so i just learned that people make charcoal by putting wood in some container with little oxygen and build a fire around it. but why not just burn the wood directly, and take the leftovers?
im guessing some of the wood burns away if you aren’t using a container, so it’s less efficient, but if you’re in a forest with limitless wood it doesn’t really seem to be worth the effort when you can easily just create a bigger fire. another reason i can guess is that the charcoal you get from using a container is higher quality. if that is the case, why does it produce higher quality charcoal, and what does it mean for charcoal to be higher quality?
In: Chemistry
How much charcoal do you need? Collecting wood is a chore, so collecting ten times as much wood is ten times as much of a chore. In addition, charcoal left after a fire is kind of hard to come by – it will naturally burn away almost all decent coals unless you extinguish it manually. Doing this to try and maximize your charcoal yield will probably produce a lot of incomplete product – partially charred wood.
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