicago or Seattle.

> But with some deeper searching, we found a great, off-the-shelf belt that would arrive quickly.

Arrive quickly because the locals have been solving this exact problem for a hundred years. When you find an off the shelf solution for your problem, that’s when a good engineer or software developer takes umbrage and considers whether they have a bad, bad case of NIH.

Re: Corn Cobs: Fuel of Nightmares

#56

Post by RosanaAnaDana »

dbcurtis wrote: post #50
pkrein wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually we aren’t burning the biomass, we’re heating it without oxygen (pyrolysis) to create a transportable biomass intermediate called bio-oil. That bio-oil is rich in carbon, molasses-like consistency, and the overwhelming odor of barbecue sauce. Today we primarily pump that bbq sauce underground as carbon removal (Biomass Carbon Removal and Storage - BiCRS), but in the future it could be used for BECCS processes…

How is this an overall improvement over leaving the corn stalks in the field to decompose and return nutrients to the soil? This process moves soil nutrients away from point of origin. (Serious question from former Iowa farm boy who still owns corn ground operated by others. Should I let my tenants ship stover away? I want to be a good steward of the soil. )

Whatever their answer they'll need to account for the fuel cost of the trip to a facility, lifecycle cost of the instrumentation, and fuel cost of a return trip for where ever the whatever is going to go.

I can tell you right now having done experimental LCA previously, its not gonna pen out. The cost of moving massive amounts of 'stuff' to do 'something' with it when its an extremely low margin, low value add product; this will end up generating more CO2 than it sequesters.

If you can't do it in place, you likely can't do it.

Re: Corn Cobs: Fuel of Nightmares

#57

Post by soco »

philote wrote: post #37
soco wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So out of the 30 gigatons of CO2, up to 22 are from biomass? That's way, way more than I would have thought...

I think the meaning is that out of the 30 gigatons of CO2, 22 gigatons can be recaptured ("negative emissions").

Right and that sounds like a lot to me. I hope they're right.

Re: Corn Cobs: Fuel of Nightmares

#59

Post by seunosewa »

I wonder if just buying crude oil and burying it isn't more cost effective than transporting bulky biomass which could have been fed to animals in order to put it through this complicated process of converting it to oil and burying it.

Re: Corn Cobs: Fuel of Nightmares

#60

Post by photochemsyn »

mnw21cam wrote: post #44
pkrein wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually we aren’t burning the biomass, we’re heating it without oxygen (pyrolysis) to create a transportable biomass intermediate called bio-oil. That bio-oil is rich in carbon, molasses-like consistency, and the overwhelming odor of barbecue sauce. Today we primarily pump that bbq sauce underground as carbon removal (Biomass Carbon Removal and Storage - BiCRS), but in the future it could be used for BECCS processes…

Neat idea. My main concern is about whether you're sealing all the plant nutrients deep underground too, or are they separated out at some stage? As a world, we're going to need to put all those nutrients back into the soil to be able to keep growing stuff. Particularly phosphorous has limited mineable stocks.

I'd guess the ash/gunk remaining from the pyrolysis would be a mixture of carbon, phosphorous, maybe some nitrogen. It'd probably make a decent fertilizer/soil amendment, particularly for degraded low-carbon soils.
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