[Stoves] Stoves Digest, Vol 16, Issue 22

David Osborne celsius4u at hotmail.com
Thu Dec 15 01:33:39 CST 2011 

Dear Crispin, 
David Osborne here, I was eagerly reading about biofuel from crops and the corporate scandals that will undoubtedly happen are mind boggling indeed but my observation is simple. If an African or Indian community grew or collected used oil and converted it, couldn't they use it for rural power generators for lighting etc in village levels? Because things like lion attacks in say Tanzania are more common than you think! Lighting would provide more security in the home. These people may not run tractors but could run generators! Generating both light, power and also employment and indeed hope. 
What simplistic method is required to make used oil into basic fuel oil for an ordinary atmospheric diesel generator? 
Yours David Osborne

> From: stoves-request at lists.bioenergylists.org
> Subject: Stoves Digest, Vol 16, Issue 22
> To: stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org
> Date: Wed, 14 Dec 2011 12:00:01 -0800
> 
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> Today's Topics:
> 
>    1. Re: Vegetable oil or biodiesel? (Xavier Brandao)
>    2. Re: Failure (Xavier Brandao)
>    3. GATT-GEN G-Micro Wax Stove (Andrew C. Parker)
> 
> 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> Message: 1
> Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2011 23:07:11 +0100
> From: "Xavier Brandao" <xvr.brandao at gmail.com>
> To: <stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org>
> Subject: Re: [Stoves] Vegetable oil or biodiesel?
> Message-ID: <4ee7ccba.ca87980a.7527.0a37 at mx.google.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain;	charset="us-ascii"
> 
> Hello,
> 
> Just being off-topic again, sorry, but I just wanted to dig into the
> interesting subject of government-subsidized economic liberalism (yes
> nothing less than that) and submit a fun and enlightening paper about how
> business climate is good in Texas (depending on what side of the fence you
> are of course):
> http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/rick-perry-the-best-little-whore-i
> n-texas-20111026 
> 
> Pure liberalism: rules are the same for everyone, it's the Adam Smith
> invisible hand, everyone for him/herself
> State intervention: everyone will feel the hot breathe of the government on
> his/her neck
> False liberalism with truncated rules, what we have today: if you are strong
> and you can pay for lobbies, government officials and legislation are on
> your side, you get public contracts and even subsidies. At the same time you
> also play in the market economy with the smaller fishes. A win-win
> situation, for you only.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Xavier
> 
> -----Message d'origine-----
> 
> Message: 3
> Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2011 09:55:45 -0500
> From: "Crispin Pemberton-Pigott" <crispinpigott at gmail.com>
> To: "'Discussion of biomass cooking stoves'"
> 	<stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org>
> Subject: Re: [Stoves] Vegetable oil or biodiesel?
> Message-ID: <0eb601ccb9a7$4c814900$e583db00$@gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
> 
> Dear Otto and Roger
> 
>  
> 
> >How can it be possible to think of useing food stuff as fuel in
> Automobiles, when millions of people are starving and struggeling for food?
> 
>  
> 
> Any oil from a plant is 'vegetable oil'. Not all vegetable oil is food. Some
> of the oil is edible, some not. 
> 
>  
> 
> >To turn vegoil into bio-diesel on top of that, sounds crazy to me.
> 
>  
> 
> It certainly is not an economically viable thing to do unless the price of
> oil is very high. It seems the oil producing states and companies would like
> it to be high to make more money.
> 
>  
> 
> >I Norway we utillize the vegoil for cooking and some restaurants and 
> >Take
> Aways, reuse the waste turned into biofuel, but thats a total different
> story.
> 
>  
> 
> Why is it different? Do you mean people should not grow crops which could be
> eaten then use it for making fuel? Many years ago (perhaps 35) American
> farmers studied how to use their own crops to make fuel to run their own
> farming operations. That was sunflower-based biodiesel used in unmodified or
> slightly modified tractors. The land was available in many cases.
> 
>  
> 
> The conclusion was that it takes 15% of a farm to grow the fuel crops needed
> to run that farm, based on a tractor-driven system such as we use today.
> Farmers would not need to buy diesel fuel any more, they could just grow
> their own. This thought scares the heck out of oil companies because it
> opens up the possibility that they will lose sales and income from
> distribution (trucks, pipelines, pumps and retailers). 
