anyone using peat for heat. more btu's than wood. their is a guy up here mining the stuff and selling it back to Ireland. a few use it here also. can it be used in a gassifier? is there any interest, I can get prices. sweetheat
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sweetheat said:
My Waterford Stanley "wood" Cookstove comes from Ireland and was originally mean tto burn peat (I bought it when they were still cheap, and this one was a scratch/ dent floor model)
how do you/ they dry the Peat?
how do you/ the mine it without getting into the black hole of permits to do anything in a wetland?
Out of the 15 acres I own, I'd bet, based on educational background that I'll skip, that my soggy "back Five" (the place that anyone or anything will rapidly disappear out of sight in anything above -10 F weather) has more than a little peat
I don't think that peat provides much of an advantage, if any, over wood. The various charts for dry (20%) red oak show 6400-7000 btu's per lb. The chart I found for peat shows 7240 btu's per lb at 20% moisture. Peat may have about a 10% advantage over red oak, and more or less advantage of other woods depending on their heat value per lb.
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Besides the environmental issues in mining peat, you have to deal with very high moisture content (typically 90%) and drying, compressing, packaging and shipping. And if for a wood stove, the end product has to be of a size to burn, which means small, compressed units. A peat operation looked to be very high cost.
About 2 years ago I did some future thinking about an energy starved world, and asked myself the question of what would be a good plan to assure an energy supply. Minnesota has lots of peat, so I though what about buying peat land? It seemed like a plausible investment until I changed my focus to the fact that Minnesota also grows trees very well, which are easy to harvest, equipment is readily available, comes prepackaged, and energy content is within about 10% of peat. My answer ended up being to buy forest land and manage appropriately.
I believe areas that use peat for energy are areas scarce of wood with unavailable or very high priced oil, gas and electricity sufficient to overcome costs associated with peat.
(broken link removed)
Besides the environmental issues in mining peat, you have to deal with very high moisture content (typically 90%) and drying, compressing, packaging and shipping. And if for a wood stove, the end product has to be of a size to burn, which means small, compressed units. A peat operation looked to be very high cost.
About 2 years ago I did some future thinking about an energy starved world, and asked myself the question of what would be a good plan to assure an energy supply. Minnesota has lots of peat, so I though what about buying peat land? It seemed like a plausible investment until I changed my focus to the fact that Minnesota also grows trees very well, which are easy to harvest, equipment is readily available, comes prepackaged, and energy content is within about 10% of peat. My answer ended up being to buy forest land and manage appropriately.
I believe areas that use peat for energy are areas scarce of wood with unavailable or very high priced oil, gas and electricity sufficient to overcome costs associated with peat.
the article I read was in the ellsworth american approx 1 month ago about a guy named kelly who had a grandfathered permit to dig peat in deblois me. he has the press and dries the peat supplying bricks to the Irish and others interested in the states. the article spoke about the difficult permitting process necessary to dig it. kelly want's to expand his operation but is up against the DEP and their lengthy permitting process. My stanley wood cook stove only has a wood grate in it. I have never seen a peat grate. maybe that was what came with it. very narrow between each segment if cast iron in that 1st grate. the wood burned it out in a couple of years. I then purchased a new wood grate. I agree with you both about the use of wood vs. peat. maybe in the next 50 years we will see a new effort by the peat people. sweetheat
Peat may be a great source of BTU's but regarding global-warming it is similar to oil in that the carbon is presently "locked-up" underground. I doubt if the peat moss growing today would absorb enough carbon (CO2) from the atmosphere to make it carbon-neutral if humans burned it in earnest. This is where wood is much better than oil.
It's too bad since something like 75% of interior Alaska is peat-growing wetlands!
It's too bad since something like 75% of interior Alaska is peat-growing wetlands!
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