Homestead mailing list

[Rob <becida AT comcast.net>]

Date:   Sun, 08 Aug 1999 15:55:27 -0400
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From: tvoivozhd <tvoivozd AT roanoke.infi.net>
To: homestead AT listserv.oit.unc.edu
Subject: Re: After an uneventful Y2K, the real crisis 2005 to 2020
References: <37ADAAB4.A1454D5 AT roanoke.infi.net> 
<37ADB450.1F91DF30 AT yonderway.com>
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Chris Hedemark wrote:

>
> > This crisis is when an oil-powered world has to start turning to other
> > energy sources, most of them finite as well.
>
> If our government was of the people, for the people, and by the people
> (sorry to exclude our few internation subscribers here) rather than
> bowing to energy industry lobbyists, they would be offering stronger tax
> incentives for a neighborhood full of PV panels on rooftops.  Not
> necessarily enough to fulfill the needs of our consumers, but it would
> put a heavy dent indeed on the consumption of fossil fuels by our power
> plants.

>>>tvoivozhd>>>the current production and cost of PV panels depends upon the
current production and cost of oil.  As the cost of oil rises, so will PV
panels, and since PV panel production also depends upon consumers being
locked into an inherently fragile money economy, I don't think I would bet
the farm on being able to buy them in a crunch.  Some metalworking skills and
a farm workshop---coupled with millions of tons of scrap metal lying around,
means to me that I can assure independence in the production of energy by
lower tech means.  Steam would do for stationary uses, it is not really
feasible for vehicles burning wood or coal. .

I don't think you will have to, except possibly during short periods of
emergency, produce fuel for vehicles.
However, anyone possessing reasonable workshop skills and equipment can do
so, with some lapse in time in adapting or making fuel-making equipment.  The
last time I thought I needed homemade fuel was during the Arab oil embargo,
when it took me three or four days to make a prototype woodgas generator for
my pickup truck.

It is very simple to make and use woodgas.  It is a little more complicated
and requires raw materials not available to everyone to make and compress
methane, or to carry it a step further and make methanol.  I would discount
use of ethanol since more energy is used in produciing grain than is
extracted from fermenting it.  It is feasible only because Archer Daniels
Midland sucks so heavily on the corporate welfare teat, and has ready sale
for the alcohol byproducts.  It is much simpler and more cost-effective to
produce crops easily convertible to biodiesel, except in climates and soils
where sugarcane grows exceptionally well.



>
>
> IThere are already farms of PV arrays and windmills out in the southwest
> and cali.  But rather than waste space I'd rather see PV on individual
> homes.
>
> > Now that another disturbing factor should be incorporated into your
> > homestead reality-mix, how should it affect the decisions you make for
> > you, your family and descendants to minimize their risk?
>
> One of the tough things for homesteaders, should petroleum products
> become available only to the rich, is what to do with all of these
> 1940's & 1950's era tractors that are just going to keep on running into
> the new century.  Also with most of us living out in the sticks, some
> great strides will have to be made in alternative automobile fuels
> before we see vehicles that can affordably have the kind of range to get
> someone from their homestead to "town" which could be well over an
> hour's drive away in some cases.  Electricity isn't there yet and I
> doubt it ever will, considering that all the cargo space would be
> consumed by batteries.

>>>tvoivozhd>>>woodgas powered hundreds of thousands of trucks, buses and
farm tractors in WWI, WWII.
A quick and dirty solution to liquid fuel shortages, but it worked.

>
>
> However, considering the current hog & corn glut, wouldn't it make sense
> to make cars that can run on alternative fuels as well as gasoline?  I
> remember when the prototype for my wife's sports car, the "Ford Mustang
> Mach III" was debuted, it had such a system where it could run on
> gasoline or agrifuels and could automatically sense which fuel it was
> using and adjust fuel and spark curves automatically to compensate.  Odd
> how these things never make it to production vehicles.  If such fuels
> were to become commonplace, the hog farmer would find one of his
> greatest liabilities has suddenly become an assett.  Stop dumping that
> crap in the river and load it in back of the truck to send off for
> conversion to fuel!!

>>>pigpower wins the day!  Methane from hog manure is good for a stationary
IC engine, but vehicle range is limited by the storage capacity of a
compressed-methane tank.  And not everyone has or would get a large number of
confined pigs---and raise the corn to feed them when woodgas feedstock is
almost universally available.

For someone interested in producing their own liquid fuel, woodgas should be
the interim solution and methanol or biodiesel the next step---if the next
step offered sufficient advantage to be worth the trouble.

http://www.oilpress.com/typ20.htm  (which comes first, the chicken or the
egg?)---to make biodiesel from farm crops such as rapeseed, soybeans,
sunflowers, hemp seed, you have to buy or make a press.  This one is
electric.  An animal or engine-powered one could be made according to plans
available from several appropriate technology sources---here is a
hand-powered one:  The Manual Screw Press for Small-scale Oil
                        Extraction
                        Kathryn H. Potts and Keith Machell
                        Manual oil extraction from peanuts or other soft
oil-seeds can be a viable
                        enterprise for small businesses. This book describes
small-scale processes of
                        oil-extraction for possible use in rural areas, as
well as ways to market and
                        distribute the oilcake.
                        ISBN 1853391980, (ITP), 1995, 72pp, £9.95,

Buy the book from
http://www.oneworld.org/itdg/publications/books/foodp.html   ---and a lot of
other good small-scale food-processing data---including small-scale milling
of grain.

For most such oils you also have to modify them into methyl esters (the
biodiesel fuel), and glycerine---requiring methanol.  There are a few seed
oils that can be used without modification as diesel fuel, but I can't
remember them at the moment---must be some of Gene's beer-breath blowing this
way, it's wiped out a lot of the Appalachian upper-level trees too.


http://www2.whidbey.net/lighthook/woodgas.htm  (for those of you who weren't
around then, or who didn't copy my last long posting on woodgas equipment and
use---and two computer crashes took out the files, here is something on
running VW bugs on woodgas.

If anyone is really interested in woodgas equipment and use, I'll try to
reconstitute the lost files---and maybe something on homemade methanol.

>
>
> --