[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]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('dolanbaker', 'T')hose 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.

[Tanada]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('dolanbaker', 'T')hose 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.

[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]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('dolanbaker', '[')img]http://i.livescience.com/images/i/000/055/281/i02/peat-bogs.jpg?1375116056[/img]
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.

[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]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Lore', 'Y')es, but it smells like smoked dirt!

[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]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('dohboi', '&')quot; 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]

Tanada, this quote you posted $this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I')n Ireland, that does not have any fossil fuel reserves,

[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.