Fuel processing is a matter of perception verses actually doing it and how you are doing it; as there are many different ways to process fuels for either technology. However most have a perception of chip fuel based systems. Seems straight forward you fill up a Harbor Freight chipper with "gasoline??" Chip up some branches and then simply run your gasifier all day long with the chips to fuel a generator?? Nope!! That's not how it works and you surely wont be running your generator all day. (Making fuel yes but the generator no) First of all a small box store chipper simply is not going to cut it for this. You will spend hours pre processing the branches as the feed stock must be de limbed and free of leaves and small twigs. Then you are limited to what will fit the chipper and then chip size will be inconsistent. The small fines will need to be discarded and you will throw 25% to 50% of your yield away as it can not be ran in a direct fuel gasifier. So right there besides the gasoline you dumped into the chipper is fuel that has gone to waste!! Ok could you go to a larger chipper? Maybe a PTO chipper? Yes certainly you could but this equipment will come at a much higher cost, require even more energy to run and may exceed the size gasifier you intend to run; so it may not be possible to use your gasifier to run this equipment. Lets say we did run this chipper with the gasifier, now you have the complexity of setting up just for this operation and guess what? You are in fact burning fuel to make the fuel and how much fuel do you think you are going to burn?? Then on top of all that, then you still must dry this fuel. If you think this is a fast process think again; this can take days to weeks and you cant just create a giant pile as only the outside will dry. Could you kiln dry it? Yes but you might as well convert to charcoal in the first place. You could use engine exhaust heat for drying fuel; however, there is still nothing to gain as this also applies to charcoal fuel production. You simply can use this same process for charcoal pre kiln preprocess. The dryer the fuel the more efficient the kiln process is. Other methods are chunking machines but this is something you will need to build as they do not exist on market and would not be viable to manufacture cost effectively. You could manually chop up the fuel into small pieces this will require a great deal of hands on labor and gasifiers are very hungry machines. In concept a direct fuel system all seems viable but in actual practice most will abandon this technology. So now you have lost energy running your equipment, lost energy in yield waste, lost energy in drying process (unless dried by the sun; cold climates good luck) you will lose 30% in the gasification process and there is always to the potential of tar production. That is the deception!!
Charcoal production does not require any heavy machinery. Just a simple kiln, we simply cleanly burn off the pyrolysis stage gas and combine this process with a primary heat and or hot water application. Generally a primary heating solution is an around the clock constant application. So with charcoal production we combine this process with primary heat and hot water and rather than bulk produce mass quantities in short time periods we produce over a daily time span while producing heat so that heat energy is used for something and not wasted. Charcoal offers less hands on fuel prep as processing is not small chunks just sized to fit the charcoal kiln (the kiln does the work not you). However we are working on chip and pellet kilns. The chip kiln format will not be like a gasifier where you sort out the fines and the smaller chippers will work with less fuel prep. However your not going to dump mulch in this, but small fines and leaves will still work. Plus our M-Series gasifiers are all in the size range to run most small chippers. Electric chainsaws, chop saws, circular skill saws, small electric splitters and other electric plug in processing equipment; can all be ran directly from your M-Series fueled Power Generator. Instead of working and wasting fuels charcoal offers less hands on work with less energy waste. Even if you direct burn to produce charcoal without CHP reclaim the energy loss is the same or even less than direct gasification and that fuel is ready to run that day!! When you combine this process with heat reclaim it is in fact by far more efficient and viable. Its all a matter of perspective