[Stoves] Diesel as an excellent fuel for rural households

Sat Apr 18 10:10:19 CDT 2015

Dear all,

I remember Wendell Barry claiming he sacrificed only 10% of his hill farm
in Ky to grow the feed needed for his bionic tractors who did all the all
traction work on his farm.  What’s more they harvest the land and fertilize
it every year so the farmer does not have to waste him scarce time and
energy planting, harvesting, and process his food in warmer climates (which
has to be done in the colder regions of the world).  How great is that?

There is a lot of work involved in planting, harvesting, processing, and
feeding biomass into technologies that convert biomass into energy and
energy into work.  So we need to do the cost/benefit assessments on the
resources and work in and the energy and work coming out of the farming and
livelihood systems.  I recall that big donkeys powered much of Middle
Eastern Civilizations including pulling the chariots used in warfare.
These were bred for speed, endurance and strength like we bred gigantic
work horses.  But it is hard to beat a mule when it comes to horse power.
As a child I learned a bit about mules on the remnant of my family’s
plantation in north Georgia and they are pretty easy to work with and
smelled great, seriously.

Horses, mules, donkeys, and oxen use most of the biomass they ingest just
to stay alive. As long as there is no constraint on land to grow food for
animal tractors that limitation does not apply because they harvest,
digest, and convert biomass they require and have more than enough to left
over to perform useful work.

The challenge is to efficiently and cheaply turn that HP into useful work
using modern technologies  that pump water, grand grains, generate
electricity, crush stone, mix feeds, make and mix fertilizers, pull wagons,
cut contours, and level land for building, etc.  These are all tasks that
today are done using electric, diesel, and petrol.  I would be interested
in knowing the cost of the technology required to convert the power of “x”
horses working continuously over 24 hours throughout the year to produce
the different forms of energy needed to run an up to date modestly modern
family farm: lights, TV, water pumping, refrigerator, plowing, grass
cutting, feed grinding, mixing, hauling, etc. and how much land would be
needed to feed the horse power required? These tasks will need to
technologically minimized by reducing all tasks to the smallest loads
possible: LED lighting, well insulated fridges and freezer, etc.

And then of course we compare just how modern and efficient and smart we
compared to modernized horse powered farming by comparing the cost/benefit
performance curves on the same productive, profitable farm using income
energies from horses and humans versus the present day spectrum of
expensive technologies for directly harvesting energy from sun, wind,
water, and biomass. It would be a technology race between different income
energy harvesting technologies which compares the cost, human attention and
work needed to operate a horse powered farm and family household versus a
system of small scale RETs (renewable energy technologies) optimized for
extracting work from particular income energies over a 12 month  annual
cycle.

What about that??

In search,

CECook

On Sat, Apr 18, 2015 at 8:35 AM, Crispin Pemberton-Pigott <
crispinpigott at outlook.com> wrote:

>  I recall that the dream of such a multifuel engine was achieved by ITDG,
> now Practical Action.
>
>  They had an engine that would run at 500 RPM on coal dust. It could also
> run on various oils. If the oil has long chain molecules they should be
> shortened (for example by transesterification) to reduce the minimum
> injection pressure requirement by turning it into 'biodiesel' or
> bioparaffin.
>
>  Here's an island technology: how about grinding old palm leaves into
> powder and using that in a low speed diesel engine? The engine could be
> used to grind more fuel and have energy to spare for other tasks like
> pumping water and lighting and making briquetted stove fuel.
>
>  Studies in the '70's showed that about 15%‎ of a farm needs to be
> planted in sunflower to power the whole farm. In South Africa one can buy a
> container sized setup that will produce three litres per second of
> biodiesel from sunflower oil.
>
>  Regards
>  Crispin
>
>   It seems a bit ironic but it is like the world has forgotten the
> Rudolph Diesel originally developed his engine to run on farm
> produced plant based oils to promote self sufficiency.  Wikipedia-----Diesel
> was interested in using coal dust [6] or vegetable oil as fuel, and in
> fact, his engine was run on peanut oil.[7] Although these fuels were not
> immediately popular,
>
>
>
>
>  *From:* nari phaltan <nariphaltan at gmail.com>
> *Sent:* Saturday, April 18, 2015 1:56 PM
> *To:* Discussion of biomass cooking stoves
> <stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org>
> *Subject:* [Stoves] Diesel as an excellent fuel for rural households
>
>   Dear stovers,
>
>  This article proposes fossil fuel based clean combustion technology for
> rural poor. www.nariphaltan.org/diesel.pdf
>
>  Cheers.
>
>  Anil
>
> --
> Nimbkar Agricultural Research Institute (NARI)
> Tambmal, Phaltan-Lonand Road
> P.O.Box 44
> Phaltan-415523, Maharashtra, India
> Ph:91-2166-222396/220945/222842
> mailto:e-mail%3Anariphaltan at gmail.com <e-mail%3Anariphaltan at gmail.com>
>            nariphaltan at nariphaltan.org
>
> http://www.nariphaltan.org
>
> ------------------------------
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