THE B2M VILLAGE
The B2M Village Project is an open source, community-based system of technologies and philosophies focused on building energy-independent, sustainable rural communities.
B2M GasifierThe first step of the B2M process is gasification‒the conversion of wood chips to gas. The B2M village will make the technology easily maintainable with parts that can purchased at a typical hardware store and structure the community to capture the massive sensible heat that would be lost into the air.
CloseThe second step is to compress the gas. An important part of making this process work on the village scale is to leave the monitoring to computer-managed programs – freeing up the community's time to work on other things.
CloseThe last step of the process is to condense the fuel. This chemical process puts off a great deal of heat, which can be captured to heat essential buildings and provide steam to power electricity generators.
CloseBy arranging energy-intensive buildings around the B2M equipment, we are able to scavenge the heat incredible heat that is put off by the process and put it to use. Laundry, bathing, baking, and greenhouses are close by to capitalize on the energy. Next, houses are heated by piping hot water through the floor. The last stop is as tepid water to irrigate ground crops.
CloseA big part of the stewardship of marginal land is to respect nature's intention for it. An oak tree drops thousands of acorns in its attempt to seed a new tree and only a fraction will happen to land where an adult oak would thrive. By transplanting a sprout to an ideal location, we've fulfilled nature's needs and we can responsibly feed the rest to the pigs, which converts the land's resources into food for the two-leggers.
CloseThe B2M village is designed to work on marginal lands (since that is all that may be available to many communities). Our flagship village, Windward, rests in the mountains of Washington at 1,000 ft elevation, so the soil gets cold. Terraces help expose the soil to the sun and keep roots warm.
CloseAn incredibly important part of the B2M village system is culture. We have a tried and tested system of by-laws to help guide the decision-making and conflict-resolution portions of community interaction. We foster a culture of mutual support, including a gift economy that runs on labor and goods exchange.
CloseA space-efficient farming technique for raising fish and veggies in tandem. The fishes' waste becomes the plants' fertilizer as water is cycled through. Talapia, our fish of choice due to it's ability to convert feed nearly pound-for-pound to meat, require relatively warm water so the system's placement next to the B2M equipment is a great way to capture and use stray heat from the B2M process.
CloseElectricity for homes and other necessary functions can be provided with steam engines. In addition to burning fuel, we can capture the energy from the exhaust of our internal combustion engines – after all, two thirds of the energy from a car's fuel goes right out the tail pipe! - and we can use the heat from the chemical reactions in the B2M condenser. The blades of the turbine can be made with oak and lubricated with tallow from our sheep
Equally important is the Negawatt – a unit of energy that measures energy we never had to use. By using gravity, warm clothing, and well-designed buildings, we can reduce our energy needs to consume only what we produce.
Routine plant maintenance produces pounds and pounds of weeds which are happily fed to the animals. Making a living on marginal land means using all of its resources and finding a multi-use place for everything it offers.
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What is B2M and what's it got to do with sustainability?
Rural communities are collapsing because of the rising cost of energy products; they're selling off their non-renewable resources in order to pay their bills, and sending their children to the city to work. Rural forests, overgrown and choking with "fuel," are a lighting strike away from catastrophic fires. Without the care of people who love and protect it, the land is being stripped of life.
All communities run on energy, and any community that hopes to endure needs to work out ways to meet its energy needs in a sustainable manner. We believe that the most sustainable route is to use self-replicating solar collectors (cleverly disguised as trees) to convert sunshine, rain and carbon dioxide into wood, a stable form of energy which can then be converted into replacements for gasoline, diesel, propane and natural gas. Every dollar's worth of fuel produced in-country is a dollar that remains in-country supporting local community. By enabling rural people to become the start of the supply chain‒instead of being trapped at it's end‒the conversion of woody biomass into fuel lays the foundation for local sustainability.
Why is a smaller, recurring donation better for engineering research?
Money is a powerful tool, but a dreadful master, something which is especially true when it comes to building relationships between people, and between people and the land they care for. It's tempting to think of how much progress could be made if B2M got a large government grant or won the support of some wealthy venture capitalist, but big money always comes with a price. Too many projects like B2M have crashed under the weight of big money.
In life, the end is often determined in the beginning. B2M is a community centered energy system; it's not being developed to make anyone rich. It's goal is to enable people who love the land to be able to live on it, care for it and ensure that the bond between people and land survives the economic cycles that are destroying community.
Small, recurring donations allow the work to go forward in a manner that mimics the development of organic networks by not asking too much of any one person. Even when the research is complete, B2M won't function without community involvement--this isn't "plug and play" technology. By building in community involvement from the start, we ensure that as B2M unfolds, it will create an alternative to continuing to depend on multinational energy corporations.
What's the timeline for the B2M research?
We've already worked out how to turn our forest waste into a reliable gasification feedstock. We've also worked out how to transform our forest waste to create woodgas, a functional replacement for natural gas, and how to use that gas for heating and electrical generation.
During 2016, we'll continue work on constructing the equipment needed to safely compress, store and analyse woodgas. Different reactions will be used to produce different energy products, and each reaction has unique input requirements for temperature, pressure and chemical ratios, so the current work is focused on developing a flexible process that can be adapted to local needs and circumstances.
The rate at which the work goes forward depends on the financial support provided by supporters like you,( B2M's True Fans), and on the operational support of the Hungry Samurai who bring their scientific and engineer training to bear on the work.
Where can I learn more about:
B2M's goals
B2M's conceptual overview
B2M's biomass source
B2M's community context
B2M's historical context
The local focus of the work
The chemistry of biomass conversion
Unusual terms used in B2M