[Terrapreta] Fwd: torrefied wood or charcoal?

[Gerald Van Koeverden]

>
> You're perfectily right to be cautious.  All the literature  
> discourages the use of briquette charcoal ashes in gardening.  They  
> are toxic to plants.
>
> What interested me in the article is the claim that the wood in  
> Kingsford briquettes isn't even charcoal - but rather a pre- 
> charcoal stage called torrefied wood.  By stopping carbonization at  
> this stage - before it goes exothermic - they save more of the  
> wood's energy than through a full carbonization into pure charcoal,  
> maximizing their returns.   Torrefied wood has 90% of the original  
> energy in the raw wood as compared to 50 or 60% in charcoal.
>
>
> On 1-Mar-08, at 9:50 AM, Dan Culbertson wrote:
>
>> I don't know if the article below is "true" but it is a bit  
>> incorrect or incomplete with respect to charcoal briquettes.  They  
>> contain coal as well as wood char and binders.  Maybe not the  
>> Kingsford brand but some certainly do.  See  http://www.enotes.com/ 
>> how-products-encyclopedia/charcoal-briquette .  Makes them not a  
>> very good thing to use in the soil for terra preta I would think.   
>> I've avoided using anything but natural charcoal in soil mixes and  
>> I leave the cheaper briquettes (and their coal ashes) to uses  
>> other than soil amendment.  I'd be interested to know if that is  
>> overly cautious... but coal doesn't seem like a very good thing to  
>> put into soil.
>>
>> Dan
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: Gerald Van Koeverden
>> To: Terra Preta
>> Sent: Saturday, March 01, 2008 08:10
>> Subject: [Terrapreta] torrefied wood or charcoal?
>>
>> true or false?
>>
>> Charcoal
>> by: E. G. Kingsford
>>
>>
>> Charcoal is simply carefully cooked wood.
>> Mankind figured out this one many centuries ago. The heat- 
>> producing part of fuel is carbon. Increase the relative amount of  
>> carbon in your cooker, and you can roast that haunch of mountain  
>> goat, or yak fillet, and get out of the kitchen in half the time.  
>> Wood is about 50% carbon (coal is 90). You can up your wood-based  
>> carbon by reducing the wood’s hydrogen and oxygen content. It’s  
>> still done pretty much the way it was started centuries ago. Logs  
>> are baked slowly at very high temperatures in a low-oxygen oven.  
>> This drives off most of the liquids and leaves the carbon.
>>
>> Unlike charcoal, the irritating, ubiquitous charcoal briquette is  
>> made from roasted wood scrap, quick-lighting chemicals, and  
>> binders compressed into a little cake. It has less snob appeal  
>> than true charcoal but is a thoroughly American heritage. The  
>> briquette was invented in the 1920s for Henry Ford, as an auto  
>> assembly line spinoff. Henry Ford pondered the problem of how to  
>> squeeze a buck from the scraps of steering wheel and dashboard  
>> wood that were ordinarily thrown away. As always, his crack staff  
>> answered with the solution, “Cook it, smash it into a lump, and  
>> give it a fancy name.” For years thereafter you could only buy  
>> charcoal briquettes only at your local Ford dealerships. Then,  
>> eventually the operation became so large it was turned over to a  
>> Ford relative, E.G. Kingsford, and the rest is hamburger.
>>
>> http://www.dountoothers..org/charcoal.html
>>
>

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