Wood Waste and Urea

There is a pretty wide agreement that if we don't reduce the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, we are all going to hell in a hand basket. Some people believe that we have already gone too far and no matter what we do, it is too late. Others believe that with the head in the sand attitude of most world leaders, there is very little chance that we will succeed in making any significant reduction in our output of fossil carbon. Assuming that the above is true and the world will not gain control of her carbon emissions, what can New Zealand do about it.

Of course we should take measures which establish our credentials as responsible world citizens and reduce our output of green house gases. Quite cynically, this is important for our marketing.  More important, though, is to future proof New Zealand against the possibility of the break down of the ecology of the rest of the world and with it the demise of their economies. Our main trading partners are in the Northern Hemisphere and their demise is going to impact us severely.  There are many many measures we can take.  Below is one regarding our fertilizer supply which will both bolster our credentials for our export market in the near term and help future proof New Zealand against the likely coming breakdown in the world economy a few decades hence.

Sawdust into urea
It has been proposed by our New Zealand SOE, Solid Energy that they turn their lignite deposits into urea for the farmers. At present we import some of our urea so this would help our balance of payment, provide jobs and enrich holders of shares in Solid Energy (MP's???). So far so good. However, it would become the largest emitter of Carbon Dioxide in the country, even surpassing our large coal fired power station at Huntly. It would increase our atmospheric carbon output by 20%.  Is there another way. Well, yes there is*. You can make urea from almost any carbon based substance from methane to pure carbon. You can also produce urea from wood wastes.

*here is yet another way to obtain our fertilizers.

In New Zealand, we have a number of sources of such wood wastes. This includes the branches cut off pine plantations when they are trimmed to make clear wood (lifts), it includes trimmings during logging, the sawdust and off cuts from lumber mills, the left over wood ends from building construction and furniture manufacture plus wood from demolition sites. In addition, all waste paper and cardboard, which is nearly pure cellulose, can be added into this mix. It is pretty clear what the objection of Solid Energy is. Clearly they want to make profit by the vertical integration of their lignite deposits and a Urea plant. The first objection they will make is that the transportation costs of bringing this material from all over the country to their plant will make the feed stock(wood, paper etc) too expensive. So lets agree that whatever happens, they will pay the same for this material as it would have cost them to mine their lignite and transport it to the urea plant. If necessary, we will use government subsidies to make the use of wood waste instead of lignite, financially neutral.  This may sound counter productive at first but bear with me a moment.

However.............Of course we must take into account the carbon tax they will be charged if they do decide to use their lignite.  We have been generous to a fault by signing up to Koyota and have taken upon ourself the obligation to pay a carbon tax.  The use of lignite will incure an added cost which must be taken into account.  Once the Carbon tax is taken into account it remains to be seen, if a subsidy would still have to be paid for getting the wood waste to the company. Wood and paper have no carbon cost because they are recycled carbon recently removed from the air.   We must also factor in the likely effect on our tourism industry and our food exports of becoming the bad boy of the OECD with respect to our lack of carbon abatement. When all this is taken into consideration, it may well be that the use of wood and paper waste to make urea will be cheaper to New Zealand than using lignite.

Then we come to the effect on our railroads. Rail is the ideal medium for transporting high bulk low value products. What is good about transporting wood waste by rail is it gives them another revenue stream which can be used for maintaining and upgrading their infrastructure. This contributes to making the shipment of all other goods by rail more cost effective. We might even put the wood-transport revenue stream into electrifying our railways, further reducing our carbon footprint and so further increasing New Zealand's financial viability with respect to our carbon output. (not to mention our clean green credentials).

Another important aspect is the greenness of our meat exports.  New Zealand meat is for the most part grass fed.  In so far as this is true, our meat is carbon neutral.  The carbon contained in our meat is carbon recently removed from the air by the grass the animals eat.  At present we use fossil fuel to produce our urea which puts a carbon cost on our meat.  When other countries such as the UK try to interfere with our meat imports to their country, they often quote carbon miles.  In actual fact, the carbon footprint of our meat, even when transport is taken into account, is lower than meat they produce.  If we produce our urea from wood waste, our meat is even more carbon neutral.

