[Stoves] Jatropha and its future

Mon Aug 8 10:32:38 CDT 2011

Dear Jan

That is really good news. I am hopeful that a stove will be developed for the fuel as a whole seed. It seems to be promising. I am hopeful also that whatever the emissions are, they will not be attributed to the fuel, but to the fuel+stove combination.

This is an important consideration because if your tests are among the first to be done, and the result is not all that great, people will be saying, “Jatropha is a smoky fuel” or some such misrepresentation. Gasoline engines don’t burn diesel very well but we don’t blame the fuel, we blame the mismatch.

I really like the hedgerow approach to fuel production., If that happened with more trees there would be far more fuel available, and less evaporation from the fields they surround.

Like neem, there are several benefits available from the Jatropha. If we find ways to burn low oil seeds, for example, it is not necessary to worry about high yielding varieties. Just grow it for free fuel.

Thanks
Crispin

++++++

Jet City StoveWorks is currently conducting kitchen tests of the jatropha seed stove Marc refers to in Tanzania.

  Jatropha grows wild throughout the tropics as well as recently as biodiesel  crop there. Alternatively, and more productively,  it can be grown as a hedge around land holdings so it need not displace land for food production.  That produces enough seed to fuel the family cookstove for a year as well as have some left over to sell into the Jatropha market. It costs at least four times less than a comparable burn time for wood and six times less than charcoal.

We are continuing CO and PM testing and hope to have our test results online by next month.  We had a stove at Aprovecho's stove camp couple of weeks ago and will have one at Paul Anderson's TLUD camp in MA in August. 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.bioenergylists.org/pipermail/stoves_lists.bioenergylists.org/attachments/20110808/dda08888/attachment.html>