Concerning large scale availability of corn cobs – have you been to a modern American corn farm in the last 50 years? Most corn is picked and shelled in the field with a combine (harvesting machine). The husks and cobs are dropped right back onto the ground to become good organic matter for the next season’s crop. Actually this is a good way to conserve the soil quality.
When I was a kid in the 1960’s we used corn cobs to provide bedding for feeder cattle. Problem was we had to take time to pick THAT corn with an old machine that picked ear corn. Then we had to bring in a “shelling machine” that could handle ear corn from storage. Considering that 99% of the corn on that farm was “combined” with the modern combine, it was a LOT of extra work just to provide corn cobs for bedding. By the early 1970’s that farm manager had given up on corn cobs and used wheat straw to bed the feeder cattle and picked ALL the corn with the combine. Saved much manpower and was more profitable. I’ sure the corn cobs can be gasified just fine but for large scale use it wouldn’t be practical because of availability. I suspect there are better sources of biomass than the corn field. My $.02 Dan Nicoson From: Gasification [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Kermit Schlansker Sent: Friday, February 20, 2015 1:55 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [Gasification] questions One major question that I have about gasification is why corn cobs are not mentioned more as a major fuel source. There must be a lot of them and as combined heat and power they could keep farm houses, schools, and apartments warm. I know that some of them are returned to the soil and some are probably used to distill ethanol. Wouldn’t it be better to distill the ethanol with solar energy or with combined heat and manufacturing (comanufacturing)? Is cellulosic ethanol likely to become important? Another question is, can we gasify the cobs and then return the ashes to the soil or must we put carbon back to the soil to fertilize it? Would powdered coal stay indefinitely in the soil and do the same thing? On this list I have seen opinions on both side of this but I hope someone knows the truth. Since fertilizer is all important to gasification and it will be scarce, we should consider the use of sewage for fertilizer. One of the reasons that sewage is said to be unfit is that medicines and other impurities would poison us. Wouldn’t gasification destroy many of these organic compounds and thus purify the ashes so they could be used as fertilizer for food crops? Inorganic compounds probably would not be destroyed and in recycling fertilizer, salt might be the ultimate pollutant. Tom Reed’s gasification driven tractor seemed to me to be one of the best gasification projects. I did think that the sheet metal would rust pretty quickly and that it needed cast iron. I wonder if it ever worked enough to plow with. I believe that some farm made ethanol used as a starting and power increasing fuel might make it more practical. Making farming self supporting in terms of energy seems like a good idea. There are many corn fields surrounding Ann Arbor yet the best energy project the city has came up with is a large array of solar panels. Why not use those corn cobs? Where is the propaganda machine for biomass energy? I believe that available biomass energy is greater than either solar or wind but the environmentalists ignore and deplore it. One way to advertise the virtue of biomass energy would be to create a large farm with an apartment on it. Gasification, can combine heat and power for the building and also create enough fuel for plowing from farm biomass. This would create a huge advertising of the need for gasification. K Schlansker
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