> 
>  
> 
> There is also the possibility that farmers will get clever and start
> exporting fuel off the farm into trucks and cars, threatening Big Energy.
> Can't have that, you know.
> 
>  
> 
> >I still cant belive that some people on this planet, can use foodstuff 
> >to
> move their vehicle from one point to another. It somehow some kind of lack
> of common sense and no respect for other people struggle for livlyhood and
> progress in life.
> 
>  
> 
> It is necessary to look closely at who is hungry and why. It certainly is
> not because of a lack of food in the world. Enormous amounts of food are
> eaten each day but an almost equal amount is thrown away. In Africa 50% of
> all food grown is destroyed by pests.  People are in general not hungry
> because there is not enough food, but because they have inadequate access to
> food. That is a very different thing. Some of the poorest people are those
> living in cities where there is wealth and a great deal of food but they
> can't afford it. That is an indication that the problem is not entirely or
> even mostly one of food being used for making fuels. Something like 40% of
> the maize grown in the US goes into ethanol but that is subsidised and is
> not viable on a massive scale. Basically it is a vote-getting trick.
> 
>  
> 
> A lot of noise is made about the recent rise in the price of food, and
> people not being able to afford it, and certain political groups have said
> it is because of the big move in the USA to turn corn (maize) into ethanol,
> a fuel that has no net return on energy. (The discussion about the energy
> equations of ethanol can be taken up another time.) There are two important
> things to know about the rise in food prices since 2008 which led to food
> shortages in people's homes, particular in urban centres. (1) The price rise
> did not affect all food/grain types which should raise suspicions and (2)
> The cause was not diverting maize into ethanol production or other crops
> into biofuels.
> 
>  
> 
> Grain prices rose dramatically in a short time and people who were against
> using maize (which is a biofuel itself, like trees) for making starch-based
> ethanol opportunistically claimed that this switch was 'turning food into
> fuel'. I say 'opportunistically' because it was not the action which caused
> the spike in maize prices or a few other crops (but not all crops which
> should give you a big hint that something else was going on). The big change
> was that private sector money (George Soros and Goldman Sachs and you and
> me) was allowed for the first time to speculate on food futures. This has
> never been allowed before. Sales were restricted to those directly involved
> in producing or processing and distributing raw grains. Since 2008 all sorts
> of people have been able to get into the food chain to hog the market, to
> demand in collusion with others either by agreement or a wink, to speculate
> in the same way people speculate with land and diamonds. The result has been
> that those crops which were opened to speculation, and only those, have
> risen dramatically in price, a price which fluctuates a lot now because
> governments are trying to limit the impact of such useless greed on our food
> chain.
> 
>  
> 
> No wonder the first people who are killed in revolutions are the speculators
> who are keeping the food supplies off the street in the hope of making even
> more money from desperate, hungry people.
> 
>  
> 
> But that is not the present situation, even if it is one that will prevail
> in the near future. At the moment 'investors' are speculating that food will
> be in short supply. Liquid biofuels might be a way to create the shortage
> but I doubt it. It will require wholesale market fiddling and monopolies and
> cartels like is done in the oil and cement industries.
> 
>  
> 
> The maize growing capacity of the US and Canada is enormous. Each government
> tries to maintain a balance between production and demand as a security
> measure. They need to keep farmers in business either growing something they
> may have already have too much of, or something they can export or turn into
> fuel. You have heard of farmers being paid for not growing anything on a
> portion of their land (USA) or being paid more than the crop is worth
> (Europe) or food being sold internationally at a price below the cost of
> production (USA and Europe and probably Brazil and Argentina). When food is
> 'dumped' below cost, it puts out of business the farmers in the dumped-on
> countries because local people can buy the food at a price below the cost of
> producing it locally. "Free trade" agreements prevent the dumped-on
> countries protecting their farmers.  This is a huge problem in Africa which
> has become dependent on food imports, not because there is no food available
> locally, but because it is not worth putting a plough into the local ground.
> Urban populations have become dependent on the subsidised price.  
> 
>  
> 
> There are those who speculate that this is a conscious act by those
> countries wishing to destroy the food production capacity of other states. I
> partly agree. It is also partly short-sightedness and nationalism.
