Hi Ken, This might be relevant to us personally, but boring to others on this Forum. It should highlight the fact however, that we were shafted as a company, and your project as a client, by unprofessional administration of this project.
> Doug, Hi! Yes this was the original project that got Lome 3 interested in > the first place. And you are quite right they were a pack of SOBs. For you to use that description puts a lot of feeling behind the skulduggery that went on. They > decided that our supply of Laecaena scrub wasn't able to be fully analysed > and its growth stats recorded. The project specification called for guaranteed engine performance on that fuel, with financial penalty clauses if it didn't. We found out later that the gasifier supplied was the most expensive of the three submitted, and it needed a lot of on site "assistance" to get it to work. Rod Newal was involved with that I understand. >So we had to clear ground and put in a > dedicated plantation, with fertiliser??!! This was how Europeans thought at the time, and I am not sure it does not continue to this day. The Pacific is an exotic place to visit from the Northern Hemisphere, so what harm to come and tell the locals how to grow stuff in a tropical island climate, thousands of miles from suppliers! > We never got the MOWOG that was > promised. Don't really know what we would have done with it anyway. Like all the other free machinery. Run it until it stops and let it rust away. The > latest that I heard was that Rod Newell, who is still over there, and got a > trip back to the Belgium manufacturers about three years ago had arranged to > do a recondition and resite it at the Anglican High School on Pentecost. > Is that where the groups you mention are working? My understanding is that there are no gasified installations working in Vanuatu. Rod was interviewed by the Fulbright Research Fellow, and that was sometime in 2009, and nothing could be shown to him. Possibly the refurbishment needed funded money, which is where these Christian groups got involved, but I would have to dig back through the humongous letter files to find the names of the local lads that wanted gasifiers for their communities. ----------------- As a project funded at a time (1984/5) before computers ruled our lives, and free information available at the stroke of a key was at your finger tips, there was little real experience to mount such projects in far away places from Europe, where most of the funded projects originated. At best, these projects were experiments to see what happened, rather than to help these remote communities develop their economies using gasifiers. These gasifiers were dumped all over the World into projects that were touted as Aid packages, and their failures held up as examples of how much more money needed spending to develop the technology, even for small scale. We are able to offer better scrutiny of these projects today, but that is for the clients to innitiate. But, we are talking about another time, "Yea Right Mate". My appreciation of the NZ Tui Beer advertising theme. Doug Williams. Fluidyne. _______________________________________________ The Gasification list has moved to [email protected] - please update your email contacts to reflect the change. Please visit http://info.bioenergylists.org for more news on the list move. Thank you, Gasification Administrator
