Re: Charcoal in East Africa

[Keith Addison <keith@journeytoforever.org>]

"A.D. Karve" <adkarve@pn2.vsnl.net.in> wrote:

>Dear Matthew,
>you are right about the high cost and low calorific value of 
>briquettes made out of compacted sawdust and other biomass. 
>Charring it is simple and briquetting the char is also quite simple. 
>Both can be done at a very low capital cost by a third world farmer. 
>We have modified an old fashioned meat mincer into an extruder. We 
>first operated the extruder manually, and after being satisfied with 
>its performance, we are now fitting it with an electric motor, to 
>increase its output. But the extruder is not obligatory, as one can 
>just manually shape the charred biomass (after mixing it with a 
>binder), into balls having a diameter of about 5 to 6 cm, and dry 
>them in the sun.  These balls can serve as fuel not only in a 
>conventional charcoal burning stove but even in a pyromid stove.
>There is no real shortage of firewood in the rural areas of our 
>state (Maharashtra, India), because of the availability of 
>combustible agrowaste in the form of stalks of cotton and pegionpea, 
>as well as abundant availability of Prosopis juliflora (mesquite) 
>trees. The farmers have a lot of light biomass which is today not 
>used as fuel (e.g. dried sugarcane leaves, wheat straw, stover of 
>safflower, sunflower, sesame, mustard etc.), and often just burnt in 
>situ, just to get rid of it. The farmers are not interested in 
>making charcoal briquettes out of this biomass for their own use, 
>but if somebody arranges to collect the charred biomass from the 
>farmers, and produces them into briquettes, there is a good market 
>for the latter in the cities.   We have formed a cooperative, which 
>would do just this.  We do not see any difficulty in selling the 
>char briquettes in the cities, because there exists a ban of the 
>production of wood charcoal (as a measure of saving the trees). As a 
>result of the ban, the charcoal prices have shot up to US$ 150 per 
>tonne.
>Yours A.D.Karve

Is there a way of charring the sawdust-biomass that gets some energy 
use out of the process?

Thanks

Keith Addison
Journey to Forever
Handmade Projects
Tokyo
http://journeytoforever.org/

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