DAIRY PRODUCTION OF SYNGAS AND BIOCHARThis is a featured page

DAIRY PRODUCTION OF SYNGAS AND BIOCHAR
-- How syngas and biochar (agrichar) can be created and used to support dairies and to create a new profit center for recycled dairy and wood waste.i
By Jim Miller

1. OVERVIEW
The system uses the cow flop to produce syngas and biochar. Syngas is used in a Combined Heat and Power mode to supply the needs of the dairy for building and milk processing heat and electric energy. Coincidentally, much of the cow flop is use in the process, including lagoon waste-water. The cost savings to the dairy operation can be considerable. The biochar, properly infused with nutrient will have a ready, profitable market for growers, especially those creating new plantings of perennials. This paper explores the probable mechanical and fiscal elements of this proposed system.2. LOCATION
  1. Larger community
  2. The dairy location is outside the urban growth boundaries in a heavy agriculturally zoned areas with with good access to roads which access farm areas which a high concentration of agro-forestry groves, e.g. Apples, hazelnuts, row crops such as asparagus, blue berries, and grapes.
  3. Site selection
  4. The land should be relatively flat and have a large waste-water lagoon from which the liquor may be taken as needed. There should be plenty of room for a composting operation. A dairy of around 600 milking cows would be a good number. Scale-up is no problem as long as there is adequate room for the larger lagoon and the composting windrows.
  5. Zoning
  6. The operation of the syngas and biochar production as a CHP should easily fit into the agricultural zoning regulations of most jurisdictions. The composting easily fits into that zoning. The biochar infusion and inoculation is done in the cement mixer truck on the way to the customer, so that is not an issue.
3. COW OPERATION.
  1. Cow flop
  2. Cow flop inside the milking barn is usually washed to a sump, then settled and the liquor pumped to the lagoon. The solids are dried and separated. Sixty percent of the flop is undigested fiber and the rest digestant. After drying, the fibers are separated from the digestant and used as bedding for the cows. Eventually, this bedding is removed, along with the cow flop and either disposed of or cast on crop fields.
  3. Feedstock
  4. The separated fibers from the cow flop is perfect for immediate use in the pyrolysis equipment, as is. Even the used bedding materials, mixed with cow flop, can be dried and burned. However the composition of the producer gas will vary with the amount of dried digestant. The used bedding could be reprocessed to separate out the newly added digestant, and then burned in the pyrolysis system. The small size of the fibers means that they have a large surface area proportional to mass and will burn quickly, thus allowing for quick turn-over of feedstock.
  5. The feedstock should include some woody chips, about nickel size. These aid in the combustion process and provide larger sized biochar mass which are slower to decompose, hold more nutrient and provide for a longer span of time during which the bacteria can live and die, thus adding the the CO2 negative value of the biochar. Depending on the size of the wood chips and the ratio of wood chips to fiber, one could expect a life of about ten years for the biochar system before all of the nutrient is gone from the biochar.
  6. New nutrients can be infused in the spent biochar which is below and to the side of the plant drip line. Compost tea, made from throughly composted cow flop, waste-water liquor, wood chips, can be added as a side dressing or by using as hollow pipe about four feet long and pushed into the ground where the biochar was installed, the compost tea can be infused with minimal damage to the root system.
  7. Wood chips can come from forest slash, lumber mill waste and new construction waste
4. PROCESSING
  1. If fiber from cow flop is used, it needs to be dried to 12% or less by weight. Because of the rain, the drying needs to be under cover. The best way is to build a simple conveyor with a three to four foot wide belt. These can be obtained used, from gravel and Ready-Mix concrete operations. The belt is on rollers which are not cupped. It moves between two 12” side rails to help contain the load. The conveyors can be 100' long or longer and on an incline so that the tipping point is above the sides of a standard dump truck. The cow flop fibers are placed in a hopper at the low end and fed uniformly onto the conveyor belt. When the belt is loaded, it stops. Covering the belt and sealed against the top of the side rails, is a plastic cover with UV resistance. This cover is embedded with millions of small, crystals made of pure silicone.iiThese crystals refract the light so that as the Earth turns and tilts its axis, these crystals direct the solar energy directly on to the feedstock. This is called a passive solar still or kiln because it tracks the sun without mechanical movement.
  2. These crystals also generate micro-volts of DC power which can be converted into AC power and use to power the lighting system and other uses on the dairy.
  3. At the low end of the conveyor is a blow-torch heater which is fueled by the syngas. Ahead of the inlet is a condenser which removes water vapor from the incoming air, using the lagoon as a heat sink. The dry air is heated as it goes through the blow-torch heater, rises along the path of the conveyor and exits at the top, laden with moisture. This arrangement allows for the maximum drying during rainy weather and fog.
  4. Wood chip drying.If wood chips are used, they also need to be dried. Because the dwell time in the solar kiln would typically be longer, the chips would use the same type of solar kiln, but would be “turned” by discharging the load on the drying conveyor belt, then adding them again to the hopper for a reload on the conveyor belt.
  5. Syngas and biochar production.The dry feedstock is then used in the pyrolysis equipment to generate heat and electricity from the combustion of the cellulose. The syngas is trapped and processed and the biochar is removed to the concrete bunker.
  6. Biochar bunker.The bunker is 14' wide, six feet deep with the side walls extending one foot above the soil line. It can be as long as needed to accommodate the production and storage of biochar. One end of the bunker is a sloped driveway for equipment access.
  7. Biochar transfer.As the biochar is produced, it is taken to the biochar bunker by truck or conveyor belt and deposited into the bunker. By using the in-ground bunker, a dump truck merely backs up to the stem wall and dumps the load from either side.
  8. Infusion.Liquid from the lagoon will be pumped to the bunker and used to fill the biochar. A free board of one foot would be sufficient to contain the lagoon fluids. Alternatively, compost tea made from the fully mature compost would be used to infuse the biochar.
  9. Removal of biochar.When the biochar is seasoned, it is ready for use as an agricultural amendment. It can be loaded directly into a used cement mixeriiiby the use of a self-propelled, force feed loader.ivThe mixture can be tailored to the needs of the customer by adding more compost, micro-nutrients, other minerals and additional inoculates. The material is mixed as it is transported. Water can be added as needed.
5.PREPARATION OF BIOCHAR MIX
    1. Biochemistry of infusion. The infusion process is critical to the amount sequestering some of the CO2 which makes this process net negative as to CO2. The larger the particles of biochar, the slower the infusion process but the longer lasting its “give-up” of the nutrients. A “slow release” of nitrogen to the plants would come with using larger particles. Thus a mix of large and small particles would seem ideal, especially in new plantings which need to grow quickly and in a healthy state to reach maturity so as to become productive. The larger chunks of biochar would release the nitrogen over a longer period of time and would avoid the peaks and valleys usually associated with periodic, above ground applications of industrial, petroleum based nitrogen, of which typically only five percent is taken up by the plants. The rest of the nitrogen either is washed out of the top soil or goes into the ground and eventually the ground water.
    2. Sources:Miller, James E.The Healthy Soil Foodwebas aFoundation for Biodynamic Farming,Mutual Aid Society of America,http://masallp.wetpaint.com/page/THE+HEALTY+FOODWEBBEYOND ZERO EMISSIONS
      Adriana Downie talks about Best Energies pyrolysis gasifier and making bio char (Terra Preta)
      http://beyondzeroemissions.org/2008/06/03/adriana-downie-best-energies-bio-char-agri-char-pyrolysisBiochar: A Soil Amendment that Combats Global Warming and Improves Agricultural Sustainability and Environmental Impacts
      www.biochar-international.org/images/Biochar_White_Paper_-_FINAL_10-9-07_w-o_links.doc -BiocharFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar

