Muck and Mystery: Muck Fires

October 07, 2006

Muck Fires

This is the second most frequent search string used to get here (the first is "agricultural problems") though I've never written about them. I've written about forest and grassland fires (see Smokey Terror and Chaparral for examples), and muck is abundant, so I get hits.

The Brits call manure muck. That usage is less common elsewhere apparently but it's common around here. It's also often called mud. Muck can catch fire. When dried it has long been used for fuel in some parts of the world where there's little wood, and it's possible for stored muck to catch too.

But the term "muck fire" most often refers to an underground fire burning in or below a layer of duff in a marshy or peaty area with layers of incompletely decomposed organic matter. A peat bog fire in other words.

It's a perennial news item in Florida which has lots of swamps and frequent droughts which dry the peat enough to be a fire hazard. The fires can burn for weeks or even months, traveling below ground and surfacing now and again at a hot spot, sometimes endangering structures built at the fringes of swampy areas. Suddenly, a fire springs up from below ground in your back yard! While walking in a marshy forested area you fall through a thin crust of soil into a bed of smoldering peat!

Muck fires damage land and buildings, kill trees by torching their roots even when they don't burn the tree, and make so much smoke that you can't even see. They can be a dominating local problem in areas where they occur, affecting large areas.

In places with vast areas of peat it's not just a local problem. Another perennial muck fire region is Indonesia. Hundreds of peat fires are burning on Borneo now, where it is summer and so the driest time of year, making so much smoke and emitting so many sulfurous aerosols that they affect major cities such as Singapore, even on other Islands, and are thought to be affecting global climate. The fires are set to clear land for oil palm and other tree plantations it is said, but the practice is traditional in farming too.

This isn't a new problem, it's been in world news for a decade and more, but it has heightened significance due to climate hysteria. It's not so much that there are more fires as that journalists and politicians (including enviro-activists who are merely politicians) are mining the story, whipping up FUD for profit.

The venality of activists aside, it is a problem, a great waste of resources as well as a great source of atmospheric gunk, and a pain in the poo for those who live any where within a hundred miles of the fires, even across stretches of ocean. Agriculture is a problem, increasingly so as the bio-fuel hype catches on, bringing ever more land under cultivation.

Jakarta plans to make at least five million hectares (12 million acres) of former forest land available for palm oil, jatropha, sugarcane and cassava plantations in a bid to create jobs for up to three million people, Hamdi said.
The government hopes that biofuels will supply 10 per cent of Indonesia's transport and electricity fuel needs by 2010. . .
Palm oil production from Malaysia and Indonesia, which together supply 90 per cent of global palm oil, provides the equivalent of only about three per cent of the current demand for fossil fuels. And Indonesia, which currently supplies half of the world’s crude palm oil, will struggle to supply even the food industry over the coming years, he said.

My emphasis. "Former forest land". Hah! It might be better to use the peat as fuel as long as it's just being burned anyway. Perhaps some sort of gasification system such as has been discussed for the combined production of liquid fuels, fertilizer and bio-char from cellulosic materials would be a less harmful way to clear the land. It would at least keep the carbon in the ground if not preserve the forests.

None of this is a surprise. If enviro-activists were actually concerned about the environment they would have opposed bio-fuels from the very beginning. In certain special cases and places, and when the moon is in the seventh house and Jupiter aligns with Mars, it is possible to produce bio-fuels in exceedingly small quantities without doing environmental harm. But opening those flood gates inevitably leads to wholly destructive systems for the vast majority of fuel production. This isn't an esoteric insight, not a subtle and speculative slippery slope, it's an obvious and immediate consequence. We are talking about humans. But enviro-activists are far less concerned about the environment than they are about geo-political issues and quasi-religious ideology. The agenda trumps all.

Posted by back40 at 09:14 AM | Enviro-Politics

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Comments

Sorta Mucky:
I wondered if you have seen and considered this profound, but simple, some what orphaned, process that can provide massive carbon sequestration, Bio-fuels and fertility too?

I feel we should push for this Terra Preta Soils CO2 sequestration strategy as not only a global warming remedy for the first world, but to solve fertilization and transport issues for the third world. This information needs to be shared with all the state programs.

The economics look good, and truly great if we had CO2 cap & trade in place:

There are processes that you can have your Bio-fuel and fertility too.

'Terra Preta' soils I feel has great possibilities to revolutionize sustainable agriculture into a major CO2 sequestration strategy.
I thought, I first read about these soils in " Botany of Desire " or "Guns,Germs,&Steel" but I could not find reference to them. I finely found the reference in "1491", but I did not realize their potential .

Nature article: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v442/n7103/full/442624a.html

Here's the Cornell page for an over view:
http://www.css.cornell.edu/faculty/lehm...r_home.htm

This Science Forum thread on thes soil contains further links:
http://forums.hypography.com/earth-scie...eta-9.html

The Georgia Inst. of Technology page:
http://www.energy.gatech.edu/presentations/dday.pdf

There is an ecology going on in these soils that is not completely understood, and if replicated and applied at scale would have multiple benefits for farmers and environmentalist.

