Word: heating
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Burn almost any kind of organic material - corn husks, hazelnut shells, bamboo and, yes, even chicken manure - in an oxygen-depleted process called pyrolysis, and you generate gases and heat that can be used as energy. What remains is a solid - biochar - that sequesters carbon, keeping CO2 out of the atmosphere. In principle, at least, you create energy in a way that is not just carbon neutral, but carbon negative...
...take the risk." Which is where chicken farmer Frye, with his small biochar operation, comes in as one of the few people out there actually making a business of it. With a pyrolysis unit that can create 3-4 tons of biochar a day, he generates enough energy to heat his hen houses; and he sells the char as fertilizer for $600 a ton. For Lehmann, biochar's benefits aren't so much a scientific novelty as a return to basics. "From cave drawings to iron smelting, charcoal has always played an important role in the development of civilization...
Steam has long powered Icelandic dreams. Pockets of underground water heated by the earth's core may not be particularly glamorous, but tiny Iceland has spent decades figuring out useful ways to harness its heat and power, employing it for everything from baking bread to turning turbines. Geothermal power now provides cheap, clean heat to more than 90% of Icelandic homes, and generates 30% of the nation's electricity, a slice worth roughly $120 million. In recent years, as Icelanders became smitten with the idea that their ambitious banks could create a global financial center in the far north Atlantic...
...turn of the last century, life on the isolated island was bleak. It had been among the poorest nations in Europe for centuries, and a smoky haze choked Reykjavik, thanks to the coal inhabitants burned during the interminable winters. In the 1930s, Icelandic engineers successfully diverted underground water to heat an elementary school, and the rest of the capital slowly followed suit. When the global oil crisis hit in the 1970s, efforts to turn this local resource into electricity - by drilling holes into underground heat pockets and reservoirs to release pressurized steam that then runs turbines - moved into high gear...
...Mission Over the years, Icelandic engineers have learned which temperature enables underground liquids to power a turbine, how to manage a boiling cavern's chemistry, and how to keep power plants sustainable by "resting" boreholes to give the source time to replenish its heat. While the ongoing costs of a geothermal power plant are low - Krafla, for example, has only 15 full-time employees - the start-up technology needed to extract heat from a few miles beneath the earth's surface and convert it to electricity is not cheap. By some estimates, conducting the necessary geologic surveys and exploratory drilling...