There is a desperate need to calculate true costs when making economic policy. In this case, with our blinkers on, the use of lignite might be less expensive than the use of wood waste to produce urea. However, when all the benefits of using wood waste and the costs of using lignite are taken into consideration, the outcome is very likely to be quite the opposite.

ps.  On Jul 26,2011 on morning National Radio there was an announcement of plans to construct a turpentine plant for producing, not surprisingly, turpentine from forest waste.  This points to a couple of things.  First, it is apparently going to be financially feasible to bring the feed stock from the forests to the plant.  This suggests that it also might be feasible to bring wood waste to a urea plant.  The second thing is that as far as I know, after turpentine is distilled out of forest waste, what remains is the wood minus the pitch.  This is cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin which is exactly the feed stock that is needed for a urea plant.  All the other feed stocks mentioned above can also  be fed in.  Some of them, such as the offcuts from lumber mills may also be usable for turpentine production. Right beside the turpentine factory would be the ideal site for a urea factory.   The transport cost to each factory is cut in half.

pps.  If our production of urea from wood and other cellulostic waste exceeds our needs, the possibility opens up to export green urea at a premium.  Of course no nitrogen source is green if it is used in excess such that it contaminates ground water but in so far as it is produced from cellulose rather than fossil fuels, our urea would be completely green.

German FIT system - Brilliant

You have to admire the German government* and its Tax Department. Not only do they not themselves financially support the introduction of small scale renewable energy in Germany, they manage to tax it 6 or 7 times. This may seem a little surprising to you considering how the German FIT (feed in tariff) system is always held up as an example of how to increase the uptake of small scale solar-electric systems. And, don't misunderstand me. It has been tremendously successful. The generation from small solar electric systems in Germany is now almost equivalent to five large coal powered generating units and is increasing day by day. Lets have a closer look at how it work.

*I have started with the German system as it is the most insidious.  At the bottom there is a link to our New Zealand system.  There are almost an infinitely varied number of systems which can be used in terms of the regulatory framewrod that surrounds it.  Each one has it's own fish hooks.

The German government is not involved in financing solar-electric systems. The money to pay the small generator for every kWh he produces* is raised by the German Power companies charging all its customers a little more for the power they buy. Here is the first level of taxation. German VAT (sales tax) is just under a fifth so when you pay your power bill, a fifth is added to the charge and this goes to the German government. Toooo clever!! Remember, the power company is allowed to charge a little extra to all its customers to pay the FITs so all its customers pay a fifth of this little bit extra as Sales tax. It is only a little per customer but remember that in total it is equal to a fifth of the sale price of the power generated by 5 large coal powered generating stations.

*For the early adopter of a solar electric system, it is fantastic, at least for the first 20 years.  The FIT is over 50c for the first 20 years since installation.  At each year later that you install your panels, the amount you get per kWh over the first 20 years is less.

Then the government insists on double metering. All the power that the small generator/customer produces goes through one meter and everything he uses through the second meter. This seems at first glance to be very beneficial to the small generator. Since he receives approximately three times the rate for the power he produces than for the power he buys he is very pleased that all the power he produces is measured rather than the excess above what he uses. This way he gets the maximum return??? Are you ever suspicious when something seems too good to be true?

Since the small generator/customer is earning revenue from his solar panels and the amount is recorded by the power company, it is visible to the tax office and this amount is added to the income of the small generator. He is than taxed on this revenue at his marginal income tax rate*.  For a really well off German, and with the reunification tax,  this is over 50%. In other words, if a high salaried German earns 200euro per month from his power generation, he gets to keep only 100euro.

*  In most countries you are taxed at a certain rate for the first part of your income, a larger rate on the next portion and a higher rate on the rest of your income.  Let's say for the sake of the argument that it is 20% on the first thousand, 30% on the next thousand and 40% on anything above 2000 per month.  40% is your marginal tax rate and any additional income you acquire will be taxed at this rate.