6. PREPARATION OF NEW PLANTING SITES
  1. Holes or trenches. A backhoe or tracked excavator is used to dig holes for a grove of trees. A wheel trencher is used to excavate a trench along the proposed rows for perennials.v
  2. Backfilling and mixing.The Biochar/cement mixer delivers the biochar already fully saturated with water. The nutrient is fully infused into the biochar and has completed the initial composting. As the mixer delivers the load into the hole or trench, the loose dirt spoils are added into the hole or trench. The backhoe mixes the material in the holes and a boom mounted rotary wheel mixes the material in the trench. The materials are deposited in alternate lifts of between six and twelve inches. The boom mounted unit attaches to a category three, 3 point hitch and is powered by the PTO. On the end of the stick, a bucket type mixing wheel, four feet in diameter is powered by a hydraulic motor which turns the distant lift (biochar) up and over the dirt layer. One pass should be sufficient. An angle dozer spills dirt spoils in the trench, over the biochar, working on the side the spoils have been placed. On the other side, the biochar mixer works ahead of the dozer and the boom mounted mixer works behind the dozer, but on the opposite side of the trench.
  3. Result.The result is a mixture of soil and biochar as deep as the root zone, down to seven feet, if needed. The trench is 27 inches wide. Wider trenches can be obtained by using a wider wheel trencher or a belt trencher. A second trench, next to the first trench, using the same 27 inch trencher, could result in a combined trench 54 inches wide. The added depth allows for water to pass through the active root zone so it does not cause root damage from poorly drained soil around the roots. Nut producing trees and plants typically need well-drained soil. The lose soil also aids the establishment and early growth of newly planted trees and bushes.
7. INFUSION OF SEASONED BIOCHAR INTO SOIL OF EXISTING PLANTS.
  1. Preparation.There are several ways to prepare the soil to receive the seasoned biochar. The char and water mixture can be pumped to each tree or along a crop row and left on the top of the ground under the plants. As rain penetrates the layer of biochar, it will infiltrate and carry the nutrients and microflora into the soil. Mulch can be added on top of the biochar to prevent rain from washing away the biochar. Side dressing, inserted into the soil, can be used. This approach may injure the roots of some plants which have a shallow root system. Holes can be augured every two or three feet apart and then filled with the seasoned biochar. A three to six inch diameterr hole, three or four feet deep would contain a considerable amount of seasoned char and would do minimal damage to the root zone.
  2. Delivery. The biochar can be delivered in a dry state at each tree by a proportional, truck-mounted mixer, provided the aisles are wide enough. The biochar, mixed with water can be delivered along rows of grapes using a concrete pump and three inch flexible hoses. Rows which are extremely long, would be serviced by hoses and booster stations placed as needed to move the slurry along. There are many types of concrete pumps with a wide range of capabilities on the used market.vi
8. TESTING.
Using the theory that: if you can't test it, you can't measure it against a “standard”, therefor, you don't prove much. The results of adding biochar to the soil foodweb may not be fully testable until the plants reach “full production”. That may be seven years down the road. The “standard” would be a high yield grove or field of plants, at maturity, with good records of input and output. The soil and the plants can be tested for a wide variety of plant and soil elements and soil biological activity, using standard soil analysis and agronomic testing of the biologicals. There are short-cuts, not always that precise or comprehensive, but “good enough”. Sugar content can be tested with a Brix meter, either digital or optical. A new portable, field device on the market, the Ping tester, can measure with a high degree of accuracy, the water, chlorophyll and nitrogen content of a leaf and record the raw data for a PC program which will give a grower of picture of his field's readings.9. FISCALA more refined study would be need to estimate the capital and start-up costs for a dairy to add the syngas and biochar business or for an independent business to start the operation and contract with a dairy operation. As a rough order of magnitude the capital and start-up costs would range from $250,000 to $500,000, depending on the scale of operation and whether equipment were purchased new or used.

