Biochar Products received insurance payment a couple of weeks ago and we have removed the damaged plant from our trailer.  It was loaded onto a truck today and shipped back to ABRI.

The plant will be refurbished with many upgrades. We will be able to get the plant back some time later this year and continue our efforts. We are currently checking on possible partners who would support us to do further testing.

Our primary goal with this upgraded plant will be the same as with our previous efforts. That is to attempt to run the plant as one would be run if it wera a larger production plant. That is to run the plant at full production speed 24 hours a day for a day and eventually run it for 24 hours continuously over a 5 day period.

In January a fire destroyed the west half of the old Ellingson Mill shop we were using to house our 1 ton per day experimental plant. The fire did some damage to the plant but it will be able to be refurbished. It will be sent back to ABRI as soon as insurance reimbursement is paid.

Biochar Products is continuing to pursue efforts to further our efforts to learn about fast pyrolysis and to test improved methods and engineering as well as test other feedstocks.

We will be posting further updates as they become available.

Recently we substituted water for diesel as a cooling fluid and have had several runs lasting up to 3 hours at full speed. We still have some residue in the cooling system which is creating some buildup in some places actually plugging the cooling system up. This residue is left over from running with diesel.  We expect to have it completely cleaned out in a couple of weeks. If that is true we feel it may still be possible to get to 8 hours with this reactor.

Back at the beginning of leaning to run the biochar plant we talked to Peter Fransham of ABRI and discussed the idea of what coolant to use to start up the plant. We talked about diesel as a possibility because it could not freeze like water will. I don't think Peter had ever used diesel but we felt like it would be a good choice.

Last year we could not get the plant to run very long without plugging up the cooling system because of buildup in the venturi. Our interpretation was that this was due to char in the oil and the char caused this residue to build up. We work all this past year to get the char separation cyclone in the reactor to work properly. We finally accomplished getting the cyclone to work and got it working well in September. We made quite a bit of oil and gave much of it away for testing in the early fall.

We finally got the new frequency drives and the dryer ran flawlessly. This allowed us to run for the longest full capacity run we have ever had.

Past maximum full capacity run was for 1 and 1/2 hours with a production of 26# of char.

The run today was full capacity for 2 and 1/2 hours with a production of 45# of char.

We have been all ready to run the plant for the last few weeks since we got the permit issues resolved.

We have been having some issues with the dryer chain flail electric motors cutting out on us after a few minutes of operation.  This issues started several months ago and it has been slowly getting worse over time. Initially it was just a small irritant we could just restart it and go on.

We now have it cutting out so often that we can not operate properly it cuts out every 10 minutes or less. This makes the dryer basically unusable. We have been working with several experts testing and trying to determine what the issues are.

I returned from several different travels and work on other projects to find letters from Oregon State Department of Environmental Quality. These gave us the needed permission to authorize our continued use of the 1 Ton ABRI plant for continuation of experimental work.

We are now cleaning up loose ends and plan to start running the plant here in Halfway in the next week or so.

We have made several modifications that we hope will allow us to run the plant for longer periods than we have been able to in the past. These results will be documented as we run the plant in the future.

Recently two of us from Biochar Products met with the president of ABRI. We wanted to discuss and get a better understanding of where ABRI felt they were going in the next year and how we at Biochar Products might fit into those plans.

It turns out that the efforts of ABRI running a 1 ton plant in Ottawa, another plant in New Zealand and our plant in Halfway have all contributed documents with our experience and needed improvements to ABRI in the last month or so. These accumulated experiences have been incorporated into modifications in the one ton plant in Ottawa for further testing.

There will likely be one or two more 1 ton plants built in the next year. These will be built with specification based on this years experience and will be further tested. 

Issues with Airlock

We have been working on testing the airlock we have been trying to get to work on the cyclone which is inside the reactor hotbox.

So far we have tested several types of bushings and drive rods. The way we make the airlock work is there is an airlock with 6 fins inline below the cyclone. Those are turned at a slow speed of less than 10 rpm.  The fins are on a shaft which extend outside the hotbox.

First we got a link on the IBI front page on the website. It will be up at least temporarily it is at:

http://www.biochar-international.org/

The link is below and is currently is the last of the "BIOCHAR newsbriefs" on the right sidebar on the site.

This last week we have been starting a discussion about just what it would take to build a plant that could be sold as a production plant.

We have been discussing the definition of a production plant. I have proposed that the definition be " A plant that can be run 24 hours a day, 5 days a week (weekend shutdown for maintenance)  for at least a 10 year life span and the plant can be run by a logging crew or equivalent".

We have shared the Biochar Products experience as far as the requirements that we believe are needed to make a production biochar plant for sale.  ABRI is now getting ready to compile those requirements with those from the New Zealand group that has run another 1 ton plant. And then include the experience they have had running the 1 Ton plant in Ottawa. This will produce a next generation design document.

It seems like a long time since I have been able to do an update on the news section. We have been in a big open area in the forest on the Umpqua National Forest near Diamond Lake, Oregon.

The last two weeks have been both exciting and challenging. The plant has been making good quality biooil and has not plugged up once on us the entire time we were running on this site. We are sure that good result is due to the airlock installed earlier in June. 

It turns out that the airlock was also the part of the plant that gave us virtually all the problems we had running during this two week period. It turns out to nobody's surprise that getting a moving part to work in an environment where the temperature is 400 to 650 degrees C is a rather difficult problem to solve. 

Last Thursday we finished all modifications on the plant including air lock and hydraulic improvements. Tests show it should now work much better producing clean oil and therefore not plugging up. This will be tested in the next two weeks on the Umpqua National Forest.

We moved the plant up to an area near Diamond Lake, Oregon for further actual testing. We believe we have all the modifications working and will test these modifications in actual operation. We will evaluate the success of these modifications before we do any more. If all goes well we will do further modifications.

