Grad Student Believes Wood May Replace Oil

YAHOO NEWS ^ | 08/03/2005 | AP

[BulletBobCo]

Treebeard's not gonna like this.

[Texas Songwriter]

How will the government allow cutting down a tree.

[Fierce Allegiance]

John Deere makes a decent slash collector/bundler for reuse. There is a biofuel facility up in main that burns the slugs.

Paste this for details http://www.deere.com/en_GB/forestry/forestry_equipment/energy_wood_harvester/1490d.html

[XRdsRev]

"I grew up in the logging business,and always believed we needed to collect the MASSIVE amount of scrap left behind....there is a dump truck load of useable material around that Cat"

I co-own a shutter making shop and the amount of sawdust we have to get rid of is incredible. If there was an economical way to utilize it for fuel conversion, thousands of tons of sawdust could be collected from woodshops every week.

[Fierce Allegiance]

main should have read Maine.

[techcor]

BTTT

[yankeedame]

What do you heat it to 900 degrees with?

LOL! There you go again -- thinking! Doesn't that always get you in trouble?

[DarthVader]

"Juan Andres Soria is a block head"

His idea may have technical merit but it lacks practicality and common sense, which makes it a useless idea.

[Minnesoootan]

Watched a show(probably on This Old House) on a manufacturer similiar to yours,they used the waste to heat their facility....all the waste went into a hopper and was fed automatically in a burner.

Read about another process of pelletizing sawdust,similiar to what they do with corn waste,to use for heating.

[Minnesoootan]

I should have emphasized WE should have been collecting it. ;-)

Long time since I've wielded a chainsaw...now I'm a CAD engineer,who Freeps too much ;-)

[Fierce Allegiance]

It has to be a very large operation to be economically viable. Any operation making wood biofuel would likely be large enough.

I've never been in large scale timber harvesting, i just think it's real cool. If I hit Powerball, I would probably start my own timber harvesting/land clearing business for fun and profit.

[zek157]

Hemp doesn't have THC. Zero. Smoke it all day and you will have a headache & burned lungs.

Indica, or sativa is another story.

[E. Pluribus Unum]

Hemp doesn't have THC.

Like that matters to the War on Some Drugs mafia?

[zek157]

Of course not. Idiocy abounds.

[snowsislander]

During WWII, Japan actually created fuel from pine roots and removed quite a bit of its forests in the process. But from what I have read of it, it was poor fuel that never worked all that well.

I did a quick Google search with "pine root Japan fuel", and I found this page http://www.cominganarchy.com/ that mentions the subject.

Pine roots being harvested in 1945 to be processed into fuel (photo from above website).

[Minnesoootan]

I still have friends 'up-north' who were chainsaw/stick pulp cutters in High School like I was that now own the modern harvesters and several haulers,and make a VERY good living...sometimes I just wonder

I'm the first guy in my neighborhood out and about after a good size storm that includes damage,I never pass up a chance to fire up the old saw!

[sportutegrl]

Every time you change energy from one form to another, you lose at least half in the conversion to heat energy.

[Fierce Allegiance]

I have a nice Husky 359 with very low hours. My idea of a vacation is to take my saw up to my BIL's place in Vermont and cut logs for his maple sugar operation (28 cord/year).

I used to help anyone out with limbing, etc, but at almost 40, I don't like to climb with the big saw anymore.

I sure hear you on the storm damage stuff. Any excuse works for me. I love the sound of my saw, but my wife & neighbors don't.

[Stashiu]

As a biodiesel user, I firmly believe that use of biomass products is worth the effort to experiment with. You never know where it will take you, but the only way to find out is to look into it.

[TheForceOfOne]

So how many trees will it take to fill up my tank?