[Stoves] HEDON Newsletter (30/11/2011)

Fri Dec 2 02:36:40 CST 2011

Dear Richard

All points noted. I think you will have to accept that the heat content of
the fuel is limited by the chemical composition. Grasses are a bit high in
ash so they are not as energetic as wood. But that is a quibble.

The wood substitution is a great achievement on any scale. Sweeping up the
otherwise wasted charcoal dust and chips is a Good Start, as they say. What
usually ruins a host of small businesses processing a resource found in a
concentrated area is the entry of a moneyed businessperson into the market
with his own transport and vending outlets. It is only a matter of time in
Dar if putting a price on the raw material will kill it. As you know I spend
decades trying to work out how to protect the tiny business from such moves.
In the bread baking industry (small local wood fired bakeries) in the
Eastern Cape this played out to a very bad end.

The small bakeries will doing so well and the profits so secure that it
began to affect the sales of large bakeries in East London who sold over a
huge area including eGcuwa (Butterworth) in the Transkei. Seeing the writing
on the wall, and wanting to prevent the local industry becoming so important
that it would receive political/legal protection, the bakeries dropped the
wholesale price of bread below the  cost of the raw materials for a year
until all the local bakeries were out of business. Having killed them, and
all the equipment being repossessed from them, they raised the price again
higher than before and made all the money back. To them it was just an
investment. The population went back to eating 'square bread' from several
hours away.

I provoked a similar reaction with the sales of diamond mesh fence making
machines. The wire industry realised we had a winning combination of
technologies and they had no future in shipping fence from a centralised
point. They could not get past the transport inefficiency (compared with
bulk plain wire).

The response was to raise the price of plain wire and cut the price of
fencing. The total income for them was the same, the viability of the
diamond mesh makers was run to the wall. One can make fence and make money,
but the profit that would have been made by the central producers selling
finished fence was earned from the plain wire. They are big and omnipresent
enough to destroy the entire small producer market, even though production
technology was demonstrably viable under normal circumstances.

The fuels businesses are in the same boat, potentially. Someone working out
where the real market is (say, Europe) for the torrefied or charcoaled or
briquetted fuels made from 'waste' will step in and pay enough to get it.
End of short story. Raw material producers will benefit, no one else.

The same thing is happening with scrap sheet metal. It is harder and harder
to get enough because it is being shipped to China for reprocessing, even
from central Zambia and Liberia. Even the DRC though I suspect there is
cobalt and diamonds mixed in there with it.

In order to make a large number of metal stoves - enough to satisfy the
whole market, it is not possible to do this without using new material. That
has to be addressed sooner or later. One option is clay which is why I spent
so much time working on clay material theory and processing in Maputo. It
can compete with metal on a local producer scale if the materials are right.
It is easier to make high tech ceramics than metal from ore, that's for
sure.

There is yet much to be done and plenty of room for everyone.

Regards

Crispin

++++

Your points taken Crispin, 

On the 50% values Insitu --of course: You have a solid point. No lo
contestare ! In the form of a hollow core briquette its another story. The
heat values we are getting run more in the low 20mjs. The reason has to do
with  infra red reflectance within the core durign the burn. Look at the
burn again in the  holey briquette rocket stove of rok Oblak It is very
near to a gassifier flame. 

On charcoal drying up.that would be worse than beer produciton halting out
here. (have seen the latter in the 70's with near riots nationwide..) Thats
why Paal and Otto Formo's solution of burning biomass and making char out of
it is such a good idea.

Whomever pays for paper or charcoal dust, will almost assuredly kill their
briquette business (at least the wet process hand production,
microenterprise-based type): It's all very contingent upon getting /
adapting blending FREE resources.  

I am yet to be convinced that much more than 20% (by dry weight) of waste
charcoal is needed in a biomass briquette, though. 

One can be otherwise pyrolising, charring and gassifying a biomass briquette
all in one go-- during its actual point of application, especially if the
mentioned pre drying pre heating technique is followed.  Nor is paper
necessary where you have chopped and well retted field grasses and straws to
do the work of binding..

Based on reports from the producers and trainer teams whom we know of here
in Tanzania, the direct consequence of briquette production is replacing
demand for  about 2000 tons of wood fuel this year--in the going local
combination of wood or charcoal. last year it was 298 tons. 

We started training producers in 2007 and from them, trainers in 2009.   

Kind regards,

 Richard Stanley

Dar

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