[Terrapreta] Fwd: compost and charcoal

[Tom Miles]

Duane,

 

Beautiful countryside. The beehive kilns shown are described in detail in
Robert Massengale's book but as a Missourian forester he concentrates on
Missouri. 

 

He does provide great history of charcoal use for iron production in the
east and describes how it moves west and south to show the periods in which
charcoal was produced, first for iron, then for wood distillation
(methanol), then for domestic use. Production for iron revolved around wood
plantations owned by these mining companies like the silver mine you saw.
These were company towns of the kind we had in the wood industry. He
describes a period of what you might call "sustainable use" in which
companies consumed as much wood as they could regenerate. As in the wood
products industry this gave away to overcutting when demand for iron rose
and small producers gave way to corporations. 

 

When high temperature blast furnaces were able to use coal to reduce the ore
then wood was no longer in demand. Production of charcoal as a byproduct of
wood distillation stopped when cheap synthetic  (coal based) methanol was
available from Germany, in about 1935, for substantially less than it could
be produced from wood. For the wood technologies see books like Hermann F J
Wenzl, The Chemical Technology of Wood, Academic Press, 1970 or N.E.
Rambush, Modern gas Producers, 1923, Benn Brothers Ltd., London.  The
chemical products are now made from natural gas. 

 

There was a vigorous spurt of charcoal kiln development in the 1930-1950s to
meet the demands of the increasing briquette market. At the time New York
City, for example had a very large consumption of charcoal for domestic use.
I did not understand the significance of the development of the Missouri
Charcoal Kiln until I read Massengale's book.  That was a very active period
for wood science. (He quotes people like Andrew Baker, formerly of the USFS
Forest Products lab in Madison, Wisconsin, who was very active in charcoal
development in the 1950s and 1960s.) These labor intensive kilns have
largely been displaced by modern continuous retorts using waste wood as raw
material. 

 

Tom

     

 

From: Duane Pendergast [mailto:still.thinking at computare.org] 
Sent: Sunday, November 25, 2007 10:53 AM
To: 'Tom Miles'; 'Kevin Chisholm'; 'lou gold'
Cc: 'terrapreta preta'
Subject: RE: [Terrapreta] Fwd: compost and charcoal

 

Tom, Kevin, Lou

 

My wife and I ran across this little bit of US charcoal history in the
spring of 2003 and visited while on a trip through the Death Valley area.

 

http://www.nps.gov/archive/deva/Charcoal.htm

 

 

http://www.terragalleria.com/parks/np.death-valley.4.html

 

 

The websites above note they were in operation for only about ten years.
They don't say what happened to the surrounding forest. It is high and dry
there and the trees in the immediate neighborhood are quite small now.

 

We got some nice pictures, but I'm giving list members a bandwidth break.

 

I wonder if this was mentioned in the book you referenced.

 

Duane

 

-----Original Message-----
From: terrapreta-bounces at bioenergylists.org
[mailto:terrapreta-bounces at bioenergylists.org] On Behalf Of Tom Miles
Sent: November 25, 2007 11:15 AM
To: 'Kevin Chisholm'; 'lou gold'
Cc: 'terrapreta preta'
Subject: Re: [Terrapreta] Fwd: compost and charcoal

 

The meaning of "charcoal" in the US has simply changed. Until 1925

"charcoal" meant charcoal, lump or sold in various fine grades. Now most

people think it means charcoal briquettes. 

 

In the 1920s Henry Ford was faced with a shortage of wood alcohol which was

used as a solvent in lacquers and as anti-freeze. So he built a sawmill, a

(wood) auto body plant and a wood distillation plant to make his own in

Michigan. 

 

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: /pipermail/terrapreta_bioenergylists.org/attachments/20071125/31db7f80/attachment-0001.html