[Terrapreta] Fwd: torrefied wood or charcoal?
Gerald Van Koeverden
vnkvrdn at yahoo.ca
Sat Mar 1 22:21:07 CST 2008
Tom,
It would be interesting to do a little detective work on this one.
Here's some amateur experimental results comparing the old Kingsford
briquettes with the newest version:
http://www.nakedwhiz.com/productreviews/kvsk/oldkingsfordnew-2.htm
You'll see that their graphed results show that the new stuff burns
much hotter and burns out significantly quicker than the old -
defining characteristics of the difference between charcoal and
torrefied wood...
Gerrit
On 1-Mar-08, at 5:01 PM, Tom Miles wrote:
> I think you’re reading too much into a couple of well intentioned ,
> not very precise, descriptions. I have seen nothing in the history
> of the Ford-Kingsford operation to suggest that they are or were
> making anything like terrified wood.
>
> Ford’s briquette was actually the char byproduct of a wood
> distillation plant to make methanol using waste from the mill he
> built to make wooden car parts. He closed the wood distillation
> when synthetic methanol from coal became available from Germany in
> about 1935.
> See Bob Massengale, Black Gold, A History of charcoal in Missouri
> http://www.authorhouse.com/BookStore/ItemDetail~bookid~37830.aspx
>
> Barbecue briquettes have always contained a collection of things
> including ashes from biomass boilers, sometimes coal char etc.
>
> Tom Miles
>
>
> From: terrapreta-bounces at bioenergylists.org [mailto:terrapreta-
> bounces at bioenergylists.org] On Behalf Of Gerald Van Koeverden
> Sent: Saturday, March 01, 2008 7:24 AM
> To: Terra Preta
> Subject: [Terrapreta] Fwd: torrefied wood or charcoal?
>
>
>
>
>
> 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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