Today is one of those days when I feel like the luckiest person on earth. I spent the morning out in the field with my hands covered in mush and this afternoon, I get to sit behind a screen and blog all about it! I love it!

I am even more excited about the day as it was our first trial of making fuel briquettes. Having been totally inspired by an old friend and work colleague from eastern DR Congo (big hat tip to Virginia and team!), I was very excited to find out that the use of alternative renewable energy resources is a big priority for Camps. The last few years, Camp Kenya has been very busy planting thousands of trees including jatropha which has a high oil content (in the seeds). If you would like to read more about Jatropha, click HERE

Ok, one step at a time: what are fuel briquettes??

From Project Kadutu:

“Fuel briquettes are made from agricultural and commercial residues such as weeds, leaves, sawdust, rice husks and scrap paper – are a unique yet well proven technology to provide fuelwood.

In this part of the world – like in most of the countries of the developing world, people use charcoal as a means to produce heat for cooking, etc. Fuel briquettes are a low cost, locally made fuel for cooking or heating that offer an alternative to the use of firewood or charcoal.

The basic process involves collecting the materials, pounding or grinding them to a certain consistency, mixing the materials with water, allowing the mash to sit for a period of time, pressing the mash into a fuel briquette using a specially designed press, allowing the briquettes to dry and finally burning the fuel briquettes exactly as one would burn firewood or charcoal.”

Camp Kenya has been working very closely with WWF’s coastal forest programme around Camp Muhaka in a variety of areas and the partnership has been growing from strength to strength. WWF has been particulalry supportive of providing quality tree seeds and planting tubes to the communities we work with. Recently, the joint partners helped to support the construction of a jatropha training centre to test all sorts of environmentally friendly renewable energy sources.

Muhaka could not be a better location to trial our first briquette machine so this morning we met with some of the members from the centre and had a first go at finding an alternative to charcoal (I can’t even begin to describe how badly the environment has been degraded  across Kenya as a direct consequence of charcoal production). And the result:

Step One: the idea is to create a mash from different types of organic waste materials that are locally available. Jatropha seed cake (the remainders of the seed once the oil has been extracted) and saw dust are recommended materials. Rember we are very much at the pilot stage!

mixing jatropha seed cake with wood shavings

Step Two: Fill the piston ring with the lovely cow poop coloured mash:

The piston section is filled with the mash

Step 3: Compress the mash using a simple easy to build pressing machine. Needs to be done quite a few times to allow all the excess water to be removed:

Make sure you have a good fundi like Camp Kenya's Chris to help build one of these

Step 4: Carefully remove the round compressed doughnut like thingies from the ring and cross fingers:

Eh voila! Well sort of…in truth the first couple fell apart…but we realised that was because there was not enough material as a binding agent with the wood chippings. The next lot we made mostly from the jatropha seed cake which held together. Left them in the sun drying and the old men kept pressing away!

If all goes well and we get it right, we hope to be helping communities construct briquette machines all over the area and trialing them out at  home. Lots of research to do but…all in a day’s work at Camps…

Print PDF

This entry was posted on Friday, May 29th, 2009 at 1:00 pm and is filed under Gap, Kenya, Project Diary, Team. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.