[jupiters_release]

10 c rise surely has to trigger anoxic oceans and hydrogen sulfide in atmosphere no?

Y'all sound like bargaining cornoos to me.

[Subjectivist]

Those are both the nearest power station to where I live. The railway that carries the turf to the Shannonbridge station are less than 5km away from my house. We also use it for heating and hot water.

Interesting, around here the EPA protects anything they deem as a wetland from resource extraction so very little peat in Ohio gets burned. There is some sold as garden amendment to improve soil and for fish tank filters, but that doesn't add up to very much. The pdf link says the two power stations together produce about 250 MWe, which in USA terms would be pretty small.

When you say you se peat for home heating and hot water do you mean you shovel it in and light it on fire? It doesn't look very suitable for that, but the only peat I have ever used is for plantings or soil improvement.

[Tanada]

Those are both the nearest power station to where I live. The railway that carries the turf to the Shannonbridge station are less than 5km away from my house. We also use it for heating and hot water.

After posting my earlier message I watched a bunch of peat video's on YouTube about Bord Na Mona peat for home use, mainly very dense bricks stamped BNM on one side. The claim is they are more energy dense than firewood by weight and almost smokeless when they burn, and that each brick once lit will burn with a high heat output for two full hours. How much of that is sales pitch vs how much can you verify from personal experience? I have no peat fire experience though I have burned both wood and coal in fires. Coal gives off more interesting colors and burns hotter, but the smell is unpleasant and it is definitely a smoky fire for the first half hour or so. Wood is good for most heating when I had a stove for it, but needs to be well seasoned and produces plenty of ashes.

[dolanbaker]

The turf I burn is machine cut and laid out on the ground to dry, each bit is about the size of a house brick, I seldom use the briquettes as they're relatively expensive.

I also mix in some willow chips form the plantation.
A really good fire is about half a small wheelbarrow load into the boiler (imagine the fireman on the Flying Scotsman ). once lit it will initially smoke, but once it gets going the fan kicks in and secondary combustion starts and the flue is completely clear. A load like that will burn for three hours and heat enough water to heat the house that evening and the next morning as I have a 1000 litre insulated tank that is heated up to about 70C.

Thermostatic valves bring the temperature down to 30C for the underfloor heating and 44C for the hot water taps. The ashes are then spread over the willow plantation.

[Subjectivist]

The turf I burn is machine cut and laid out on the ground to dry, each bit is about the size of a house brick, I seldom use the briquettes as they're relatively expensive.

I also mix in some willow chips form the plantation.
A really good fire is about half a small wheelbarrow load into the boiler (imagine the fireman on the Flying Scotsman ). once lit it will initially smoke, but once it gets going the fan kicks in and secondary combustion starts and the flue is completely clear. A load like that will burn for three hours and heat enough water to heat the house that evening and the next morning as I have a 1000 litre insulated tank that is heated up to about 70C.

Thermostatic valves bring the temperature down to 30C for the underfloor heating and 44C for the hot water taps. The ashes are then spread over the willow plantation.

That looks like a pile of freshly charred fire wood! If you don't mind me asking, how much does it cost on a brick/chunk basis compared to fire wood or coal?

[dolanbaker]

It's actually dirt cheap (pun intended) the major cost is the diesel used by the machinery to dig and process it for you. One years supply is about €500 plus §50 to get it shifted home. If you own your own bog, which many do it is even cheaper. If you really want it cheap then you can do it the old fashioned way with a sleán, but that is like chopping down trees with an axe.

With the current price of heating oil where it is today, turf is about 60% the price of oil and only slightly cheaper than coal or wood.

I built a multifuel boiler about five years ago when the price of oil went through the roof, this is despite the house being constructed with extreme levels of insulation. We often found that many of the neighbours were getting bills at least twice what we were paying and still had cold houses.

I also have 14m2 of solar thermal to supplement the heating as well and to finish off with 3.5Kw of solar PV to supplement the electricity consumption, no batteries yet as still too expensive.

[Lore]

Yes, but it smells like smoked dirt!

Now I do like a nice peaty Scotch Whisky.

[dolanbaker]

Yes, but it smells like smoked dirt!

The willow has a scent all of its own.
It nearly smells like a certain recreational smoking produce!

[dohboi]

Any time we haul carbon, in whatever form, out of the ground that had been relatively well sequestered there, we are essentially smashing another hole into the hull of our rapidly sinking global ship.

But smashing holes through the bottom of our sinking ship is about the most profitably thing to do, given the way we have set up our 'economy,' so bash, smash and dash away!

