Biofuels

Biofuels Table of Contents: Here is the dream. "Anybody can make biodiesel. It's easy, you can make it in your kitchen -- and it's BETTER than the petro-diesel fuel the big oil companies sell you. Your diesel motor will run better and last longer on your home-made fuel, and it's much cleaner -- better for the environment and better for health. If you make it from used oil it's not only cheap but you'll be recycling a troublesome waste product. Best of all is the GREAT feeling of freedom, independence and empowerment it will give you. Here's how to do it -- everything you need to know. " (Quoted from: Journey to Forever) But I don't believe it. I have spent years researching this subject. Last year we had meetings of over a dozen fellows in my living room - most of whom had actually done it. A couple on a commercial scale. In and out of the business with the fluctuations of oil prices and public attitudes. I have done the figures over and over with several engineers. When you look at the energy (fuel) it takes to drive the tractors, harvesters, oil presses, etc. - you come out with very little net energy (fuel). And that does not include other energy that went into making it - such as hydro and human energy. I have traveled about and talked with people about all sorts of grand ideas - such as algae. It is all a dream. I am writing this is May 2010 and the latest one I checked out was last month about switch grass. Comes in numerous varieties. Marvelous stuff, the government agent told me. You plant it and have nothing more to do about it. Comes up each year thereafter on its own. The first year you have to kill the ground to make sure it gets a good start. My last email back to him (I was in the process of ordering seeds) - I asked, "What will that do for our bees?" Bees travel three miles from the hive and most of the beekeepers are losing their hives these days. Anyway, it was my last email. I never heard back from him. I don't know the solution. I think I am back to some other kinds of seed. We may have to go with biofuel. Get out there and prepare the ground with oxen, horses or human labor. Plant by hand, reap by hand, even human powered seed presses. But biodiesel may power a truck that we have to send some long distance and there is no other way. We may be able to power the seed presses with water or wind, or electricity that we make from water or wind, and we may be able to power vehicles for local use with batteries, woodgas, or other forms of energy including horses - but for long distance transportation we are going to need diesel fuel and I don't know where we are going to find any oil in the ground around here. So - I continue to look at biodiesel. Have bought lots of expensive books. (Send me money and I will send you the secret.) This is a much smaller section than I used to put out but most of the stuff before I could only reference because it was copyrighted. Now, years later, I realize that the only thing they could make (take) was money. Your money. I must be a very gullible person - because I have bought many books on this and many other things. The ideas sound good but the engineers around me can't figure out a practical way to put it together. If it were easy - a lot of people would be doing it. It is NOT true that you get what you pay for. I have paid lots for information that was supposed to be useful - but wasn't. Anyway, the information that you get from me is free. Making it: How to make biofuel Seed Presses: Pressing Oil from Seeds This 24 page .pdf file lists 56 oil bearing seeds and discusses a variety of methods for extraction and processing. These oils can be used either for food or fuel. The Pros tell You: All the hype in one place. From here you can link to many of the popular books and feel the enthusiasm of the movement. Click here to return to the Individual Agriculural Recovery After Nuclear Holocaust Making it on the Farm RAPESEED, LINSEED, FLAXSEED, SUNFLOWERSEED, SESAMESEED, PEANUT, GROUNDNUTS, MUSTARDSEED, POPPY, COTTON SEED etc. are but a few of the seeds that have been suggested for making biofuel. There are also techniques that have used grasses, corn, and all sorts of other vegetable and biomass. There are large commercial operations in several countries in the world - but we were looking for something to do on a smaller scale. It just isn't practical now - but it may be under different circumstances. Click here to return to the Table of Contents

