Should We Burn Wood or Gas

[Cruzi]

The hysteria around the coal seam gas is quite amazing, they have taken every drilling fluid additive and claimed it is used in CSG

CSG whilst the most boring job ever for drilling contractors usually uses only 2 additives, one is KCL (potassium chloride) and the other soap. (Most CSG is done with Air Drilling, requiring a foam to prevent downhole fires)

CSG has been done for decades in other places but one place does an experimental method on shallow seams and suddenly a whole industry is vilified.

Contamination of bore water, artesian basin and other aquifers is a big concern of all drilling companies and contractors and is closely monitored by the government.

Many will say this is not enough but there has been several thousand holes punched through the Great Artesian Basin and the controls have protected it. And yes it is independently checked frequently.

[kiwigeo]

The hysteria around the coal seam gas is quite amazing, they have taken every drilling fluid additive and claimed it is used in CSG

CSG whilst the most boring job ever for drilling contractors usually uses only 2 additives, one is KCL (potassium chloride) and the other soap. (Most CSG is done with Air Drilling, requiring a foam to prevent downhole fires)

CSG has been done for decades in other places but one place does an experimental method on shallow seams and suddenly a whole industry is vilified.

Contamination of bore water, artesian basin and other aquifers is a big concern of all drilling companies and contractors and is closely monitored by the government.

Many will say this is not enough but there has been several thousand holes punched through the Great Artesian Basin and the controls have protected it. And yes it is independently checked frequently.

Cruzi,

The process by which coal seam gas is drilled and the wells brought into production is a bit different from that used on conventional gas wells.

The coal seams generally have to be fracced and also dewatered. The fraccing fluids aren't nice and the dewatering process does affect shallow aquifers.

Unfortunately there are one or two coal seam operators who don't care alot about the health and safety of both their workers and the general public.

KCL is usually a component in drilling mud (usually combined with polyacrylamide)...it functions to stabilise swelling clays. Foam as you say is used in air drilling.

Re frequent independent checks......the mines departments in most states are so poorly staffed and the staff overworked that adequate monitoring of drilling operations is just not possible. The NT mines department is a good example of this and its part of the reason the Montara blowout happened.....the monitoring was a complete joke. Over the years there's been a move towards oil and gas companies "self monitoring" their operations....often also a joke.

Regards Martin

[Cruzi]

Ok, it seems I am out of touch with what is currently happening in the patch.

We did a lot of CSG work around Injune and Roma using nothing but foam (before current operators took over), over pressure, release, cavitation, repeat ad infintum., the hole was cased to top of seam with bond logs and that was it.


But having said that did go drill a hole that the operator did neglect to mention the existence of H2S on (you know the company quite well).


As for fraccing coal, really?

We always treated it like cream in a cake, it keeps coming into the hole due to the overburden, no need to actually frac but then the only frac operations I worked on ( not in coal) used nitrogen and frac sand.

[kiwigeo]

Ok, it seems I am out of touch with what is currently happening in the patch.

There have been alot of changes in the oil and gas game over the 25 years I've been involved in it.

I assume you were involved in the drilling side of the operation? I spent 8 years in the Cooper Basin with a major operator (you know who). We probably both know alot of the same people. The sand and flies and smurfs got to me after a while and these days I only lurk offshore....mainly on long term deep water projects.

Cheers Martin

[seanz]

Trees don't care where the CO2 they take in comes from ......doesn't matter if it comes from burning a tree or burning fossil fuels.

The big difference between burning wood and fossil fuels is that trees are replacable where as fossil fuel is a finite resource. The sensible approach is to burn plantation timber and replant trees at a rate that makes the exercise carbon neutral.

One little known fact about "clean" gas....most of it comes out of the ground containing a significant amount of CO2 (up to 20%), H2S and other impurities. Until recently this would have simply been separated at the processing plant and vented to the atmosphere. On many of the newer projects the CO2 is injected back into the reservoir.

The trees don't care where the carbon comes from?

The trees care, man. The treees caaaare.


The underlined part is what I was trying to say.......