i
[Note:All citations to websites and web pages are to persistent sites, and are to the then current status of such sources as of October 22, 2008. URLs for such cites are hyper linked to the name of the cite. Use “Properties” to view the URL.]
ii
AlgalOilDiesel, LLP
530 NW 13thSt., Corvallis, OR 97330
Wired:: 541-757-9797Wireless: 541-971-0403
Skype: jimmiller 5417Email:jimmiller5417@yahoo.com



September 14, 2008

Sales Engineering DepartmentKyosemi24th Sky Building, 2nd Floor,1-34-3 Shinjuku, Shinjuku-ku,Tokyo 160-0022 Japan
Phone +81-3-5312-5360Fax +81-3-5312-5367Email:info@kyosemi.co.jpURL:http://www.kyosemi.co.jp/index_e.html

Re: Sphelar

Dear Sales:

We are interested in adapting the Sphelar technology for a third world application, namely potable water from brackish water and polluted water. The solar still is shown on the attached schematics. The water will also be passed through an activated charcoal filter.

We need technical information to complete the design, namely the system to power the pumps shown. We have two scales in mind, an extended family unit with livestock for about 300 gallons per day. The larger “village” scale would be 10,000 gallons a day.

We need specifics on the electrical output, power conditioning equipment and photo-optic switches. If you can help us source the pumps, that would be appreciated.

Sincerely,James E. Miller
iii
Cement mixer, used: 1 of 4 Oshkosh 12 Yard Cement Trucks,1986-1990, All with 290 Cummings &;BIG EAST EQ CO
Phone: (800)529-2515
or (203)752-0213
Fax: (203)773-0693Send A Message
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iv

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v

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> 530-867-0588
vi
1995ManufacturerSCHWINGModelWP750-15XPriceUS $28,000LocationWarsaw, MissouriSerial Number171012014ConditionUSED




















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