Dear listmates, There has been traffic on both lists about the need to scale up production of biofuels to "economical" levels, and that has triggered much thinking on my part. Until now I, too, had been concentrating on industrial scale processes - admittedly still not on a very large industrial scale, because the logistics of coconut-based industry here limit plant size - feeling that smaller scale processing would be uneconomical. The recent traffic forced me to rethink my position. In thanks, I would like to share the result of my cogitations.
When a person with surplus wealth considers his investment options, he has a wide range of choices. His surplus is cash, or convertible to cash, and therefore highly mobile. For him, ROI is the preponderant criterion. When a farmer with little cash and growing cash expenses considers investing his time and effort, the criteria are fundamentally different. His labor is not readily convertible to cash - that's why he's poor! - so his best bet is usually to use labor to reduce cash expenditures, e.g. for fuel. If he is growing the usual crops - banana and coconut, he is fortunate in being "labor rich," as little labor is required to cultivate these crops most of the year. Thus he has time, and with a little scrounged equipment and a lot of effort he can make small quantities of high-grade fuel. An economic analysis written from the point of view of somebody investing cash to get cash would prove that this activity is "uneconomical," but economics is the science of human action (Ludwig von Mises' phrase), and different humans have different needs and resources. If our hypothetical farmer can save cash by investing labor, that is "profit" for him regardless of what hypothetical cash value an analyst might set on his labor. To put numbers to it, if a farmer can get diesel fuel currently costing 15 pesos per liter at the pump with a CASH outlay smaller than 15 pesos per liter, it is a winning proposition for him. I haven't got prices for methanol yet, so I don't know whether that question has a positive answer for true (transesterified) biodiesel, but if the pseudo-biodiesel that consists of a blend of kerosene and coconut oil is considered the answer is unmistakeably YES. Kero costs less at the pump here than diesel, and when blended 20:1 with zero-CASH-cost coconut oil from the farm the cash saving is considerable. Even a sharp rise in kero cost will not change this result because the weighting factor is 5%. Furthermore, the effect on this poor debtor nation's economy can be considerable, regardless of the scale of individual efforts. Filipinos are very quick to emulate something that works, and a few liters a day, multiplied by hundreds of thousands - eventually of farmers, comes to a very large reduction in petroleum purchases on the international spot market - a very desirable result. What is more, a small change in balance-of-payments can have a very strong cascade effect on the domestic economy, as cash saved is invested in local manufactures. It is essentially that process that changed the USA from a primarily agrarian nation into an industrial superpower in two generations! Now the question is: how to make this feasible? There must be standard methods, easily implemented at small scale, for refining coconut oil and/or biodiesel to a standard that is compatible with existing equipment, and there must be standard tests, easily and quickly carried out, for verifying that this has been accomplished. I would like to challenge interested listers to do as I do, tabulating the key acceptability criteria and searching for cheap and reliable methods for determining a sample's conformity to those criteria. Viscosity I think is easy. Water content, free acids and alkalis, etc. may require considerable thought and experiment - or has this already been worked out? Best to all, Marc de Piolenc Biofuels at Journey to Forever http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Biofuel at WebConX http://www.webconx.com/2000/biofuel/biofuel.htm To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