[fxst]

it would save a lot of bother if we just burnt pollies instead.
It seems whether you use coal,gas,oil products, trees or electricity etc you are doing the wrong thing. Are we supposed to just freeze in winter & fry in summer? We all can't, or don't want to, move into tropical areas or fit so the solution to me is use what you want it will be taxed at some stage
Pete

[Barry_White]

it would save a lot of bother if we just burnt pollies instead.
It seems whether you use coal,gas,oil products, trees or electricity etc you are doing the wrong thing. Are we supposed to just freeze in winter & fry in summer? We all can't, or don't want to, move into tropical areas or fit so the solution to me is use what you want it will be taxed at some stage
Pete

Well Pete I live in a climate that is easy to tolerate in the Summer although it does get down to -7 C in winter but my free wood keeps me warm and cooks my dinner so the only tax I'm paying to keep warm is the tiny bit I'm paying for the bit of fuel I burn in the chainsaw to gather the wood and I don't think they will be able to work out how to tax the wood that I burn.

[Cruzi]

There have been alot of changes in the oil and gas game over the 25 years I've been involved in it.

I assume you were involved in the drilling side of the operation? I spent 8 years in the Cooper Basin with a major operator (you know who). We probably both know alot of the same people. The sand and flies and smurfs got to me after a while and these days I only lurk offshore....mainly on long term deep water projects.

Cheers Martin

Worked with the smurfs for some time, with Obsolete Drilling Equipment, went OS to few countries ended up in Sakhalin doing ERD work, did that till my head exploded, now a wood eating hermit

[fxst]

Good for you Barry...we do the same on the bush block
Spent a couple winter months in the new england area ...(Armidale) too bloody cold for me though I probably might like the summers there
Cheers
Pete

[ian]

With-out starting a huge debate.......fingers crossed.

If you burn timber you are releasing carbon from this (or recent) carbon-cycle. If you burn fossil fuels you are releasing carbon from a previous epoch.

To put it very simply, the carbon you release from fire-wood is going to go back into making another tree.

So, you're not making the problem any better (well, you might be if your heating alternative is fossil fuel), but you're not making it any worse.....especially if you use plantation timber as fire-wood.

I miss using my log-burner..........

I'm not so sure ...
I think the real question is

Does your (and everyone else's) wood burning stove consume trees faster than they regrow? If you burn 1 tonne of hardwood each year, does the "replacement" tree produce 1 tonne of wood in the following year?
if the answer is no, then burning trees just takes longer to do the same climate damage as burning fossil fuel

[seanz]

Hardwood? What is this hardwood of which you speak?

Do we consume more firewood than we grow timber every year? With all of the plantation forestry in NZ, probably not.

[ian]

Do we consume more firewood than we grow timber every year? With all of the plantation forestry in NZ, probably not.

It would be interesting to know for sure, but some "back of an envelope" calcs might be

a stove burns 10kg of wood each day to warm the house,
the stove runs for 120 days (4 months) per year = 1200kg of wood per year
the cooker burns 2kg of wood a day cooking meals = 730kg per year
call that 2,000kg, or 2 tonnes per year per household
figure 4 million households in the cold bits of OZ and NZ -- it's probably more

so, that's 4,000,000 x 2 = 8,000,000 tonnes of fire wood per year
call that 12 Million tonnes of trees per annum -- after allowing 33% for in forest waste (small branches, leaves, bark, etc)

The projected NZ forest output in 2025 is 40 million cu.m (say 24 million tonnes as most of it is soft wood) harvested from around 4 million ha ref Forestry in New Zealand: Overview (Forest Enterprises Ltd)
of which >80% will be exported, making NZ the world's largest wood exporter
leaving around 5 Million tonnes to build and heat houses

I think there would be a "shortfall" somewhere, either in NZ and OZ or everywhere else in the world

feel free to adjust my sums based of your firewood usage

[BobL]

You'all might find this article very interesting.
http://www.ifiallc.com/PDFs/long-run...ber_prices.pdf

As for burning wood for large scale heat some of you may remember this which on the scale of a small industrial estate - you have to read through to about post #3 to find out about heating.
https://www.woodworkforums.com/f132/a...oinery-117469/

And then there is this which provides 4 soon to become 12 MW of heating for a small town which has a very cold winter.

While I was in Italy last year I went to visit a big (4 Megawatt average operation) woodchip fired water heating plant supervised/managed by one of my cousins in the Italian Alps.

The plant is located right in the middle of the major ski resort of San Martino at and elevation of about 2000 m and was installed to reduce the amount of pollution that covers the resort in a brown fog, especially during some of the colder skiing season weeks when all of the hotels and lodges would have run their oil fired heaters on max.

