Paul, would you be able to share your plant model showing this pencils out economically?
This would include feedstock acquisition costs, operating and maintenance costs, staffing costs, capital principal and interest, etc.
Best,
On Mar 28, 2022, at 1:59 PM, Paul S Anderson <
psanders@...> wrote:
I totally agree with Gordon’s comment. Small size units such as cookstoves and mid-size units such as for heating a school or apartment complex, when in large numbers, can have awesome impact and therefore should be not be denigrated, but should have equal standing with large-scale systems.
For example, please read pages 21 – 27 in Section XII of my white paper on “Climate Intervention with Biochar” about biochar-producing (TLUD) cookstoves.
As a real-world example, there are now 100,000 Champion natural draft TLUD stoves in West Bengal, India, where very impoverished women are producing 80 tonnes of charcoal / biochar PER DAY, which is over 29,000 t of charcoal / biochar per year. Using the 1: 2.5 ratio of C: CO2, that is 200 t CO2e removed long term per day. or 72,500 t CO2e per year. [However, this charcoal / biochar is REQUIRED to be sold for burning, mainly in incense sticks, because of carbon credit rules. But future projects can be with CDR and have much more cash flow.]
And it can scale up by multiple orders of magnitude to at least 300 million tonnes per year, with multiple SDG benefits for the impoverished families that are doing their daily cooking.
I will gladly answer any questions. We are seeking seed funding for scale up as CDR.
Paul
Doc / Dr TLUD / Paul S. Anderson, PhD
Phone: Office: 309-452-7072 Mobile & WhatsApp: 309-531-4434
https://capitalism21.org for societal reforms and free digital novella “
A Capitalist Carol” with pages 88 – 94 about solving the world crisis for clean cookstoves.
That’s an excellent summary of the points made.
There is one that I believe is incorrect and (should be removed) that is in conflict with many of the others, particularly items regarding circular economies:
"Large scale systems are needed. Cost/benefit of small-scale systems is prohibitive. Offtakers seek large systems”.
Our work shows that well-designed small scale, highly distributed biochar+energy (primarily heat) systems have a much better benefit/cost ratio with far more potential benefits, including financial profitability and lower CapX, than concentrated, large-scale industrial operations. They can scale to any size, do it incrementally, with the heat users bearing much of the cost. The fundamental difference is that the business model is not convenient for privately owned corporate style enterprises - as a community system it is more complex to develop (partly because of the inclusion of an array of non-monetized benefit objectives) and needs to be nurtured into existence, just like healthy soil.
It can be easily argued that the private mega-industrial mindset is what created the problems we are now desperately trying to fix.
I learned about 40 years ago that most environmental issues arise from a “law” called cumulative effects. It occurred to me then that solutions to environmental problems aren’t to be found in silver bullet monumental technological cures - the solutions will be in a shift to practices resulting in positive cumulative effects. This is the principle that supports Trollworks’ advocacy for community solutions (where large numbers of ordinary people participate) - the co-op model seems to be a good mechanism for doing that.
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the old model obsolete.”
– R. Buckminster Fuller
On Mar 27, 2022, at 12:54 PM, Tom Miles <
tmiles@...> wrote:
Large scale systems are needed. Cost/benefit of small-scale systems is prohibitive. Offtakers seek large systems.