---

---

Concepts for Recovery

Safe America For Everyone This newsletter powered by: Mad Mimi Unsubscribe instantly from these emails by clicking here. Email look weird or can't download pictures? View it on the web here. Click HERE to go to the SAFE home page. Click HERE to go to Ark Two. Forward this email to a friend. This newsletter is Copyleft: and may be used by anyone. A personal note: Still functioning - and intense week this last week and the week coming - in working on the radio. May have all the elements to start the CAT generator - but need someone to come give me a hand. SAFE Ark Two Newsletter August 5th, 2012 Concepts for Recovery Over the last half century I have given lots of thought and have discussed with many people how we might go about recovery. The situation at Ark Two is much different than what one will find elsewhere - and it appears that we may have many advantages. Our location is unique in that we are built on a rock base in the Cambrian Shield. At one time, when I looked through them years ago, there were eleven Earth Change Maps on the Internet and Ark Two was the ONLY location that remained safe on all of them. This was a coincidence because it was not a factor in our selecting the Ark Two location. At least not a personal factor. I won't belabor my feelings of how we have been led to be here. Anyway - although somewhat mid-continent - we are considerably beyond the reach of what was the last great Madrid earthquake. There have been two earthquake tremors here in the last eighty-five years but while my wife was here for both of them they were so slight that she never felt them. Today there are dozens of earth change maps on the Internet - and while I haven't gone through them all you can see them at: http://www.greatdreams.com/maps.htm We are on the highest location in Southern Ontario - and to reach it from Toronto and Lake Ontario one must come over Caledon Mountain. We are also far above the waters of Georgian Bay - and it is a long view down to them when one drives in that direction. Ark Two is located in the small village where my wife was born in the house just south of where we now live - and her mother was born here two centuries ago - so there are dozens of local relatives in the extended family. It is important to be where you are known and accepted - and have strong ties to the community. The Ark itself is on a dead end road bounded on one side by a 150 ft cliff. The village has only two entrances from the paved highway by-pass - and two from country roads. Being 90 miles from Toronto it is probably too far for masses of refugees to reach it. That would certainly be so in the winter time. However, it is only twenty miles from a major Canadian military base - which regularly does practice drives through it - and it is also a favorite target location for swarms of motorcyclists. Equally important to our location is that we are centered in one of the main agriculture areas of Ontario. Thirty miles east of us lies the Holland Flats which is the vegetable growing center for the province and there comes right up to our fence line the Highland Company - 2,316 acres - on which last year there were grown 100 million pounds of potatoes. (In the area there are also other growers and crops.) Unprocessed potatoes may not store that well for two years - but there should be no reason for local survivors to starve to death during the first winter. Great controversy surrounds the Highland Company - because they wish to put a mega quarry where the individual potato farms were. How soon that may be accomplished - if ever in God's timing - we don't know - but there will still be extensive land for agriculture production for many years to come. Another controversial activity by the same company and others is an extensive Windmill Farm now approaching 200 giant windmills. What a bounty that might be. The windmills are presently controlled from California of all places - and presently the electricity is all sent to the US. Still the edge of the Windmill Farm is only five miles from us - and if there was some way to make them function - (independent of the electronic controls they must assuredly now have) - then they could be a marvelous source of power in our scenario and paradigm. We are also blessed by one of the few black start hydro dams in North America at Eugenia Falls - about 25 miles away - which services, among other places, Dundalk which is about 15 miles from us. Not quite so great a blessing is the largest nuclear generating plant in North America - which is a couple of hundred miles west of us. Think Fukushima. But - we do have a nuclear fallout shelter. Now onto some of the challenges that we anticipate that we will face. I was looking at the statistics for PEI. In 1900 they had over 10,000 potato farms, and now they have only 270 - which still grow six times the amount that was grown there in 1900. While I don't have the exact figures for here - I am sure that the ratios are equally as great - or larger - because of Highland Company. Think Agribusiness. While we have lots of farmland - we have few farmers. In fact - practically no farmers who know how to farm except by modern methods: Treated Outsource Seed Chemical Fertilizers Pesticides Herbicides Mechanized equipment - All hydrocarbon dependent Take that all away from them - (and that is what will happen) and they won't have a clue as to what to do. Oh, to be able to find and import a few very small scale old method farmers. They exist. I read about them on the Internet. But they aren't here. Neither are horses. We have Amish communities nearby - and while they ride through the village with