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New technology turns leaves to coal in hours
Published: 6 Jan 13 14:01 CET | Print version
Online: http://www.thelocal.de/sci-tech/20130106-47169.html
German scientists have developed a new technology to transform garden waste into fuel overnight, Der Spiegel magazine reported over the weekend. The resulting brown pellets can be used to fire conventional power stations.
- Nuclear power will 'never return' to Germany - National (4 Jan 13)
Garden waste such as grass, leaves or plant clippings, is placed in a kind of pressure cooker which can transform it into a form of coal, wrote the magazine, completing in a matter of hours a process which takes millions of years in nature.
"The bio-coal has almost the same characteristics as brown coal, with the difference that it's C02 neutral," Friedrich von Ploetz, head of the Suncoal company based outside Berlin, one of three bio-coal plants now operating in the country.
The best part about the new technology, wrote the magazine, is that unlike in the production of conventional biogas any organic matter - including food waste - can be 'carbonized' and transformed into fuel.
The breakthrough could mean an extra four million tons of fuel could be generated every year in Germany alone, according to the state-affiliated Johann-Heinrich-von-Thünen-Institute, enough to provide electricity for 2.5 million households.
The Local/jlb
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Your comments about this article:
Forgive me if I'm wrong it is along time since I studied but increasing the pressure would result in oil and gas would it not ?.
I have given more questions than answers sorry.
So many green energy fanatics tend to forget that many of their so-called "solutions" are neither solutions, nor green.
How is SunCoal's pellets different from biochar, something that people have known how to produce for 2,000 years (and charcoal, not true coal)? Is it more compact? Is it more efficiently produced?
A diesel engine hooked up to a 100 ton hydraulic press.
you can pelletise leaves and use them to run a heater or wood gasifier that generates electricity or drives a diesel motor, but the potential plus here would be if the trade-off between the energy taken to create the artifical coal results in a higher energy density to weight ratio that results in a marginal benefit for transportation costs, i.e. the energy used to create the artifical coal is less then the additional energy that would have been required to transport the pellets... not sure I am convinced unless the coal generator is itself portable and can be taken into the forest...