[dohboi]

+1

[Tanada]

Pstarr and Dohboi you are both making the same fundamental mistake I used to make. If you look at human populations we don't all live in places where forests of trees naturally grow, quite the contrary in fact. Some trees grow in Ireland and some grow in North Dakota, but not nearly enough to provide wood fuel for heating and cooking. Did you think the people living in those places before Coal/Oil/Gas was mined went to all the work of extracting Peat and collecting buffalo chips because they hated firewood or something? When the Irish discovered that Peat was a useful fuel they worked out ways to sustainabley extract it without causing the kind of damage the industrial processors cause. Some of those peat production locations have been in use for over a thousand years without causing the bog to become a lifeless desert. If the First Peoples living in North Dakota had been shown how to harvest Lignite instead of Buffalo Chips I am pretty sure they would have done the same thing, which would leave the buffalo chips to fertilize the prairie grasses.

This is how the Irish National Peat company extracts peat,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SShddxRfRY4

Now compare that to the traditional way of cutting peat leaving all of the surrounding area green and growing. Historical and contemporary accounts say a four man team, two cutters and two catchers, can cut a year supply of fuel in 4 days, leaving the bog undisturbed 350-360 days out of the year. Each family had a 'farm' or 'section' where they would get their fuel for hundreds of years and let nature repair the extracted area. UN estimates are Peat accumulates around 1 mm per year, so if the team starts at one side of their section by the time they cut all the way across the other side of their section will have grown back an inch for every 25 years. They extract about four feet depth in their working area but only for a week or so each year. If a family burns 10 cubic meters of peat per year and they go 125 mm deep in their excavation is 8 meters by 1 meter by 1.25 meters, about the size of the excavation in this video. These guys were going fast to show off for the camera and we don't see the stacking and drying phase but the whole process is not a months long disturbance of the bog, just a few days per year. Anyhow 1000mm*1000mm*1000mm*10 is 10,000,000,000 cubic mm of extraction. So long as the section they are working covers is 1 mm*10,000,000,000mm square in total area the peat is generated as fast as it is extracted. Division tells us that is 10,000 square meters aka 1 Hectare or 2.47 acres of land per family. Could you supply all your heating and cooking needs in perpetuity from 2.5 acres of woodlot? Anyhow here is a short video of traditional sod cutting in Ireland,
https://youtu.be/8DYpD7cCWuc

[dohboi]

" it takes 'thousands of years for peatlands to develop the deposits of 1.5 to 2.3 m, which is the average depth of the boreal peatlands...'"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peat

So you'd have to extract it pretty darn slowly for it to be sustainably harvestable.

If you are extracting something faster than it can be naturally replenished, it is by definition unsustainable. Do you have some different definition? Am I missing something?

What native or other populations did or would have done has essentially no bearing on the question.

[dolanbaker]

My understanding is that at about 1% a year it is sustainable, as in the bog will regenerate at about 1cm a year and that means that you take 1metre once a century from any particular site.
Bord na móna have in recent years take far more than that from most sites and have completely worked out many of them. The same story has happened in many parts of Europe as well.

In the UK the famous Norfolk Broads for example are simply the result of turf cutting in the middle ages completely depleting a fuel source.


there are examples all over Europe of worked out bogs like this.

[Tanada]

" it takes 'thousands of years for peatlands to develop the deposits of 1.5 to 2.3 m, which is the average depth of the boreal peatlands...'"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peat

So you'd have to extract it pretty darn slowly for it to be sustainably harvestable.

If you are extracting something faster than it can be naturally replenished, it is by definition unsustainable. Do you have some different definition? Am I missing something?

What native or other populations did or would have done has essentially no bearing on the question.

Dohboi your quote is harmonious with my statement, 1 mm per year for 'thousands of years' adds up to 1.5 to 2.3 meters, which is the depth of the peat in most bogs between the soil on the bottom and the green shoots at the top. Bogs are natural wet spots where water accumulates and the plants that grow in that environment are what accumulates to form the peat. When the growth gets to the top of the sustained water table it doesn't go any higher because the environment will not support the mosses and sedges that form the peat above the water. The area where I live was a pretty flat swamp zone before the European settlers moved into the region and dug 3 meter deep drainage ditches every half mile to mile in a grid pattern leading to the local river. When the federal government sent surveyors here in the late 1700's to lay out plots for the Revolutionary War veterans the commander of the survey wrote back that there would be serious unrest if the swampland of Northwest Ohio and Southeast Michigan were used for Veteran benefits so they relocated the land grants into central Ohio closer to Columbus. Even so conditions here did not result in peat formation, there is so much limestone around here the water is very hard so the acidic Ph needed for the Peat to form do not exist here.

When the rural citizens of Ireland are still extracting peat for fuel in a sustainable fashion how does that have no bearing on responsible use of a renewable resource?

Report about 3.8 Mtoe is produced with peat. Therefore the overall share of peat of primary energy consumption is 3% in these countries.

In Finland and in Ireland about 5–7% of primary energy consumption relies on peat. In Estonia and Sweden this share is 1.9% and 0.7% respectively. In Latvia and Lithuania peat makes a smaller contribution to primary energy consumption.

