[Terrapreta] Chicken Litter Project & Potential of TP Sequestration

[Tom Miles]

Erich,
 
Foster described his poultry litter project to me some months ago. At that
time he was considering using a fluided bed reactor for pyrolyzing the
litter. It will be interesting to learn about his progress. It looks like he
will be presenting his work at a symposium February 22 in Harrisonburg.
http://www.vtnews.vt.edu/story.php?relyear=2007
<http://www.vtnews.vt.edu/story.php?relyear=2007&itemno=37> &itemno=37
 
His pyrolysis work led to high charcoal yields (~40%):
http://www.nt.ntnu.no/users/skoge/prost/proceedings/aiche-2005/topical/pdffi
les/T7/papers/537g.pdf
 
Improving the Quality of Bio-Oils from Poultry Litter Pyrolysis

Foster Agblevor and Sueng-Soo Kim

Disposal of poultry litter is becoming a major problem in the USA poultry
industry because of environmental pressures and health concerns. However,
poultry litter can be potentially converted into bio-oils, gas, and
fertilizer. We investigated the fast pyrolysis of poultry litter into
bio-oils and gaseous products. The bio-oil yields were relatively low (20 to
30%) compared to wood derived bio-oils and they had very high viscosities
compared to wood and herbaceous bio-oils. The viscosity of the bio-oils were
considerably reduced when the poultry litter was mixed with other feedstocks
and co-pyrolized. The char yields were extremely high (>40%) compared to
woody and herbaceous biomass. The high char yields were attributed to the
high ash content of this feedstock. The char product had high concentrations
of potassium, phosphorous, calcium, and nitrogen. The gaseous products
yields were also very high.

Pyrolysis under catalytic conditions increased the gas yields considerably.
Thus, pyrolysis technology can be used to dispose of poultry litter and
simultaneously produce high-value products, and fuels.

 

Another charcoal project at Virgina Tech was directed at making lump
charcoal from small diameter timber. Are you aware of this project? A poster
was presented at VA Tech's October 16, 2006 Deans' Forum on Energy Security
and Sustainability
 
Bioenergy and Carbon Sequestration from Charcoal Production Using Wood
Waste: Developing a Locally Made Charcoal Enterprise in Virginia, A Pilot
Study

Rising energy demand and technological advances have made charcoal
production from wood waste feasible at commercially operable scales.
Residues from forest harvesting and untreated mill wastes provide suitable
materials for producing heat and power, with charcoal or "charwood" as a
valuable by-product. Wood carbonization is achieved under pressurized
conditions with heat for drying and pre-heating charwood feedstock supplied
by a separate gasification-combustion unit. Surplus heat is derived from the
exothermic carbonization reactions, and power is generated through a
pressure-driven gas turbine. Separate process controls on the combustion and
carbonization chambers regulate drying and reaction rates to ensure
volatilization of organics. The system's low emissions and nearly
carbon-neutral energy output could stimulate markets for small diameter wood
removed in sustainable forest management operations, and offset carbon
emissions from non-renewable fuels.


    Virginia and throughout the region has seen a growing supply of wood
waste from forest harvesting operations, over crowded land fill sites, and
natural disasters. To add value to this stream of wood waste a team from the
College of Natural Resources is developing systems to produce and market
natural lump charcoal. Program objectives include: develop and test a
prototype small-scale natural hardwood charcoal manufacturing process that
uses a portable kiln and small diameter logs or slab wood as raw material;
demonstrate how to make a portable kiln and produce natural hardwood
charcoal to forest managers, landowners, entrepreneurs and other interested
parties; determine the feasibility of the small scale natural hardwood
charcoal production; and evaluate local markets and effective marketing
methods for natural hardwood charcoal. The poster will summarize progress
thus far to develop and test a portable kiln and to explore ways to add
market value to natural lump charcoal. Recent demonstrations for landowners
and natural resource specialists have shown that the system has appeal in
the region, and further improvement and testing of the system will continue.

Tom Hammett, himal at vt.edu, 231-2716, Dept: Wood Science and Forest Products,
Mail code: 0323, Affiliation: faculty

Phil Radtke, pradtke at vt.edu, 231-8863, Mail code: 0324, Affiliation: faculty

 
Tom Miles
 
 
  

  _____  

From: terrapreta-bounces at bioenergylists.org
[mailto:terrapreta-bounces at bioenergylists.org] On Behalf Of Shengar at aol.com
Sent: Tuesday, February 06, 2007 2:53 PM
To: terrapreta at bioenergylists.org
Subject: [Terrapreta] Chicken Litter Project & Potential of TP Sequestration


My News this week: 

A professor  at Virginia Tech will be starting a pilot project at a poultry
farm near me next month.
Please contact me if any of you are interested in joining me on a field trip
to Dayton VA. to see Dr. Foster A Agblevor's chicken litter pyrolysis
project. 
I will set a date dependent upon the folks who contact me. 
If any need a place to stay I've got plenty of room.
I will post more specs on Foster's project as I get them.

I feel like Dorothy in OZ,,,,,,,,, Who knew after all my searching's that
this would fall into my own back yard.......there IS no place like home!

I have also made contacts and generated interest with several people at the
Center for Innovative Science and Technology CISAT and James Madison
University. Primary among these people is Dr. Wayne Teel who tells me he has
several students wanting to do projects in this area. 

Chicken litter is a big management problem in the Shenandoah Valley and
consequently the Chesapeake Bay.


 
 
The reason TP has elicited such interest in the Agricultural / horticultural
side of it's benefits is this one static:

1 gram of charcoal cooked to 650 C has a surface area of 400 m2, now for
conversion fun;

One ton of charcoal has a surface area of 400,000 Acres!! which is equal to
625 square miles!!

Now at a field application rate of 2 lbs/sq ft (which equals 1000 sq ft/ton)
or 43 tons/acre, this yields 26,000 Sq miles of surface area per Acre.
(Virginia is 39,594 sq. miles)

What this suggest to me is a potential of sequestering virgin forest amounts
of carbon just in the soil alone, without counting the forest on top.

To take just one fairly representative example, in the classic Rothampstead
experiments in England where arable land was allowed to revert to deciduous
temperate woodland, soil organic carbon increased 300-400% from around 20
t/ha to 60-80 t/ha (or about 30-40 tons per acre) in less than a century
(Jenkinson & Rayner 1977). The rapidity with which organic carbon can build
up in soils is also indicated by examples of buried steppe soils formed
during short-lived interstadial phases in Russia and Ukraine. Even though
such warm, relatively moist phases usually lasted only a few hundred years,
and started out from the skeletal loess desert/semi-desert soils of glacial
conditions (with which they are inter-leaved), these buried steppe soils
have all the rich organic content of a present-day chernozem soil that has
had many thousands of years to build up its carbon (E. Zelikson, Russian
Academy of Sciences, pers. comm., May 1994).
<http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/carbon1.html> Quaternary carbon
storage in global ecosystems
 
 
Next week: 
My look into the issue of Mercury  and  Ammonia Scrubbing technology of Coal
fired power plant CO2 emissions.
 
Cheers,
Erich
 
Erich J. Knight 
Shenandoah Gardens
E-mail: shengar at aol.com
(540) 289-9750
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