Himalayan villagers collecting pine needles. Courtesy Avani.
In Nepal, Uttarakhand and Sikkim, the unique Himalayan Chir pine is a recognisable feature of the forests. It is incredibly hardy, produces fast-growing and usable timber, and supplies valuable sap and pine cones. But all this comes at an environmental cost – the most dangerous of which is forest fires. But locals are addressing this problem by raising the temperature. By Jeremy Torr.
Kumaon, Uttarakhand, India. September 2020. Because it is so hardy and easy to set out in plantations, the spindly Chir pine (pinus roxburghii) is, in many places, displacing the slower-growing native Himalayan oak forests. The ecosystem change started back in the 1800s, when Britsh Raj engineers began felling established oak groves for railway sleepers to help establish the mighty Indian rail system. They often replaced the previous deciduous trees with Chir pine to give a new source of empire-building resin and turpentine oil.
Chir pine needles burn rapidly and kill everything on the forest floor as well as endanger villages. Courtesy Avani.
But every Chir tree produces thousands of long, resin-filled needles that drop to the forest floor and form a thick soft carpet that smells wonderful when you walk on it. The needles are so thick and tough they don’t decay, and effectively stop anything else growing where the host tree is establishing itself. This means slower growing natives like rhododendron, oak and sal robusta get edged out by the Chir, but worse – a self-replicating forest fire system compounds the monoculturism by burning any struggling low-level flora as its towering canopy avoids fire damage. Below, those hardy needles are full of resin and fibre and burn hot and fierce to kill any other fauna as well as flora. The forests are becoming monocultural deserts.
“Pine needles from the chir are highly inflammable,” said Uttarakhand forest conservator SK Chandola. “They burn in no time and fires spread fast to large swathes of the forest.” Worse, the carpet of needles makes water drain off rapidly, negatively affecting soil conservation and killing any undergrowth. “The needles are not edible; the tree does not produce anything that herbivores can eat, so the species thus affects the availability of food for wild animals too,” added Chandola.
Worse, the fact that many older, shorter and more accessible species are being edged out means a less reliable supply of wood for cooking and heating; villagers have to walk miles to find wood for cooking and heating, as well as denuding hillsides of reachable wood. In short, the Chir today is not a welcome sight on many hillsides.
Rajnish Jain decided to investigate gasification. Courtesy Avani.
But help is at hand. A community group calling itself Avani in Uttarakhand has begun to address the problem not by cutting down the trees themselves, but dealing with the core of the problem – the pine needles.
“The villagers thought I was out of my mind,” said Rajnish Jain, one of the founders of Avani. The idea of using pine needles for anything useful at all was alien to the local people. “But we thought, there is so much energy there – how can we use it?”
As part of Avani’s goal to combine traditional knowledge and craft with a modern approach, Jain started to investigate if this massive and energy-rich biomass could be utilised in some way. Just burning the needles was uncontrollable, so they looked at other approaches. First off was turning them into charcoal for cooking. This would help villagers by avoiding long treks to find fuel or the dirty use of kerosene, and would help clear the flammable carpet from under the trees. Local villagers did buy charcoal briquettes but were reluctant to pay much – and besides the charcoal burners used vital supplies of dung and earth in the process. It wasn’t really sustainable.
The pilot gasification and power plant for generating power. Courtesy Avani.
Jain realised charcoal would only dent the problem, not make a significant impact on the fire and forest desertification problem. They set about finding additional technologies to use the pine needles’ stored energy. That turned out to be gasification.
Today, villagers go into the forests and collect massive bundles of needles then bring them to a small, high temperature cooking plant. The needles are chopped up and fed into a coking chamber which burns them at a high temperature – but with a very small and carefully monitored oxygen supply, the way coke is made from coal. This coking process chars the needle fragments which can be used as charcoal, but also fumes off gases including hydrogen and methane. These gases are then captured, cooled, then used to power a gas engine generator that produces electricity. Much more efficiently than if using unsustainable fossil-based fuels.
“The villagers didn’t know anything about biomass gasification, and generating electricity from pine needles seemed an alien concept,” said Jain. “But we are looking at (more installations of) this system producing enough power for 12 million people and generating 2,000 jobs over the next five years.”
Perfecting the process was not easy. Jain remembers being told not to waste his own or anybody else’s time as gasification would never work. “But we reduced the density of the needles by cutting and crushing them – and it worked,” he smiles “It was that simple.” It took a couple of years to perfect – and convince other doubters that it would work, but today Avani’s gasifier plants are producing reliable, cost-effective power and helping to reduce forest fires at one stroke. Already three villages are generating their own power.
“This could only be done if we gave it an economic value. It wasn’t just about (removing) the pine needles; we had to be doing something with them,” said Jain.