Then the tax office looks at how much power the owner of solar panels buys. Remember, this is all the power he uses. Not just the extra he needs to make up his shortfall. Whatever you buy in Germany, including power, has sales tax attached to it and sales tax, as we said, in Germany it is just under a fifth. Suppose our same well off German buys 200euro of power. Once you have added VAT, he has to pay 240euro for it. The 40euro goes to the tax office. So far we are up to 3 taxations on the power produced. Now we come to the power company.

The power company earns money by selling power. The power it buys from the small generator, it sells on to its other customers. This increases its revenue and it pays tax on this added revenue at its marginal tax rate. It also pays sales tax on power it buys.  The power is taxed once more and since the power company has to make a profit, it passes on this added expense to its customers.  This added cost is also taxed.  We now have a tax on a tax.  (or is it a tax on a tax on a tax.  I am loosing track of all the compounding going on)

As I said, you have to admire the system. At a time when the world is desperate to replace fossil fuel power generation with renewables, the German government has come up with a way to increase the uptake of renewable energy, have a sixtiple dipping system of taxing every kWh of renewable power produced and gain the gratitude of its citizens and the admiration of the world. Machiavelli would be all a twitter. Imagine how much less expensive it would be for the installer of small generation equipment if it wasn't taxed this way; how much more worthwhile it would be to install such a system and how much less expensive power would be for  German consumers that don't have solar panels.  Imagine how much better if the German Government simply put in a system for the benefit of the German citizen.

One wonders what all this extra revenue is used for. If the German government ear-marks (ring fences) this money for installing wind turbines, making home solar equipment less expensive, subsidising house insulation etc. etc. the system would be justified in terms of the big picture of replacing fossil fuel generation by renewables. I wonder. That would be another story.

In another blog, I calculated that the small customer who installs solar panels would have to install a system between 1.7 to 4 times as big as he actually needs  to generate the power he uses if he wanted to end up paying nothing for his electricity.  This is, of course, only if double metering is the law of the land.  The wide range depends to a large extent on your tax status and the tax laws of your country.  Guess what extra you pay when you buy your solar system.  That's right.  GST.  So you pay even more tax to the government in order to buy a system which is far bigger than you actually need.  How many taxations are we up to now.  I have lost track.

Note that in New Zeland we have double metering but it only measures the excess and shorfall after you use your own generated power.  For a look at this system, click here.

American Wars and Wind power

It has often been opined that the real reason America gets involved in so many wars is to secure her energy imports. This always seemed a bit far fetched and I wondered how much extra energy America could have generated if she had used all the wealth expended on wars over the past decade or so to build wind turbines. The results are interesting but I have to depend on whatever information I can glean from the Internet. I'll put down the information I have found and where it comes from and show the calculations. If you have other figures, plug them in and see what you get. But first a word about units.

Two important concepts when you talk about electricity are power and energy. Think of a couple of lads who have to move a pile of bricks up from the ground to, say, the fifth floor. They walk up the stairs with the bricks. One of them is big and strong, the other small and weak. The more powerful chap can take the bricks 10 at a time and finishes the work in half a day. The smaller chap can only carry 5 bricks at a time and takes a full day to finish. When they both have finished, they have expended the same amount of energy (as measured by the weight of bricks times the height they have been moved to), but the big chap is more powerful. He has done the work faster. Power is a rate of expending energy (rate of doing work). In electricity the watt, kilowatt or megawatt is a measure of power. It is the rate at which you are expending energy. The Kilowatt hour is the measure of how much energy you have expended. If you expend energy at a rate of one kilowatt for one hour, you have used one kilowatt hour.

So what information do we have. From this web site, the electrical energy consumption of the United States in 2005 (latest I could find) was 3,816,000,000mWh/y (megawatt hours per year - a megawatt is a million watts). Incidentally, this was one of the few sites that used the correct units so perhaps its information is more trustworthy than some of the others.

From this web site, the cost to the Americans of the wars they have been engaged in since 2001(eight and a half years to August 2009) is $901,386,000,000US. Click on this site and watch the numbers go up.

From information from a friend in the wind turbine business, it costs about $2millionUS per megawatt of wind turbine generating capacity. Just a word here about what this means.

