What are the goals of the B2M project?


First:

     To promote economic sustainability through ecosystem conservation and forest stewardship.

Second:

     To enable people living in rural areas to achieve energy independence at the village level using sunshine, rain, and atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Third:

     To create a portable B2M processing plant with an attached housing unit using modified shipping containers.

Fourth:

     To create a non-profit training center where people can learn to build and safely operate an integrated biomass to fuel system.


Why is this important?

  
  
      Around the world, record numbers of young people are abandoning the country side and moving into the slums that surround major cities. As of 2011, more than a billion people are living in slums without access to potable water, sewage treatment, and land ownership.

      As the elders left behind die off, the knowledge needed to support sustainable land-use practices is being lost. This loss of land-based knowledge makes it very difficult to reverse the transition to living in slums. Lacking the skills needed to meet their energy needs directly, the remaining rural residents have to rely on extracting non-renewable resources from their land-base in order to purchase food, fuel, clothing, and medicine from outside sources. And as those non-renewable resources are exhausted, ever more people will be forced to abandon their homes and move into the slums.

      The B2M project focuses on reverse engineering the technology that will better enable rural communities to sustain themselves by creating energy-dense fuels from sunshine, rain, and carbon dioxide. B2M is not about reinventing the wheel; the technology in question is well established. What's novel is our vision of bucking the "Bigger is Better" trend by focusing on an open-source miniaturization that can enable rural people to meet their needs using widely-available renewable resources.

      There's a lot riding on this work; as vital resources become more scarce, resource wars will become more common. Enabling communities to use freely available sunshine, rain, and atmospheric carbon dioxide to meet their energy needs is a way to stop the current slide into war everlasting over the few remaining deposits of non-renewable resources. Who would go to war and risk their life for resources they already have lots of at home?