I have a hard time getting entries into the news section because I am working in the forest and don't have access to a computer. I will update less often but hope to keep a dialogue going. We hope these modifications will really work out and solve some of the problems we have had in the past.

We were in Newberg working with PC Engineering last week. 

We got the airlock installed at the base of the internal cyclone. It is basically a tube with a six fingered star shaped part inside rotating slowly run by a small electric motor. 

This airlock prevents gas from being drawn up from the bottom of the cyclone while letting char that is knocked out of the gas stream by the cyclone to fall into the shot auger where it should be and the remaining clean gas to be passed on to the oil condensation section of the reactor.

PC Engineering in Newberg, OR is making modifications to the 1 ton plant that will give us the ability to gather new data needed to properly modify the plant so it can produce clean biooil by resolving much of the char in the smoke issue.

We will also be picking up a used generator that can run the plant when away from electric power sources. We managed to find a 20 KW diesel generator that can run on regular diesel, biodiesel and waste motor oil if filtered to 5 microns. This is a very tough engine and we are hoping that we will eventually be able to run it on biooil produced by the plant. We will not test it with biooil until we get some external tests on the biooil and see if it meets our needs. In the mean time we hope to be able to run it with waste motor oil.

The modifications to the plant that will be tested initially will be the addition of a pressure gauge and a gas flow speed  sensor that will allow us to calibrate the fan speed to get the proper speeds through the cyclone. These pieces of information are needed to properly engineer the elements of the gas flow and cooling system properly to remove the char particles. Up till now we have had only 8 thermocouples that gave us temperatures at different points in the process. These are not enough information to do the engineering needed to build a proper particulate removal system.

We delivered the plant to the PC Engineering shop the end of last week and we spent Friday afternoon and Saturday showing the team that will be making modifications the plant.

We met with 4 people on Friday and spent several hours discussing the general operation of the plant. These discussions included how this older ABRI plant compared to the new plant now running in Ottawa, Canada.

We discussed how this plant uses steel shot as a heat maintenance medium and how the newer plant uses ceramic shot for that purpose. In addition the way the char is separated from the shot in this plant is with a trammel screen which filters out the char and recirculates the shot.  The new plant blows air across the shot blowing the char out of the shot. That this difference is not critical since both work. The reason the new method was put into place was that there were far fewer things to break so long term less maintenance would be required on the new type plants but the old method works fine for now.  So we all feel there is no need to replace this to bring our plant up to good working order.

We will be taking the 1 ton biochar plant to the Portland area later this week. We are working with a small engineering/fabrication firm in a small town west of Portland called Newberg. We will depart Halfway on Thursday and drive to Portland delivering the plant to the engineers on Friday morning.

We will be first discussing modifications needed to the plant to resolve the char in the oil issue. We will look into cyclone modifications and possibly some high temp filtering systems. These modifications will be then completed and we will then go back to Newberg to test the plant and see if we have in fact solved the problem.

In addition either during these modifications or after we have these modifications in place we will develop controls and monitoring information systems.

Last Friday I met with a small engineering/fabrication company to look over a list of possible improvements to the plant to bring it up to the standard where it can run in a production mode.

The primary modifications discussed are the possible solutions to the problem of getting char in the oil.  We are discussing a new idea that we really had not thought of before along with the ideas I referenced in the previous post. We had been considering making modifications to the air flow through the internal cyclone and/or adding a second cyclone and filter.

A few days ago I was studying the way industrial cyclones function. They are pretty common in applications where there is a need to separate dust or particulates from air streams. The statement that helped us identify a possible problem is as follows:

We have finally reached the point were we are fairly confident we can make no more progress until we make some modifications in the plant to make it work better. 

One of the issues, that seems to be a kind of deceptive issue,  is the status of char that is not separated from the smoke. It seem while we are running the plant that we are making oil without a problem. It turns out that we are making biooil alright but we are also destroying that which we have made by contaminating it with char. The char soaks up the biooil and eventually fills the cooling tank to such a degree that it can no longer cool the smoke to make biooil. This char soaked oil also tends to plug up the biooil cooling system as well creating quite a mess to clean up.

We have basically gone trough this process in two different ways. First at lower char making temperatures of between 350 and 400 degrees C which yields a grainy char substance in the bottom of the cooling tank that will not flow and plugs up the system which pumps the biooil. Second we also used a higher char making temperature between 420 to 460 degrees C which yields a gooey heavy tar like substance that also sinks to the bottom of the cooling tank but eventually builds up to a point where it can be pumped through the oil cooling system causing a lot of plugging of the venturi system and is not an effective coolant causing problems with the biooil making system.

We seem to be making progress all the time. The real issue is that now we get 5 or 6 good runs that are limited by oil overheating. We are still getting periodic break downs that require dismantling part of the plant and fixing the problem usually every 8 to 10 hours of operation.

These issues and the heating problems with the biooil seems to be the next things that need to be solved to get the plant to a production type operation.

Our discussion with partners now is can we bring in some engineering help to work on the problems that will be needed to actually resolve these issues once and for all. We are now at the point that we have them pretty well documented but do not have the skills or capabilities to resolve the issues that we are now aware of.

We spent the last week or so trying several ideas to solve the problem of not making much oil because of char in the oil.

Since the Forest Service wanted more char we had gone to running at lower shot temperatures basically under 350 degrees C. This dose produce more char and less oil but we discovered that most of the additional  char produced is just light char and ends up in the oil.

So starting this week we went back to running above 400 degrees C for shot temp. That turns out to be a very good idea we are now getting much less char in our oil and we are starting to get longer runs because we have more oil to cool since we are not destroying most of it with char.