BioChar Products News from etwombly

Insurance Paid off and Plant Sent to ABRI

Eric Twombly — Fri, 06 May 2011 14:11:54 +0100

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 witRead More...

Old mill shop partially destryed by fire ending Biochar Products current effort

Eric Twombly — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 16:11:25 +0100

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 wilRead More...

Running with Water instead of diesel each run better

Eric Twombly — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 03:39:43 +0100

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 beginningRead More...

Dryer working now, got a good run 2 and 1/2 hours at full capacity

Eric Twombly — Sat, 04 Dec 2010 23:51:04 +0100

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.

The problem that stopped us we believe was that the char removal cyclone inside the reactor hot box became plugged and we started to get some gas back flow.Read More...

Making Progress on Drying Motor Cut Out

Eric Twombly — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 14:59:28 +0100

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 eveRead More...

Finally Have all needed permits

Eric Twombly — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 19:33:37 +0100

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 Read More...

Meeting With ABRI and future developments

Eric Twombly — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 18:04:12 +0100

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 expRead More...

Still working on airlock function and renewing DEQ air quality permitt

Eric Twombly — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 16:52:56 +0100

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.

The area we are having problems with are the bushinRead More...

Demand for work for our 1 Ton Plant

Eric Twombly — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 21:12:28 +0100

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.

Energy Spotlight: Forest biomass also generates jobs
Roseburg News Review
07/04/2010

The interesting thing about this is that this news item and probably others as well is creating work for biochar Products with ourRead More...

Discussions with ABRI about building a Production Plant

Eric Twombly — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 18:32:30 +0100

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 Read More...

Plant working better making good oil but still some breakdowns

Eric Twombly — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 14:58:35 +0100

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 aiRead More...

All modifications complete for now and plant tests look good.

Eric Twombly — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 18:26:05 +0100

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 Read More...

Air lock on cyclone completed and seems to be working.

Eric Twombly — Fri, 28 May 2010 13:27:31 +0100

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 pasRead More...

Modifications being made to 1 Ton plant and will be tested later this week and next.

Eric Twombly — Mon, 17 May 2010 16:17:43 +0100

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 verRead More...

1 Ton Plant at PC Engineering and plans for modifications are now being developed

Eric Twombly — Mon, 03 May 2010 13:55:19 +0100

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 planRead More...

1 Ton plant going to Portland area this week for modifications to improve functions

Eric Twombly — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 17:30:20 +0100

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. TheRead More...

We are working with ABRI and other enineers to solve the char in the biooil problems

Eric Twombly — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 13:08:28 +0100

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 Read More...

Basically we have stopped running the plant till some modifications can be made

Eric Twombly — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 20:07:22 +0100

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 contaminatiRead More...

Plant running better but we still get breakdowns

Eric Twombly — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 14:21:54 +0100

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 brinRead More...

Learning work arounds for problems and getting more and longer runs

Eric Twombly — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 23:20:20 +0100

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 tuRead More...