Consultancy

The current strive to introduce biofuel tends to concentrate not on the real needs for energy services but on processes to convert solid biofuel into other forms. But before you do that you might want to consider the fact that mankind has used fossil fuel only during the last century.

Almost everything – steel, glass, brick, cement and everything else – was produced using solid biofuel before the mid-1800’s. So if glass could be produced using wood as the fuel during 2000 years and more; Why would it be impossible for us to use wood-fired glass furnaces today? With today’s computerized process technology, modern insulating materials etc this would not be such a big problem. The same holds true for several industrial processes. And this would be very much easier than to try to get woody biomass into the tanks of cars. So if you want to actively promote a rapid expansion of bioenergy in Europe you should go for industrial processes – not for the transport sector.

Many biofuel-fired installations throughout Europe are to supply heat to smaller communities. Unfortunately many of these installations violate the fundamental rule that if the fuel itself is variable and of a low quality then the equipment must be advanced and of a high quality. If the fuel, on the other hand, is sophisticated, then the demands on the combustion equipment are reduced. Of course there are limits and if these limits are broken, then the final result becomes huge emissions of hazardous products.

Since many installations have violated these fundamental limits the result has been that the European Federation has introduced several laws to combat emissions. In several cases these new laws could have been avoided if the installations had been correctly designed and dimensioned from the beginning.

 

What do I offer?

My speciality is combustion, combustion technology and combustion engineering and my main field of research has always been process-industry directed. So my offer is to help you during the procurement phase and to help in the process of evaluating bids and offers for new biofuel-fired energy installations. I can also be a discussion partner during the planning stage.

But as you’ve seen from the "Forest" project – you had a link to that from the page "Basics" – I can also be of help when it comes to plan individual house heating and district heating systems. There are trade-offs and optima to be found in the combinations of central heating water-borne systems and air-borne heating systems using local stoves...