[Terrapreta] Fwd: torrefied wood or charcoal?

[Tom Miles]

Gerrit,

 

You can achieve the same thing by altering the volatile content of the
charcoal. Kingsford is probably using the same equipment in the same way
only they may be either leaving more volatile in the char or adding
volatiles to the char in the briquetting process. The grooves in the new
briquette are probably just a designer change in the die.  I suspect either
an additive or a minor change in processing. I think that significantly
lowering the pyrolysis process as in torrefaction would be difficult in
their multiple hearth furnaces. They may be just reducing the residence time
and running the char through faster. 

 

Tom 

 

From: terrapreta-bounces at bioenergylists.org
[mailto:terrapreta-bounces at bioenergylists.org] On Behalf Of Gerald Van
Koeverden
Sent: Saturday, March 01, 2008 8:21 PM
To: Terra Preta
Subject: Re: [Terrapreta] Fwd: torrefied wood or charcoal?

 

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>
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 <mailto:vnkvrdn at yahoo.ca> 

To: Terra Preta <mailto:terrapreta at bioenergylists.org> 

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
<http://www.dountoothers.org/charcoal.html> 

 

 

 

 

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