Fuels

I was interested to read Dr Karve's experiments with rice husk charcoal in closed containers.

We don't grow much rice in NE Scotland, but we do grow lots of oats and barley. The oats we eat as porridge and we make the best whisky in the world from our barley.

Anyway, two years ago I did something very similar to what the Karve family did. I bought some stainless steel food containers. They came as a nested pack of three, for not very much money, and with tight-fitting lids. I punched a small (8mm dia or so) hole in each lid, packed the cans with oats or barley or, on one occasion, paper from an office shredder, and stuck them on top of the open coal fire in our sitting room.

It took them a while to get up to temperature, during which time they gave off lots of very dirty steam, then lots or very tarry steam, then lots of highly-flammable gas. The gas burned with the characteristic bluish-reddish flame.

The residual charred grain did burn later, but not that well.

A bonus, though, was that the smell of charring grain was lovely.

Although this site, quite correctly, bends most of its effort to the less well off parts of the world, we in affluent N Europe still need to be looking at non-petroleum fuels. We can grow barley and oats very well indeed in this area. So well, that our farmers used to be paid not to grow them.

Best wishes to all.

Robbie T