Homemade Coal?

With Maine's tough marketing conditions for forestry products, I have a bunch of unmarketable wood kicking around. By kicking around I mean its the waste wood my truck drivers have picked over and decided would not make the cut for logs. About a third of it is White Pine and would be a pain to cut, split and stack, especially in small sections enough to burn in a pot bellied stove. So....

...I was thinking, a dangerous proposition for sure, and doing a lot of research online regarding charcoal. If I took this waste wood, stacked it up with my log loader, then covered it with dirt with my bulldozer and lit it on fire, for a lot less work than what it would take to cut, split and move it, I could generate charcoal.

I got about 10 cord of the White Pine alone, and from what I can gather up, that junk wood would be about 4 tons of charcoal. Assuming charcoal is about the same heat equivalent of coal, that would enough to heat my house for the winter.

If it worked out well, maybe I could cut some Eastern Hemlock in the ensuing years and convert that to charcoal? Right now I cannot even get rid of it. Making a form of homemade coal might be the best of both worlds; using wood I have, but burning it like coal?

 

How about a healthy divisive hardwood charcoal vs softwood charcoal controversy. Surely there must be some opinions.


Wouldn't it be less work to just burn the pine ?

 

Charcoal probably will not burn too long where it is so light and not very dense compared to Anthracite coal.

Maybe built a retort with a metal drum and run a batch to see how it works?

 

That was my first thought too since I am clearing for land; just accept the fact that I got something from the pine logs and push the rest into a pile. After that just torch it after the first snow fall. It just seemed like such a waste however. If there was an easy way to get some use out of it though, why not put it to some sort of use.

 

Unless I'm missing something, open up your pile to people that heat with wood. Gave them sign a release of liability and let them have at it. Give it away, or charge a nominal fee.

Sent from my SM-T280 using Tapatalk

 

I think this stuff is pretty worthless for firewood. I will have to get a picture of it for you guys (and gals), but about 1/3 of it is White Pine which is not great firewood anyway, but it is also the parts of the tree that would not go for logs. That means a lot of big limbs, crooks, etc. It is hard to describe, but it would not just require noodling; it would require a lot of noodling on big, bulky low quality wood. The hemlock is not quite so bad, having more BTU's than White Pine, but bigger in size, but straighter.

I hate waste though so that is what got me to thinking about making charcoal. It just seemed like a good use for wasted wood.

 

Give the charcoal a try and see what happens.. If pine is already low BTU wood anyway, would that also yield low BTU charcoal? I don't know the answer to that but it would be worth some research. You might be able to offer it free on Craigslist or with a small delivery fee (whatever it costs per mile to run your truck there). I burn low quality wood during the shoulder seasons (spring and fall) to save the good stuff for winter. Gonna start cutting a pile of white pine this week for that has been sitting a couple of years. Taking up space in someone's yard and I'll use a little here and there to add to my BTU stockpile. If you find someone who does the same, you might be able to put it to good use.

 

Yeah I might try it.

The sawmills drive me crazy here for sure. A few years ago they decided to stop grading logs by scale, you just haul them in and get paid an average price, say $425 a thousand instead of $600 for select, $500 for #1 pine, $300 for #2 pine and $180 for #3 pine. It would actually work well for a logger as trees are not always perfects, so sending in a load does average out. The sawmill gets the same amount of wood, and the logger (and landowner) gets the same money, but all they did was increase their log standards. Now they just don't take logs with crooks or short lengths (under 12').

A logger can still make money, it just takes a very good eye on knowing what the scaler will look for and giving that to them. In the meantime, a lot of wasted wood piles up on the yard.

 

Wood ash interestingly enough makes fertilizer, but it is not that potent. At 0-1-3 on NPK the field this wood sits in would require 156 cord of wood burned into ash (not charcoal) since it needs 70-40-210 on its NPK requirements. I could use it for that, but boy that is a lot of wood to consume for only a few years worth of field growth.

 

Chip it? Know anyone with a tub grinder? Haha.

Wood chips/mulch are handy as heck. Even soft wood chips.

My tree service connection just chipped about a 200ydx20ft high pile of lower quality wood and some brush. Impressive machines those tub grinders...

 

That is a really interesting idea and should work on some level.

Charcoal does not have the energy content of coal, as someone already pointed out, because it is so much lighter. That said, charcoal is easy to light and burn as long as you are burning it in something that has a grate and is bottom- drafted (the draft is below the grate), exactly what a coal stove requires.

I believe what you are suggesting is fairly common in a lot of third- world countries to generate an indoor cooking fuel, and they do exactly what you mention.

The overall efficiency will come down to how much time and expense are involved in the actual conversion I think, as well as the ratio of wood to charcoal. Pine does not coal very much when burned and I would expect the same would result from your charcoaling idea so you may not actually get much charcoal from pine, as compared with some hardwoods. So you would have to add up the time to gather, bury, burn the wood and then recover and store the charcoal and see if it is worthwhile to you.

A very different method may be to buy or make a gassifying waste burner and use the heat directly, or use that heat to heat a large container of storage water and in turn use that water to heat buildings. ??

Brian

 

I had a suggestion of making biochar. It is not something I can use on my farm because my organic matter is already pretty high, and I am above optimum levels on my micro-nutrients, and adding biochar would just make that worse. But selling it; now that might work. There are a lot of organic gardeners here that like that sort of thing so maybe it would be an end product for me? A lot of questions there on practicality and making it all work, but I got a lot of waste wood (limbs, tops, deadfall, etc) and of course tree species that there is no market for.

 

Biochar sounds like it's worth a shot for sure. Not sure how much work it would be but there are a lot of people claiming it's great for gardens.

 

I made some charcoal recently and with some of the best wood I use for smoking too. Some apple and plum. Noting these are hardwoods, it was a little bit overdone. Your biochar, making briquettes might be an option but as far as yield goes, what I got leftover what looked like half of what I started with. So pack whatever you plan on using real tight. Maybe a slightly cooler fire and smaller outlet hole for exhaust.

 

I hate to burst anyone's bubble but charcoal is a far cry from actual coal, especially charcoal made from pine. One of the laws of thermodynamics states basically that you cannot get more energy out of something than is already there in totality. If pine has 16 BTUs you can't double that by burning off some of it by turning it to charcoal (this process reduces the available energy because some has been burned off in the process of the formation of the charcoal). charcoal doesn't increase available energy it just provides a steady even heat (ideal for cooking meat). The initial combustion phase has already taken place so it "picks up where it left off" when reignited. If you want to use wood charcoal to compete with coal it will need to be from hardwoods like oak, Osage orange (hedge) or black locust. And even then my guess is the hardwood charcoal will burn out before the coal does, but I could be wrong. I have never done an experiment comparing the two like that.

 

Yep, good idea Eric.

But I think we can just assume the Internet brought him here, right?

Hey, somebody had to say it......



Brian

 

Thanks for the warm welcome. Been a lurker here for a year or two. Was at the "other" site too. But the emoticons are much better over here.So I finally decided to jump in.

 

Great- it is a nice group of people here. Lots of idea sharing, a few chuckles and a little bit of mutual support, disguised as good- natured ribbing. A person could do a lot worse than hang around here.

This forum is pretty slow right now but will pick up again once we are all nestled in our 'caves' and feeding the stoves again. Kind of amusing sitting in front of a computer, communicating with other folks who share heating with wood in common; my computer and woodstove are w/in a couple of yards of each other in space but separated by a couple of centuries in concept.

Brian