their horse carts - much of their farming is mechanized also. There just won't be work horses. Or Oxen. The latter being my preference. I have studied considerably into the subject, but it takes 4 years to raise up an oxen team - and what is one going to feed them in the interim? Back to the horses. Nephews here have barns and horses. But they are leisure horses. They don't know how to work. Not even the fancy Clydesdale show horses which are too old o learn. Besides that there is the fact that we don't have the proper implements. Worse yet - neither do the farm boys know how to work today. When there is real work to be done - then temporary migrant labor is brought in from Mexico. I would much prefer after the catastrophe to have show up 50 Migrant workers than 500 Baystreet Brokers and Banksters. The latter would just be a burden. They wouldn't be able to produce enough to feed themselves. There will be much weeping and gnashing of teeth as we process the refugees and give them a chance in the fields. While we view ourselves as a refugee center - when workers collapse we may have to simply tap them on the shoulder and send them on to the death camps. I see our best hope as being the diesel tractors, although there will have to be an immense amount of hand labor along beside them. I know - biodiesel! But I have done the calculations a hundred times in a hundred ways and one just can't make it pay off. There are lots of tables available on the Internet for the various models of tractors and their fuel consumption for various kinds of equipment. Once you compute the number of tractor hours - against the per acreage yield of biofuel crop - forget it. There are many kinds of biofuel crops - some more suitable to some areas than others - and I have corresponded about the possibilities with Ag Schools that consider themselves experts. Their first recommendation was to go in and kill off with herbicides all the current vegetation. When I asked them what the herbicides would do to our bee colonies - that was the last that I heard from them. Aside from all that - gathering, transporting, and especially processing the crops - takes immense amount of energy/labor/effort. One ends up putting out more energy than they get back - or the net effect is so little as to not make it worthwhile. On our web site you will find plans for wood gasifiers, electric vehicles, and numbers of other approaches. All of these have their place - but I feel that for us - the answer is diesel - given the equipment available - for farming and transport. Tractors, trucks, buses, generators - diesel. Over the last fifty years I have seen many technological changes. There have been significant technological changes in the last ten years - in regards to solar power and wind power - and while we may make use of some of these - (and especially water power for us specifically - because we are blessed with an excellent waterfall) we still need to power the diesels. Just in the last couple of years I have noted some real breakthroughs in conversion of waste organic materials - and even plastics to diesel fuel. These methods require heat and fortuitously there has been a breakthrough in the development of solar heaters using recycled satellite antennas. I have real hope for this process but we need to do development and practice. It is beyond the scope of this newsletter to get into the technical details here - but for those who would like to examine the method I am providing the following links. Here is a very short video http://tinyurl.com/cu9ju76 The main source of information that I have found is: http://tinyurl.com/6l7oka8 This above source contains many (about 60) web pages of discussion which for our own use I have summarized. One half the problem is getting organic material for fuel conversion. In this area we have lots of farm waste like rotten potatoes - but it would be great to find an easy source for getting scrap plastic. Car tires are good material but somewhat problematical to handle. Not impossible. We may be able to come up with a solution. The other half of the problem is the energy for heat. Around here we have wood lots - and of course the waterfall which can generate energy to be converted to heat. However, here is another energy source that I am becoming enthusiastic about: http://tinyurl.com/cq2zlcm http://tinyurl.com/6xfojnr The above two videos are 4 years old and advances continue to be made in this field also. Here is something related that is more recent. http://tinyurl.com/ct33ukg We have actually built an array of solar mirrors that is so powerful that it will melt steel. The solutions that we come up with here - having an abundance of agricultural land - good water power - the possibility of an immense Wind Farm - what may be an immense labor supply - (although we may have to be harsh/rigorous/severe in our demands for productivity) - will be different from circumstances elsewhere. I plan to devote at least the following newsletter to further subjects of recovery - and then after that a newsletter to the ever more important subject of reconstruction - but which which it is difficult to find anywhere else any thought that has been given to it. If you know any sources, do please let me know - so that I will be able to include them. Peace and love, Bruce Dawnsayer@webpal.org SAFE Ark Two Newsletter August 5th, 2012 Bruce Beach 161 Main St. Horning's Mills Ontario L0N 1J0 Canada This is a link to the book everyone needs now - and which we hope they will buy and support our cause. This is a link to the book everyone will need the day AFTER the Great Catastrophe - but which they need to buy and read NOW!.