A wind turbine is rated for how much power it will generate when the wind speed is optimal (neither too much or too little). However, the wind does not blow all the time. Wind sites are monitored before a wind farm is constructed to find the capacity factor of the area. Below about 35%, a site is often rejected and a higher capacity factor is, of course, desirable. I will use the 35% figure since it is conservative for our example. What this means is that a one megawatt wind generator in a 35% site will be generating on average over the year just over a third of a megawatt or 350kilowatts of power. Over a year of 365 days of 24 hours this will produce 350 x 365 x 24 = 3066Mwh of electrical energy.

So how many megawatts of electrical generating capacity could we buy for the $901,386,000,000US of wealth that has been expended in the wars from 2001 to Aug. 2009. Dividing this figure by $2mUS per megawatt we get 450693Mw of generating capacity.

Since one megawatt of generating capacity in a 35% site will produce 3066mWh of electricity, 450,693 megawatts of generating capacity will generate 450,693 x 3066 = 1,381,824,738 mWh of electricity per year.

Since the electricity generation of the USA in 2005 was 3,816,000,000mWh/y, this is an extra 36% of the 2005 generation.

How much imported oil would this replace. How much better would the US balance of payments be. How many young lives would have been saved on both sides and would this have been enough to avoid the present economic melt down. How many terrorists would not have had a motivation to pursue their path of destruction. With the American example, how much further ahead would other countries be in their uptake of renewable energy. How much corruption and misery for their own people would have been avoided in the oil rich countries. If America is indeed fighting wars to secure her energy supplies, it is false economy. We should look at Ike's warning about the Industrio-military complex for the real motivation for all these wars the Americans loose.

Terra Preta - how does it work

Fairly recently fertile zones along the Amazon river were discovered. These are places which are rich in charred organic material and are fertile zones in an area of very poor soils. The depth of black soil is typically half a meter. In case this sounds strange to you; that the soils of the amazon jungle are poor, perhaps some explanation is in order.

You would think at first glance that the soils of the Amazon must be very rich to support such a large biomass of such rich flora and fauna; a veritable jungle. Apparently not so. If you cut down the jungle or burn a patch of it, you can plant some crops and if you are lucky you will get a couple of crops before you have to move to a new location.

If you do the same thing in the forests of Eastern North America as the Europeans did when they arrived, you could plant crop after crop in the rich deep dark soil before you have to start to fertilize. So what is the explanation for the incredible quantity and richness of flora and fauna in the jungle.

 The explanation is partially in the ability of the trees and plants to recycle all the nutrients that fall on the soil. Animals and plants die, Animals defecate and urinate on the forest floor and with the high rainfall, humidity and temperature. all this material is mineralized (changed back into phosphates, nitrates and all the other ates) and is taken up by the roots of the growing flora. So why isn't there an accumulation of rich dark soil as there is in temperate zones.

The answer apparently is in the relative temperatures of the two areas.

When the temperature of the soil is above 25degrees centigrade, in the presence of moisture, humus breaks down. Humus is the refractory material that is left in temperate-soil when organic material breaks down. The humus is the part that doesn't break down.

 It is physically sticky and helps in the  formation of the crumb structure (peds) of soil which allows paths for aeration and water penetration. It holds large quantities of water which plants can draw upon. Of great interest, it chealates (binds loosely) a variety of plant nutrients. If there is a source of nutrients coming from, for instance the breakdown of plants or animals, the humus will hold these nutrients in the upper layers of the soil and keep them from being washed into the subsoil.

Humus is a little like the haemoglobin in our red blood cells. Haemoglobin can hold a lot of Oxygen but not very strongly. In the lungs where the Oxygen concentration is high, it absorbs oxygen and in the body where the oxygen partial pressure is low, it releases it. Humus does the same with water and nutrients. below 25 degrees, humus is very stable.

So now we come to Terra preta and why it works. Terra preta has been formed by generations of humans charring organic material and incorporating it into the soil. Along the Amazon, where these soils exist, the black layer is often about half a meter deep. Any of you who have done organic chemistry know how charcoal is used to remove odors and colors from liquids. Charcoal is very good at adsorbing molecules on to its surface and releasing them. This is apparently the explanation for why all this char makes the soil so rich. 

