Forests should be logged
Really, doing so is better ‘carbon’ storage than not logging.
Forests on fire, inspire
Consider the ill-chosen “lungs of the planet” tag for tropical forests. ..Catchy it may be, but our lungs take oxygen from the air and exchange it with carbon dioxide, which we exhale. ..Anything described as the “lungs of the Earth” should logically be a large emitter of CO2 to the atmosphere. Which forests, whether tropical or not, simply are not on a day to day basis.
Terrestrial plants (trees included) take CO2 from the air and use it to build their tissues. They are consumers of carbon dioxide rather than emitters thereof, hence the inverse of our lungs. ..Of course, when forests are on fire … then they are large emitters of CO2.
The boreal forest of Canada consists largely of conifers. .{Boreal simply means northern.}.. A typical summer’s day will find several dozen fires snapping and crackling their way through the conifers, almost all started by lightning. ..It has ever been thus. ..The acreage of trees consumed by fire varies widely from year to year, but usually is considerable.
As a result, much of the boreal forest is relatively young. ..In many areas very old trees are scarce because forest fires are so common. ..Also, Climate warming has already seen the boreal forest migrating northward slowly, such that its southern fringe tends to become less friendly to conifers and other species are beginning to take their place.
Which means when conifers there are logged or burnt, the new trees that grow will often not be conifers, will often be species that grow faster. ..Faster growth is more rapid removal of CO2 from the air. ..Another good reason to log the southern fringe of conifers, which is already a good idea anyway…..
Some history
At the mouth of the Hayes River, at tidewater in far north Manitoba, stands York Factory. No road leads to it, and few people ever visit this isolated place. Nonetheless, it is a designated National Historic Site, which seems an absurd waste of effort and money. Oh it is historical, true enough, but the isolated location makes the designation weird.
{ Didn’t know Manitoba has a seacoast? Hudson’s Bay is salt water, a sea in fact though not in name. ..Idiotically, (and apparently because an apostrophe is inconvenient) Henry Hudson’s mistake immortalised in the name of this sea, has been shortened to Hudson Bay, as though it was a mere inlet off a larger body of water. ..What stupidity! That <‘s> makes a huge difference in meaning.}
York Factory was a key fur-trading post and the main shipping centre for the Hudson’s Bay Company for a couple of centuries. ..In those days a few ships came and went each year, taking the annual harvest of furs to England. ..Some of the furs would have come from other trading posts ringing Hudson’s Bay, but many more would have arrived down the Hayes river from Lake Winnipeg and beyond. History, the place certainly has.
What is preserved is the large main building, a two and three storey structure of wood erected in the late 1700s. Residing therein would have been a chief factor of the company. Which is why it was called factory, just as a church rectory is where the rector once lived.
<Incidentally, a factor is simply another name for an agent working on behalf of a company or group or individual. ..The name is rather old~fashioned now but was common enough in its time. ..Early industrial factories were called such as they were overseen on behalf of the owners by a resident factor who dwelt nearby.>
What is noteworthy is the age of the building. ..The trees that became the timber that became the building have no living contemporaries. ..That timber that became a building may be thought of as a carbon store. ..Other trees that escaped such a fate would have died and rotted long since, giving off carbon dioxide as they decomposed.
The lesson
Thousands upon thousands of buildings in this country are ninety or more years’ old. ..What original wood remains in them would have been twenty or so years older still before they were felled and became lumber. ..So that wood is now older than the majority of trees alive in the boreal forest. ..The implication is obvious: _a good way to store carbon is to cut down trees and make something lasting of them, a building of some sort will do.
Alternatively, the trees (or at least the wood waste from the lumber making) could be dumped in a swamp, ..where they would somewhat decompose but mostly form peat, which is another long~lived carbon store.
Meantime, new growth, where the felled trees once stood, begins the process anew. ..Those environmentalists who are concerned about rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere should be lauding the lumber industry and demanding acceleration of the rate at which trees become lumber! That would be logical, would it not?
Moreover, house builders should be able to get carbon credits for sequestering carbon in the form of lumber and plywood in roofs, flooring and exterior walls, since all these tend to remain in place for a good many decades.
A productive boreal forest being turned into lumber strikes me as a goal to be embraced by anyone concerned about rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere. ..Ethical investment funds should be buying dividend~paying shares of lumber companies, thereby participating in their profits on behalf of their investors concerned about climate change. ..Seems all fairly straightforward, really.
Still, there are some who will think this is dumb — also this ditty:
I hear chainsaws in the woods And crows cawing in flight; I hear carpenters hammering, A house rising on site; And I can't help but think: Such a wonderful world.
Timber & Compressed Air
Trees into timber:
A lumber mill is typically powered with electricity and noisy with saws. ..However, it need not be — at least, not for the first stage of turning trees into timber. ..Here, sawing may be replaced with slicing, in which the log is forced by side pressure against a wedge as it is moved forward. ..Sufficient pressure is required in order to obtain a smooth result, this according to research carried out by the National Research Council of Canada many years ago.
A cost saving is had, for saw blades must be sharpened often while a wedge needs no such frequent attention. ..Nor is slicing dusty like sawing is, nor as shrill, so by adopting this method of creating timber the environment and safety of such a timber mill is clearly better than in any sawmill.
Ruinous sawmill explosions due to excessive dust in dry air have been known. ..In fact, there were two in northern British Columbia in early 2012, each with loss of life and considerable damage. Using slicing avoids creating the dust that sawing produces, so the fire hazard obviously is greatly reduced.
A timber mill producing squared timber from logs could rely on wedge slicing for removal of the four slabs.
