PELLET STOVES WOOD ENERGY FOR ALL
(Page 5 of 9)
October/November 1995
By John Vivian
The first time I heard this, I thought it must be a joke. Unless Archer Daniels Midland or someone with a big grain elevator has gone through the bureaucratic nonsense required to obtain an EPA exemption, it couldn't be legal. However, dry corn contains less than 20 percent water (the EPA maximum legal water content for pellets), and too-wet fuel is the only serious problem I can think of. But that's being common-sensical and presuming more than typical flexibility in a bureaucracy that relies on making things difficult for its existence.
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In fact, only wood pellets of a certain composition are specified as an approved fuel in the EPA's original 66-page, three-column, single-spaced, small-print tome of regulations. No mention is made of pellets manufactured from recycled cardboard—say nothing of corn. And, to be tacitly exempt from EPA's enforced do-goodery, pellet stove makers must agree to design and build the fuel hopper and feed auger so they can't be removed and the stove used to burn cordwood or any fuel but wood pellets.
I suspect that widespread popular discontent with EPA's overbearing enforcement of one-size-fits-all regulations in general, and resentment of the woodstove Standards of Performance in particular, has the bureaucrats on the defensive, and that no gang of black-garbed EPA enforcers is about to invade your home and shut down the corn-stove. Which is to say, if burning corn in your pellet stove is an exercise in civil disobedience, welcome to the revolution. If only Jimi and Janis were still with us we could have a Woodstock II that mattered.
I guess my main problem is that corn is a foodstuff. And, intuitively—viscerally—I felt that putting food in a stove had to be some sort of crime against nature and the land.
Of course, what's burned isn't Golden Bantam or Super XXX Sweet, but field corn raised primarily as hog feed, but it is also used to feed saddle horses and song birds, isn't it? And to make plastics, and to brew into alcohol for auto fuel, house paint and whiskey.
Those of us who came to maturity in the organic-gardening tradition have long criticized the economics of growing field corn, which utilizes the petrochemical anhydrous ammonia as a nitrogen source at about 20 percent efficiency. Then the crop is fed to livestock that convert it to protein (fat and cholesterol) at less than 10 percent efficiency. We consume the meat, converting (what isn't deposited as lard around our waistlines or as plaque on our arteries) into nutrients at less than 10 percent efficiency. Which is to say that petroleum is converted in several stages to human heat-energy at a .002 efficiency rate. In still other words, 99.998 percent of petroleum—our most concentrated and flexible finite energy resource—is wasted. Of course, in the process a lot of oil field roughnecks, grain farmers, hog raisers, meat packers and grocers earn a living, which is another story.
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