The Northern Light

Issue date: 3/4/08 Section: Features

Media Credit: Teresa Combs [Click to enlarge]

Bob Crosby is putting years of experience in mechanical engineering and appropriate technologies to good use. He's going to build a wood-burning stove that helps fight global warming.

While his stove will look similar to an old "Yukon" two-barrel stove, appearances are about all that his will have in common with the ancient beasts.

Crosby said his stove will produce heat while providing fuel for cars, fertilizer for gardens and electricity for its own bellows.

A key fact scientific fact makes this possible.

Wood itself doesn't burn. When exposed to extreme heat, wood gives off biogas, which subsequently burns. While these two occurrences typically happen in conjunction, this doesn't need to be the case.

"You can design a stove that will extract the gas for use and use it instead of natural gas. And you're left with charcoal which you can plant in your soil and enhance the productivity of the soil," Crosby said.

Crosby has created a design for the stove and hopes to soon implement his design.

The stove will run require to things to run: wood to burn, and biomass for the gasification process.

The stove will produce heat, biogas, which can be used in most typical combustion engines with only minor modifications and charcoal made almost entirely of carbon which, is an extremely potent fertilizer, Crosby said.

A small thermoelectric generator, powered by the heat of the stove, would create electricity to power the controlled air-intakes of the stove.

The design is incredibly efficient, it can be built for less than a thousand dollars and it's carbon-negative, Crosby said.

While 'carbon-negative' may sound like useless science jargon, it means that the carbon plants removed from the atmosphere as CO2 are then trapped in the charcoal.

The user could use charcoal as fertilizer, effectively trapping the carbon in the ground and making it unavailable for the creation of earth-warming CO2 gases.

Yes, Crosby's wood stove fights global warming.



The Man Behind It

Crosby is a mechanical engineer who left the beaten path years ago to create what he calls "appropriate technologies."

Continued...

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