Terra Preta creates a terrestrial carbon reef at a microscopic level. These nanoscale structures provide safe haven to the microbes and fungus that facilitate fertile soil creation, while sequestering carbon for many hundred if not thousands of years. The combination of these two forms of sequestration would also increase the growth rate and natural sequestration effort of growing plants.

Also, Terra Preta was on the Agenda at this years world Soil Science Conference !
http://crops.confex.com/crops/wc2006/te...P16274.HTM

Here is a great article that high lights this pyrolysis process , ( http://www.eprida.com/hydro/ ) which could use existing infrastructure to provide Charcoal sustainable Agriculture , Syn-Fuels, and a variation of this process would also work as well for H2 , Charcoal-Fertilizer, while sequestering CO2 from Coal fired plants to build soils at large scales , be sure to read the "See an initial analysis NEW" link of this technology to clean up Coal fired power plants.

Soil erosion, energy scarcity, excess greenhouse gas all answered through regenerative carbon management http://www.newfarm.org/columns/research...coal.shtml

If pre Columbian Indians could produce these soils up to 6 feet deep over 20% of the Amazon basin it seems that our energy and agricultural industries could also product them at scale.

Harnessing the work of this vast number of microbes and fungi changes the whole equation of EROEI for food and Bio fuels. I see this as the only sustainable agricultural strategy if we no longer have cheap fossil fuels for fertilizer.

We need this super community of wee beasties to work in concert with us by populating them into their proper Soil horizon Carbon Condos.

I feel Terra Preta soil technology is the greatest of Ironies since Tobacco.
That is: an invention of pre-Columbian American culture, destroyed by western disease, may well be the savior of industrial western society. As inversely Tobacco, over time has gotten back at same society by killing more of us than the entire pre-Columbian population.

Erich

Erich J. Knight
Shenandoah Gardens
E-mail: shengar@aol.com
(540) 289-9750

Posted by: Erich J. Knight at October 11, 2006 08:21 PM

Nature article: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v442/n7103/full/442620a.html

Here's the Cornell page for an over view:
http://www.css.cornell.edu/faculty/lehm ... r_home.htm

This Science Forum thread on thes soil contains further links:
http://forums.hypography.com/earth-scie ... eta-9.html

The Georgia Inst. of Technology page:
http://www.energy.gatech.edu/presentations/dday.pdf

There is an ecology going on in these soils that is not completely understood, and if replicated and applied at scale would have multiple benefits for farmers and environmentalist.

Terra Preta creates a terrestrial carbon reef at a microscopic level. These nanoscale structures provide safe haven to the microbes and fungus that facilitate fertile soil creation, while sequestering carbon for many hundred if not thousands of years. The combination of these two forms of sequestration would also increase the growth rate and natural sequestration effort of growing plants.

Also, Terra Preta was on the Agenda at this years world Soil Science Conference !
http://crops.confex.com/crops/wc2006/te ... P16274.HTM

Here is a great article that high lights this pyrolysis process , ( http://www.eprida.com/hydro/ ) which could use existing infrastructure to provide Charcoal sustainable Agriculture , Syn-Fuels, and a variation of this process would also work as well for H2 , Charcoal-Fertilizer, while sequestering CO2 from Coal fired plants to build soils at large scales , be sure to read the "See an initial analysis NEW" link of this technology to clean up Coal fired power plants.

Soil erosion, energy scarcity, excess greenhouse gas all answered through regenerative carbon management http://www.newfarm.org/columns/research ... coal.shtml

If pre Columbian Indians could produce these soils up to 6 feet deep over 20% of the Amazon basin it seems that our energy and agricultural industries could also product them at scale.

Harnessing the work of this vast number of microbes and fungi changes the whole equation of EROEI for food and Bio fuels. I see this as the only sustainable agricultural strategy if we no longer have cheap fossil fuels for fertilizer.

We need this super community of wee beasties to work in concert with us by populating them into their proper Soil horizon Carbon Condos.

Erich J. Knight
Shenandoah Gardens
E-mail: shengar@aol.com
(540) 289-9750

Posted by: Erich J. Knight at October 11, 2006 08:22 PM

Hi Erich,

See site search.

But it's still limited to relatively small quantities of liquid fuel production - compared to world need - unless more land goes into production and more water is used etc. This is not feasible since population will rise by about 3 billion and we already have a billion hungry folks in the world. Adding fuel production to the combined pressure of food and fiber production for 8 or 9 billion people is too much.

The Eprida process is more valuable for the bio-char and fertilizer than liquid fuel. What it might do is bring agriculture closer to an efficient system which produces what it consumes without a net loss to the environment. I'm all for that (see the site search for earlier posts on these things).

There are some wastes that can be used but it should be understood than the definition of waste is changing too as resources become scarcer and we become more frugal, discovering that things once considered waste since they had no economic worth are now valuable, and have higher uses. This will bid up the price of "wastes".

Posted by: back40 at October 11, 2006 10:13 PM