Micro-gasification: Cooking with gas from biomass - Amper

Micro-gasification: Cooking with gas from dry biomass
Summary of benefits of densified fuel for use in micro-gasifiers
Fuel
USER
Fuel
PRODUCER
Advantages Disadvantages
Easy and clean handling
More heat per batch load or Longer
cooking period with same size and
volume of fuel container
Less handling tasks
Predictable performance
Uniform properties
Better storability (easy to stack)
Less storage space needed
Less moisture
Fuel ready to use (like charcoal)
Less transportation issues
Less transaction costs
Less insects in the fuel
Add value to biomass residue materials
Reduce transport requirements
Environment Make use of biomass otherwise too
small for fuel use, thus reducing the
pressure on forests
Less spontaneous fires of large crop
residue heaps
Waste management: turn uncontrolled
dumping sites into mining
sites for fuel, while reducing methane
emissions
Biochar creation better from densified
fuel
Pellets achieve one of the highest bulk densities
and have proven to be an ideal fuel in microgasifiers:
they have very uniform burning properties
and provide more energy output per given
volume of a fuel container. The created char
promises good properties for further use. In a test
done by Christa Roth in July 2010 in a gasifier
burner unit made from tin-cans, the result was
that 200 g of raw 6 mm diameters softwoodpellets
burnt for 120 minutes and yielded 55 g of
char. The volume of the char was roughly 50% of
the initial volume of the raw pellets.
HERA – GIZ Manual Micro-gasification Version 1.01 January 2011
Densified fuel is more expensive
than ‗natural‘ fuel
Investment costs into densification
equipment
Poor collectors of natural
biomass fuels might not
participate in value chain of
densification
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Organic material used as
fuel instead of green manure
on the fields, can be
overcome by feeding biochar
and/or ash back to the
soil