The importance of peat at national level is most significant in Finland, where over 22% of all fuel used by CH plants is peat. In DH plants this share is 19%, and 8% for CP generation. The use of peat and wood is bound together. Owing to technical and economic reasons peat cannot be replaced fully with wood or other renewable or recyclable fuels. Peat also decreases the dependence of energy production on imported fuels. The only alternative to peat is coal, which cannot replace all of the peat, because of the technical characteristics of boilers.

In Ireland, that does not have any fossil fuel reserves, peat is an important source of domestic energy, and therefore it is included in the fuel mix. One of the principle energy sectors in Ireland is the electricity sector and of this peat contributes 8.5%. In Estonia about 4% of district heat is produced using peat. In Sweden the importance of peat at a national level is relatively low, 0.7% of primary energy consumption, but of CH and DH the peat share is 4% and 6%, respectively.

The regional benefits of peat production are mostly directed to rural areas, which suffer from migration of young people and from a workforce with a high average age, as well as from relatively low levels of income. Peat contractors usually also practice agriculture or forestry or some kind of contracting work. Therefore peat brings extra income to people and regions that are less developed economically.

Quote is from the link to Chapter 6, Peat on this page,
http://www.worldenergy.org/publications ... 13-survey/

Dolan posted some pictures of what unsustainable peat extraction can do from England, but in Ireland peat has been used since at least Roman Empire period to present without that kind of ecological damage. Some cultures are much better at using the commons than other cultures, you can't paint them all with the same tar brush.

[dolanbaker]

Tanada, this quote you posted

In Ireland, that does not have any fossil fuel reserves,

is actually incorrect as Ireland goes have natural gas, there are several gas fields off the west coast. It's possible that the information is out of date.
This is more up to date, http://www.dcenr.gov.ie/energy/en-ie/ga ... /home.aspx

Ireland’s natural gas comes from both indigenous production and imports. There are a number of operational gas fields off the coast of Ireland. Kinsale Head, Ballycotton and the Seven Heads fields are located off the coast of County Cork. There is also a new gas field located at Corrib off the west coast of Ireland. The development of this site is not yet completed.

Due to the finite nature of gas, imports from abroad are very important to the market in Ireland. Approximately 96% of our natural gas demand is bought on the international gas markets and imported to Ireland through the natural gas network, or specifically through interconnection with Britain. As a result, Irish customers are exposed to fluctuations in international gas price and neither the Commission nor the gas suppliers have direct control of this part of the value chain.

When Corrib gas field comes on stream, it will greatly enhance our security of supply in that it will provide diversity of supply for the duration of its production. It is expected to meet approximately 40% of all-island gas demand over the first two years of operation before production starts to decline.

There also used to be some small scale coal mining but they’re all gone now. Wind energy is becoming very big here now and will become a major part of the energy mix once the storage issue has been resolved.

It's worth noting that peat production for domestic heating is sustainable but not for large scale electricity generation as a significant number of bogs have been cleared out since the 1940s due to peat extraction for power generation.
This one is now a nature reserve. http://www.loughboora.com/

[Tanada]

Thanx for the correction Dolan, the piece I quoted was from a report about practices in 2013 which was the most recent I could find. This gas field sounds pretty small and doesn't seem to be producing yet. I don't know how much Natural Gas Ireland imports annually but I can't imagine it is a huge amount given the size of the population and the limited industrial demand. 40 percent for just two years and then declining output sounds on the small side, but maybe Ireland consumes a lot more Natural Gas than I thought?

This graph shows Ireland as the 35th largest importer of Natural Gas in 2012, with 4,521,999,872 cubic meters imported, making up 96 percent of consumption.
http://www.indexmundi.com/g/r.aspx?c=ei&v=139

In comparison Ohio where I live consumed 25,826,580,000 cubic meters.
Irish population 4,598,000 Ohio population 11,590,000. In fairness however the winter weather here is quite a bit colder than on the Emerald Isle.

[dolanbaker]

Yes, and we know that a decline in supply would cause serious issues here as we are at the "end of the pipe" so to speak after mainland Europe and the UK. I fully expect there to be a "frack or freeze" type of debate in a decade or so, as it was there was serious opposition to the Corrib gas field https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrib_gas_controversy this delayed the construction of infrastructure by several years.

[dohboi]

So at what level of population and at what level of consumption per capita could a reasonable sized stretch of bog be sustainably harvested? (And by sustainably, I mean with no diminution of the total amount of peat.)

I'm don't doubt that, with a vast enough expanse of bog and relatively tiny number of people using it very sparingly, that sustainable harvest (by my definition above) would be possible. But I don't still have a clear idea of what exact number of people and rates of extraction we would be talking about per acre of bog.