Here's a shot of the main plant building and a pile of woodchips ready for burning - nothing special to look at but, then it does need to blend into the ski resort town.
Attachment 168376

Wood chips are dumped into those to two bays by a front end loader where a conveyor belt and large piston rams feed the chip into the furnaces. The wood chips come from timber processing waste - not the sawdust or woodchips but the branches and bark. Every year the town and surrounding councils also clean up the roadsides which are continually over grown with branches - these are collected up chipped and trucked to this plant.

There are two (soon to be 3) furnaces each of 4 MW each and also a 4 MW oil fired furnace for use on really cold days and in emergencies as they are really only getting started.
Attachment 168377
Attachment 168378
The furnaces heats a pressurised hot water circuit which circulates around the plant at about 92C.
This water then heats the resort town loop which goes around to all the houses, hotels and resorts. The water leaves the plant @ around 86C.
These are the 30kW pumps that drive the water in secondary loop around the town.
Attachment 168379

At each house, hotel or resort a small heat exchanger extracts heat from the town line for internal heating and hot water.
The burn rate in the furnaces are maintained such that the temperature in the return line back to the plant never drops below 52.

The exhaust from the furnaces are electostatically filtered and the soot is dropped into large dumpsters. The soot is added to road base to use in road building.
This removes about 800 tones of soot a year from the air.
Condensers are also used to remove water from the exhaust.
The remaining gases are then mixed with large volumes of external air and expelled as totally clear gas from a low rise smoke stack at a temperature of around 85F

Here is a port open in the side of the smoke stack.
Attachment 168380
While there some residual oil vapours in the exhaust (ie I could smell the fact that conifers were being burned) - the gas coming out of the stack is premixed with so much air that it was only 30C and extremely clean - there's nothing visible and it was not making me gasp.
The resort people are very happy about the outcome.
The oil companies that used to supply the hundreds of thousands of gallons of heating oil a year to the resorts are not.

There are over 40 such plants in the Italian Alps and many more in the pipeline.
The chips are waste from logging or clearing operations and law dictates they cannot travel more than 40 miles to the plant.
There are way more chips available than they can burn so the next step is to introduce a thermo electric system

I think we can learn a lot from these people.
The other alternative is Russian gas and it has to pass through 7 countries to get there!

[seanz]

Interesting post BobL, very interesting.......Un Zud is almost all out of hydro opportunities.

And, of course, extra points for a good post that's completely on topic.

[seanz]

It would be interesting to know for sure, but some "back of an envelope" calcs might be

a stove burns 10kg of wood each day to warm the house,
the stove runs for 120 days (4 months) per year = 1200kg of wood per year
the cooker burns 2kg of wood a day cooking meals = 730kg per year
call that 2,000kg, or 2 tonnes per year per household
figure 4 million households in the cold bits of OZ and NZ -- it's probably more

so, that's 4,000,000 x 2 = 8,000,000 tonnes of fire wood per year
call that 12 Million tonnes of trees per annum -- after allowing 33% for in forest waste (small branches, leaves, bark, etc)

The projected NZ forest output in 2025 is 40 million cu.m (say 24 million tonnes as most of it is soft wood) harvested from around 4 million ha ref Forestry in New Zealand: Overview (Forest Enterprises Ltd)
of which >80% will be exported, making NZ the world's largest wood exporter
leaving around 5 Million tonnes to build and heat houses

I think there would be a "shortfall" somewhere, either in NZ and OZ or everywhere else in the world

feel free to adjust my sums based of your firewood usage

Usage? I don't use it, it's stacked in the shed and every now and then I walk past and shake my head.......wood-fires need chimneys. Who knew?

Here's some more figures for you, you may need a bigger envelope.
Forestry-statistics

Wish these figures were as easy to find for NZ
Firewood industry - Plantations and sustainably managed forests

Does that help? Is Oz firewood use carbon neutral?

These fellas say it's 'practically' carbon neutral in NZ
Firewood Supplies

But they would, wouldn't they?

I look forward to the day when I, once again, enjoy doing back of the envelope calculations for entertainment........but I've been a bit short in the 'quality sleep' department.

Still, if it is roughly carbon neutral now, without even trying, that's a good thing, right?