It might want a saw for cutting the logs to length, though a high pressure stream of water could be used instead. ..Somewhere in the same complex lumber could be made from the timber, perhaps also by slicing. ..However, that is something many mills, especially the more remote ones, are unlikely to do: _For it is simpler to ship out timber than lumber, as it may be dealt with the same as logs, with no trailer needed only bogies having wheels or skis.
Compressed air
Instead of with electricity, the mill could be mainly powered with compressed air — or more precisely, with compressed dry nitrogen gas (N2) obtained by removing it from the air [which is ~80% N2.] ..Spent gas would be recycled back to the compressor, and since it is typically well above atmospheric pressure, such recycling reduces the cost of re:compression. _[If memory serves, a New Zealand patent was issued covering the re~cycling aspect.]
Compressed air tools are more compact and lighter weight than ones having electric motors, making them handier to use. ..And as dry N2 gas contains no moisture nor oxygen, rusting of the tools’ internal parts will not occur, as does happen using ordinary compressed air. As a result, tools will last longer.
As for how the N2 gas gets compressed, one way is by a windmill driving the compressor. Water is another means: flowing or falling water.
Water falling …
Falling water was cleverly used to supply moist compressed air for an entire lumber mill in northeastern Ontario somewhat over a century ago. ..Air entrained in a falling column of water will get compressed, the pressure attained being directly related to the height of the column [7m per atmosphere, roughly]. ..At the bottom of the column a horizontal section allows separation of the compressed air from the water. ..Obviously, this air is moist.
For that lumber mill, the falling column of water was down an abandoned mine shaft, while the horizontal section was an old gallery, with a smaller side shaft providing drainage of the water. [It was hilly country.]
Where no such abandoned mine is handy, a floating collector — basically an inverted heavy tank sitting in water and supported by the air inside, while kept upright with poles to prevent tilt — may be used to store the moist compressed air. ..Such a collector tank was how “producer gas” was stored in the later 1800s. ..Whenever gas was withdrawn faster than it was being supplied, the tank would sink lower in the water, maintaining a steady pressure.
<<.. Producer gas is a mix of hydrogen, carbon monoxide, and carbon dioxide. ..Sticking your head in an unlit oven with the gas turned on was a sure way to commit suicide back then, due to the CO content, which is lethal. ..Natural gas does not have as sure a result.>>
The set-up would essentially be a run of river situation: – water being diverted to a drop of sufficient height, – a pool for the tank to sit in, – and a ditch to return water to a lower stretch of the river. ..So, very like what was needed for a water mill of old, though here there would be no mill.
Likely more compressed air would be produced than would be needed for the timber mill itself, so other uses for it could be added. ..An obvious choice would be compaction of waste wood into fuel pellets. ..Or if the site is remote, a turbine run by compressed air could be revolving an electricity alternator.
Water flowing …
In many places there is water flowing at no great speed, neither is it very deep. Here is where a new invention may be put to use. ..Called the waterotor, it was designed by Fred Ferguson of Ottawa. ..Its unique feature is the shape of the blade, which captures more of the energy in flowing water, and therefore it is able to make good use of quite slow flows, even just 3.2 km/h. ..Of course, a somewhat greater flow is better.
The waterotor has three blades on a horizontal hub within which is a generator {or alternator] producing electricity. ..So a cable coming out of the stream provides some power; _and since water is constantly flowing, the electricity does too. ..But then, that’s not really wanted, because use of electricity is not all 24 hours of the day, and its use varies quite a bit in a 24 hour period. ..Storage of some sort would seem required.
One way of matching variable use to steady production would be to substitute for the generator a horizontal screw that acts as a pump to deliver a smallish quantity of water at high pressure all day, every day. Water under pressure would be stored.
This could charge a large tank of water on land and the headspace of air above the water in the tank would be brought up to whatever pressure it is designed for — below what the smallish hose from the waterotor is providing. ..The idea is to have some shrinking amount of pressurised air built up overnight in the headspace, the water in the tank then being the same pressure, available for use the next morning. ..The water would power a turbine being on a common shaft with an air pump in an adjacent chamber which provides compressed air.
There are all kinds of air tools and pistons and so forth that are powered by compressed air, pumps and electricity generators too. ..And only as much air is withdrawn from the tank as is needed from one minute to the next. ..Also, a steady supply of high pressure water is still trying to enter the tank all day long, and thus tending to keep up the pressure of the air in the headspace.
Dry Nitrogen Gas
But compressed air itself should not not be used for the machinery or tools since the moisture in it will cause rusting of the internal surfaces over time [as was stated earlier]. Instead, dry nitrogen gas is what is wanted, and it is wanted relatively near where the tools and machinery are. ..Consequently, there would be more than one site where the nitrogen gas from the tools gets re:compressed by mixing it with higher pressure dry N2 gas coming from the central location of the storage tank.
Fortunately, it is not difficult to create dry N2 gas. ..The air, after all is four~fifths nitrogen to about one~fifth oxygen. ..A zeolite with a pore size so small that only the N2 gas may enter, while the larger molecules of O2 and CO2 and H2O cannot, in contact with air fills its pores with N2 gas. ..Those pores were previously vacated, so now they pull N2 in.
The next step is to pump out excess air, so suction can be applied to draw the captured N2 out of the zeolite’s pores. .It takes some effort to do so. And that gas is dry. ..So this is a constant cycle: of air entering, exhaust the chamber, suck the N2 gas out of the zeolite: ..repeat. Then pressurise it by using the water from the tank to turn a pump.
That’s the gist of it — dry compressed nitrogen gas runs the machinery and tools and pumps and whatever else.
Thanks to Fred Ferguson’s innovative blade design, fairly slow moving water, deep enough to fully immerse the waterotor allows remote sites in the woods to become worksites. Jobs created where these are typically rather scarce. ..Of course, this is a unit delivering water under pressure instead of electricity, but credit where credit is due.