> 
>  
> 
> There is something very wrong in the global economic system which is why the
> 'occupy' movement grew so rapidly.  Consider: One of the largest companies
> in the US (Halliburton) paid 308 million in taxes in 1998 and got 85 million
> in rebates (no tax) in 1999 while receiving 2.3 billion in government
> contracts and 1.5 billion in subsidies, while also moving 44 of their
> subsidiary companies to off-shore tax havens (1995-1999). That is how they
> already behaved 12 years ago. Imagine how things will go when such attitudes
> start speculating in the food and fuel markets.
> 
>  
> 
> Roger you will no doubt enjoy reading
> http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Corporate_Welfare/Pigs_at_Trough.html
> because it details how one of these corporate welfare recipients took over
> the White House.
> 
>  
> 
> If a rural African can grow a little sunflower around the edges of their
> fields as a wind break and turn it into cooking oil and cooking fuel, they
> should do it. At the moment the products and processes necessary to do that
> are not available to them.
> 
>  
> 
> Regards
> 
> Crispin
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ------------------------------
> 
> Message: 2
> Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2011 23:45:13 +0100
> From: "Xavier Brandao" <xvr.brandao at gmail.com>
> To: <stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org>
> Subject: Re: [Stoves] Failure
> Message-ID: <4ee7d581.340cb50a.1324.2186 at mx.google.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain;	charset="us-ascii"
> 
> Dear Alex,
> 
> "I just watched a TED talk that may (friendly) or should (judgmental)
> interest this crowd."
> Should, definitely. I am not saying any person or organization on the list
> has specially had failures, but just that any person working in development
> will know failure. Trying not to reproduce it often does not get all the
> effort it deserves.
> 
> We can all picture in our minds a stove left to rust in a corner of the
> kitchen, being used as a shelf for utensils and pots.
> 
> I was talking about that with a person working on a stove project (not from
> this list), saying that people sometimes do not use the stoves. He said:
> "yes, we have known that also"
> "Does it happen sometimes or often?"
> "Quite often actually?"
> 
> What is often? 50% of the stoves not being used? 40%? Even 30% is a big
> failure, in my opinion. It is not about how many stoves have been
> distributed, but about how many are used, or how many are used everyday.
> 
> I really like the sentence "Everything people see from Africa doesn't matter
> and everything that matters from Africa, people don't get to see". That is
> so true. The vision westerners have about Africa is caricatural. NGO play
> with that, they are very talkative when they speak about the problems they
> are fighting, the victims of the problems, the solutions they are
> implementing. They never speak about what is happening few years after the
> expatriates or volunteers left the region.
> Sometimes, the message seems like: "a project with solar panels was done in
> Benin, so many panels installed, so Benin/solar electricity: checked! What
> country is next?". Even if only a school benefited from two stoves, you can
> say a project happened in the country, and you'll have plenty of pictures of
> smiling children and happy staff.
> 
> Xavier
> 
> 
> -----Message d'origine-----
> 
> Message: 2
> Date: Sun, 11 Dec 2011 18:38:18 -0500
> From: Alex English <english at kingston.net>
> To: Discussion of biomass cooking stoves
> 	<stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org>
> Subject: [Stoves] Failure
> Message-ID: <4EE53EEA.6060707 at kingston.net>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
> 
> Dear All,
> I just watched a TED talk that may (friendly) or should (judgmental)
> interest this crowd.
> 
> http://www.ted.com/talks/david_damberger_what_happens_when_an_ngo_admits_fai
> lure.html
> 
> Highlights;
> Engineers Without Border is now releasing Failure Reports and encouraging
> others to do the same.
> http://www.admittingfailure.com/
> 
> Alex
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ------------------------------
> 
> Message: 3
> Date: Wed, 14 Dec 2011 09:34:17 -0700
> From: "Andrew C. Parker" <acparker at xmission.com>
> To: "Discussion of biomass cooking stoves"
> 	<stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org>
> Subject: [Stoves] GATT-GEN G-Micro Wax Stove
> Message-ID: <op.v6hmzfequoov7l at user-8ezctxe031>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-15; format=flowed;
> 	delsp=yes
> 
> I received notice that GATT-GEN was taking pre-orders for their G-Micro  
> wax burning camp stove.  You can review the stove here:  
> http://www.gattgen.com
> 
> I have no personal involvement with this product, but I certainly like the  
> idea.
> 
> 
> Andrew Parker
> 
> 
> 
> ------------------------------
> 
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> 
> End of Stoves Digest, Vol 16, Issue 22
> **************************************
 		 	   		  
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