Biomass briquettes in Africa

While backpacking Eastern Africa two summers ago one of the things that stuck out in my mind was walking past the charcoal sellers on the street. Women were lined up for a kilometer to sell a small back bag of charcoal, making less than a couple dollars a day. More than 90% of the population of east Africa uses either charcoal (which requires cutting firewood) or firewood itself as their primary form of fuel for cooking and heating.

It’s a cheap fuel and has been used for centuries. Unfortunately, coupled with the rising populations the demand for the fuel is stripping the forests of Kenya and Tanzania in particular. Women walk miles to scrounge enough wood to cook over and virgin rainforest is cut to be made into charcoal.

Deforestation has become a major problem. Cutting firewood for charcoal has been made illegal in many areas but it has only driven the trade underground. In some of the national parks I saw armed park rangers standing by to intercept illegal firewood gatherers.

There are several NGOs working on this problem trying to find an alternative to making charcoal out of firewood. One solution I saw practiced in Tanzania that has found some success is ARTI (Appropriate Rural Technology Tanzania Institute) group. This non-profit has designed a process to make charcoal briquettes out of waste agricultural bio-mass. Rather than use expensive machinery that must be brought from oversees, this organization has designed a kiln / briquette producer than can be fashioned from old paint cans, an oil drum, and a meat grinder. Straw, leaves, manure, beach refuse, sawdust and other “waste” that was previously burned or buried can all be used as inputs and made into compact charcoal briquettes. This process eliminates the need to cut trees for charcoal and when coupled with high efficiency cooking stoves (that other NGOs are producing) has the potential to drastically reduce deforestation from charcoal production.

What I particularly like about ARTI is that they are using cheap technology that exists in Africa already. Too often I saw other NGOs working in the areas whose projects required equipment which was either prohibitively expensive or came from overseas. Here is the link to their website: http://www.arti-africa.org/charcoal.html

-Mike

Weekend bio diesel production

My first car was an 86’ diesel Volkswagen Jetta. Its was slow, smokey and noisy. But it was cheap to fill up (back when diesel was much less than petrol). I loved that car. Since I moved to Vancouver, I have had no need for a vehicle so it had to go. Tear.

But I have always liked diesel cars for their fuel efficiency. I have also for quite a while been interested in making my own things. I enjoy do-it-yourself projects, which is why I looked into making my own bio-diesel as an experiment at home.

Now, when I have read about people making their own bio-diesel from waste cooking oil from restaurants and I have always though that that was fine, but the idea of driving around to a bunch of restaurants collecting sloppy dirty oil has never seemed to me to be too sustainable. Also, it only s economical if you can get the waste cooking oil for free. ..and if everyone started colleting the used cooking oil, pretty soon it would not be free anymore. Buying enough cooking oil to fill a car tank (50-60 liters) is really not very economical ☺.

Regardless, I have decided to try it anyway just for fun. There are tons of resources on the web of how to make it, I looked at wiki-how http://www.wikihow.com/Make-Pop-Bottle-Biodiesel and also watched a few you tube videos: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TC9h78b2RM4&feature=fvw.

All the products can be purchased at a grocer and hardware store. I have all the ingredients and will try it this weekend. Check back soon for another post of the results of my experiment. Not sure how I will see if it can actually be used in an engine….

Bio-energy, Sustainable or Not? - Vivi

Bio-energy, Sustainable or Not?
By vivi, 2010/4/15

In this Environmental Science and Sustainable Development (ES & SD) section, we mainly focus on the sustainability concerns, and those bioenergy that are unsustainable or even a threat, such as cellulosic ethanol in America.

Generally, biofuels can be divided into liquid biofuels (bioethanol, biodiesel, and other liquid biofuels), gas biofuels (biogas, biopropane, synthetic natural gas, syngas) and solid biofuels (wood, charcoal, biomass pellets). Which from the very beginning, people just put a prevailing trend to all these rising energy which are renewable. However, as time goes by, many controversial cases happened and showed not all bio-energy are environment-friendly or economic-benefit.

For example, Corn Biofuel (i.e. butanol, ethanol, biodiesel) is especially harmful because:

Row crops such as corn and soy cause 50 times more soil erosion than sod crops (e.g., hay) or more, because the soil between the rows can wash or blow away. If corn is planted with last year's corn stalks left on the ground (no-till), erosion is less of a problem, but only about 20% of corn is grown no-till. Soy is usually grown no-till, but insignificant residues to harvest for fuel.
Corn uses more water, insecticide, and fertilizer than most crops. Due to high corn prices, continuous corn (corn crop after corn crop) is increasing, rather than rotation of nitrogen fixing (fertilizer) and erosion control sod crops with corn.
The government has studied the effect of growing continuous corn, and found it increases eutrophication by 189%, global warming by 71%, and acidification by 6%.
Farmers want to plant corn on highly-erodible, water protecting, or wildlife sustaining Conservation Reserve Program land. Farmers are paid not to grow crops on this land. But with high corn prices, farmers are now asking the Agricultural Department to release them from these contracts so they can plant corn on these low-producing, environmentally sensitive lands.
Crop residues are essential for soil nutrition, water retention, and soil carbon. Making cellulosic ethanol from corn residues -- the parts of the plant we don’t eat (stalk, roots, and leaves) – removes water, carbon, and nutrients.

So before following bio-energy blindly, to take more attention to sustainability concerns seems pressing important. Carbon emissions, climate change, life-cycle impacts, biodiversity and species impacts, impacts on use of degraded lands etc. become public’s topic. Thus, in current society, to implement sustainable bioenergy production, we need environmental tools (e.g. impact assessment tools, agricultural tools, water resource tools, threatened species tools, invasive species tools etc.) and socio-economic tools (e.g. food security tool, gender tools, climate adaptation tools, economic tools etc.) working collaboratively, and give full play to the compilation of tools and approaches (Keam, S. and McCormick, N. 2008).

More information is available: http://data.iucn.org/dbtw-wpd/edocs/2008-057.pdf


Reference:
Keam, S. and McCormick, N. (2008). Implementing Sustainable Bioenergy Production; A Compilation of Tools and Approaches. Gland, Switzerland: IUCN. 32pp.
Alice Friedemann (2007) Peak Soil: Why cellulosic ethanol, iofuels are unsustainable and a threat to America, Culture Change

Bio-Energy Wiki

To get started here is an excellent link with lots of useful bio-energy info:

http://www.bioenergywiki.net/

Welcome

Hello!

This is the home of the Bio-Energetic Blog, a place where students and others can come to learn and share ideas about bio energy. We are three graduate students at Lund University, in Sweden. We will try and organize the blog posts to 4 areas related to bio-energy: Sustainable development, Business management, Technical/engineering and Economics. We look forward to hearing all ideas, questions and comments.