 
 It is not that it has much in the way of nutrients itself but it can hold nutrients just as humus does in colder climates. If the farmers along the Amazon, for instance, net a bunch of fish and dig them into their terra preta, they will break down and the nutrients will be held by the soil instead of being leached out by the rain. And charcoal is very stable at high temperatures unlike humus. 

 

One wonders how they arrived at the idea. Perhaps they observed good growth of their yams or whatever, in a place where there had been a fire that was put out by the rain. Char also has some of the other properties of humus such as water retention and improvement of soil structure. Some careful work is necessary to tease out the finer details of how charcoal works in warm soils. In a way, char (charcoal) is the humus of the tropics.

 

There is a further use of charcoal in cooler climates.  Our farming methods have released the carbon that was stored in virgin soils all over the world.  While proper farming methods restores this carbon*, precious little proper farming is practiced world wide.  Charcoal can be incorporated into temperate soils and quickly increase the carbon content of soils, while sequestering carbon for very long periods.  All that is needed is an economic source of charcoal.

*  Read The Omnivores Dilemma, by Michael Pollan, starting at chapter 10 or Growing a Revolution by David R Montomery.

The Luddites had a point

The Luddites had a point. They were a group of artisans who wove cloth and socks in home industries in the early 1800's. When the mechanized loom was invented which could produce far more cloth with unskilled labour, the artisans formed the Luddite movement and went around destroying the mechanical looms. It became a hanging offence to do this and hence the name Luddite was apparently not the name of their leader although that was what the authorities assumed. Clearly it was not healthy to let the authorities find out who you were. Notably, they only destroyed looms of factories that undercut their prices. Factories that kept prices up to a level that allowed the artisans to compete were left alone. At present the word Luddite is applied perjoritively and rather unjustly to anyone who is against progress of any kind.


So now most of our cars are mainly constructed by robots, any plastic utensil is made by a huge machine with one operator and turns out thousands of items per hour and even the pieces of wooden furniture are to a large extent produced by machine and at the most, assembled by humans. On our road to utopia goods are produced more and more cheaply making them more affordable for us all but.....................

We still need money to buy them. Where do we get the money if none of us has jobs and for that matter, if we can get the money somehow, what are we going to be doing to the environment if everything is cheap. We will be (are) cutting down more and more trees to make furniture that we can all afford, mining more and more irreplacable minerals to produce cheap cars, extracting more oil to burn in our cars and to make our plastics, mining more rare earth metals for our electronics and so forth.

What has actually happened is that most of us have become employed in the service industries. Everyone is servicing everyone else while capital is making the big money. Services include everyone in the tourism business, politicians, writers, sex workers, most government employees soldiers and a raft of others. All of this still leaves a lot of people unemployed or under employeed. What do we do with them. We still have to get money into their hand somehow so that they can buy the products produced by capital and keep the whole system operating.

Some we put some on welfare. They get a dole-out from the state which has got it's money by taxing income from wage earners and from the earnings of capital. From, say, the sale of plastic collanders that have been produced by their tens of thousands from a single maching with a single operator.

Some we put in the army. This is especially valuable to a capital intensive country which can produce far more than they use and produce it very cheaply. The army produces nothing of value, burns up fuel, destroys vehicles and blows up munitions. It keeps the taxes flowing from the government into salaries and back into factories which can continue to produce as the government uses up their production. It necessitates mining more minerals, extracting more oil, carring out research and many more activities to keep the army operating. Of course an army has to have a war from time to time to use up all this excess production and make room for producing more. I have read an estimate that one in every ten dollars in America is earned providing something for the armed services. Imagine if there was no army airforce or navy. Unemployment in America would be huge. Of course an army has the slight dissadvantage that it kills people in far away countries who, with a complete lack of appreciation of the way the world works, object to being killed. They fight back and kill our good old boys both in their country and in ours which is most unfair. Of course this provides employment for a raft of other services such as undertakers, spys, security guards, and the manufacturers of a host of metal and explosive detectors. Full employment for all.