Please accept my best wishes for a very happy and healthy New Year. Jim, I remember when you came to gasification. Your expressive enthusiasm was infectious and quite welcome. As a result of your increased interest, innovation and participation, others were infected as well and moved forward, building their own gasifiers and contributing their personal experiences. This is all just great! Our industry needs more people like you and your band of innovators, out yonder, on the West Coast. Additionally, your GEK and what you do with it is your business as I'm sure you will agree.
This brings me to your misappropriation of terminology in the interest of "preventing confusion" amongst your disciples, potential customers, followers and sycophants. Producer gas is producer gas and syngas is syngas! I have made both gases and, if you could say the same, you, too, would know the differences. Granted, GEK gas may be different. There are many differences that occur in your part of the world. So, don't ripoff our terminology. Call it GEK gas! or lead! Help educate the uninitiated! Teach and preach the differences. Just don't play word games with the rest of us. If you are an adherent to our calendar, Happy New Year! Respectfully, Bill Klein, 3i (Powerhearth makes great producer gas!) ----- Original Message ----- From: "jim mason" <[email protected]> To: "Discussion of biomass pyrolysis and gasification" <[email protected]> Sent: Tuesday, December 28, 2010 4:38 AM Subject: Re: [Gasification] Syngas on Wiki_ On Mon, Dec 27, 2010 at 3:46 PM, Toby Seiler <[email protected]> wrote: > > Jim insists that his GEK is making "syngas" in all of his web > communications that I see, taking advantage of and fostering a > misconception and misrepresentation that a producer gas making machine > (GEK) he is selling, will make "syngas". I've asked that he market with > the correct term, but he refuses. I feel that this marketing use of > "syngas" term is misleading in his machines capability as a gasifier. > Synthesis gas making should be so easy. > > The Wiki process to make a change is not one that I have navigated. The > issue with the "syngas" term is, to date, the biggest disappointment I > have had using Wiki. > while the pleasures of lexical fundamentalism are undeniable, i'm not sure they usually lead to more useful and accurate descriptions of the world. i was trying to stay out of this latest round, but as toby has called me out for willful misleading, i guess i now need to respond. the problem here is that none of our terms are good for the modern hearers of them. only a small cult of people know the possible terms, and newbies to the terms seem to get quickly confused by the conflicting/unknown associations in old terms. in this ambiguity, i've found and argued the best option among many admitedly NOT good options seems to be "syngas" as an overarching term for gas made via thermal conversion of carbonaeous feed stock. the "syngas" term works for me as a contrast to "natural gas". it has all the "its flammable" and "it can do work" associations that we associate with "natural gas" (and we don't associate with methane). the "syn" part suggests something that is intentionally made, not naturally occuring. a gas we make that relates to natural gas. the percentage of nitrogen dilution in it to me seems one of many potential clarifiers. for a modern hearing first learning of this gas, its immediate relationship to "natural gas" in naming gets the process of understanding going. all sorts fo clarifiers will build as the process of learning continues. i've also argued that what to name this "thing" is already in play. this is clearly evidenced by the ambiguous usage in the wiki article, and elsewhere on the web. this is not simply a conspiracy by me, but rather the response of many contemporary users trying to find a name that works and has the right connotations for current times. it is happening already and will continue irrespective of our agreement. more fundamentally, we need to temper our lexical certainties with the knowledge that woods mean different things in different eras. meaning drifts and is reassigned as needs require and times change. language is not providing names for discrete and natural entities in the world. rather, names bracket off and claim boundaries to an ambiguous continuum of stuff and processes. these boundaries change over time as their users decide to do different work with them. this process is called semantic shift. here's the wiki article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_change . if you do not believe wikipedia, google to the 1000s of other pages that point out examples of why calling someone "gay" in 1910 is different than calling someone "gay" in 2010. i suggest we are seeing this type of semantic ambiguity and contestation of meanings happening around the term "syngas". and as i'm interested in getting this tech understandable to other than the current small cult, i'm promoting the term i think hears best to modern ears. the term that repeatedly works best for me while teaching this tech to newbies is "syngas". that nitrogen is or is not involved in the matter, or that if over x % we are going to change the term, but not if related to y process, is the last issue on their minds. let's review the other potential terms. "synthesis gas". this term has mostly functional evocations as the feedstock to a GTL process. this historically was always without nitrogen. but many GTL processes these days work with nitrogen diluted gas in a single pass. some in fact argue the nitrogen helps their process. should we have a similar linguistic protest against these uses of "synthesis gas" by these researchers? seems the "synthesis" gas term should be more about the feedstock aspect of the gas than its particular composition. "wood gas"- tom reed's choice and a biggie currently in the english world (but pretty much only the english speaking world). i find this one trouble for modern ears that think burning wood is bad. you immediately need to have the "why its ok to use wood" discussion. also, wood is only one of many sources to make the unnamed gas. it is unnecessarily limiting. the gas should cover gas made via coal, peat, ag waste, msw, etc. "producer gas"- the producer part of this does not do much work in helping people understand the gas. that this machine has in the past called a producer isn't widely known. it sounds victorian to me. i've never had this term work well while teaching this tech. "generator gas"- most who hear this think petrol for a genset. that gas making machines were called gas generators, and this was shortened to generator, so "generator gas" makes sense, is lost on contemporary ears. "suction gas"- well, that's one way to make it. not one of the more relevant clarifiers i find. should i call gek gas "heat exhanged gas" ? "water gas"- again, a method of making it. a name for a gas from a specific process. not really a general term. "bio gas"- this has come to mean anaerobic digestor gas. could also be gasifier gas when using contemporary organic sources. but convention now points elsewhere and there seems to be agreement on this one. ffinally any participant here knows i've used all and every term for this (which for now will go unnamed) gas. on our site all terms are used in various places, and i find it difficult to believe that anyone is confused about what type of gas i'm making (particularly the hot air type). probably only 5% of the people who visit the site even know all these various terms, and could even hold forth about the implied amount of nitrogen suggested by the term chosen. thus i find this a very academic debate, mostly following from toby's specific interest in this topic, as he plans to make a product with a less nitrogen diluted gas. others find other features of this gas more or less interesting, and choose their terms accordingly. maybe we should throw out the "syngas" term altogether for pure co and h2. if we want to be literal, "synthetic natural gas" or its abbreviation "syngas" should mean a majority ch4 gas made by artificial means. co and h2 should have little part in it. like all terms, there are many competing evocations at work. both content and function of the named. meaning in the end is a "conspiracy of convention". there is no wrong answer, only picking the ambiguity that one thinks does the most work. nonetheless and in actuality, i try to not use any of these terms so as to avoid the whole issue. i try to organize sentences so i can say "gasifier" or "gasification", and not name the gas or the machine otherwise. these are much more translatable and accurate and without debate i find. if one wants to go do a lexical calculation on our site, i think you'll find minimal use of any of them. jim ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Jim Mason Website: http://www.whatiamupto.com Current Projects: - Gasifier Experimenters Kit (the GEK): http://www.gekgasifier.com - Escape from Berkeley alt fuels vehicle race: www.escapefromberkeley.com - ALL Power Labs on Twitter: http://twitter.com/allpowerlabs - Shipyard Announce list: http://lists.spaceship.com/listinfo.cgi/icp-spaceship.com _______________________________________________ The Gasification list has moved to [email protected] - please update your email contacts to reflect the change. 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