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	Charcoal for Change (Nicaragua)

		Summary
		This project will work to develop and implement a simple, portable stove that turns waste biomass into biochar, a soil amendment that provides structure, nutrients, water retention, and fertilization. In the combustion process, sustainable bioenergy is created while effectively sequestering carbon dioxide and greatly reducing the harmful particulate emissions of traditional primitive wood-burning stoves. This project will have two phases: a construction and distribution phase followed by a training and implementation phase.
		How You Can Help
		100% will go directly to project costs in Nicaragua.

	More Information About this Project
	from our man in nicaragua
	Hi there GO folks, I got a metalworker to make a gasifying stove similar to the Anila that uses materials that are cheap here, and can thus be produced for as little as $10-15. This cheaper stove is a simple TLUD, or top-lit up-draft stove, which has been shown to work through small development projects in India and Africa. I am currently receiving technical support on the first Nicaraguan-made version of this stove from Dr. Paul Anderson, the American pioneer and expert on this technology and a mentor of mine. His design has been shown to have remarkable efficiency, extremely low emissions, and is gaining notoriety because it produces biochar (albeit in lower quantities and somewhat different way than the Anila). Dr. Anderson spoke with other biochar experts at the North American Biochar Conference, which recently received a lot of attention, and SeaChar has hosted events with him to advance the technology, education, and dissemination of his stoves. To explain this more thoroughly, here are photos and captions of the first test of the TLUD my new metalworker friend Wilmer just finished. The specs and descriptions are primarily for feedback on stove usage and simplifying terminology from Dr. Anderson and the SeaChar engineers, but I think you'll see it could be adapted to kitchens here in essentially the same fashion as the Anila. As far as disadvantages go, saving the charcoal it produces rather than its continued burning is the intended use, and thus it has a shorter burn time. This is also because it does not gasify waste biomass that surrounds the firewood, as the Anila does. Because it's materials costs are so much less, however, this burn time disadvantage can actually be countered by providing two of them to each family, to be interchanged as needed, which Dr. Anderson has done in India. The cooking structure into which the stove can fit is extremely similar to what is commonly used here, practically all free materials, and can be adapted in a variety ways, including maintaining the ability to use this stove while simultaneously cooking the old fashioned way. Another metalworker here just finished a complement to this technology that would be used strictly as a way to efficiently produce biochar, and potentially make burning the charcoal in the stove a sound decision. It is a technology that has quite a lot of potential and the SeaChar engineers are tinkering with it in Seattle. The idea comes from the Appropriate Rural Technology Institute, in India, and it is essentially just a 55 gallon drum that is adapted to work as a TLUD to turn agricultural waste into biochar (for a more thorough description, there's a description here). By using this over the remainder of my time here it should be possible to set up larger scale biochar plot tests than with the TLUD stoves alone. With what I see as, currently, a prohibitively high materials cost for the Anila, is an opportunity for applied research in these cheaper technologies that can provide comparable value in their advantages. If you believe in the potential of biochar like I do, the gap between the technology that is out there and who could be taking advantage of it is enormous. The article on biochar from the economist this week highlights the potential of this kind of stove (specifically mentioning one kind that has little chance in poor rural areas because it requires pellets as fuel), but right now I'm essentially the only person that's trying to make them work where people will actually use them. As a final note, I was able to meet with the municipality's environmental secretary, and he confirmed my belief that the current cost estimate for the Anila would make it extremely difficult to work on a large scale. With this cheaper technology they'd consider a partnership, though, and that could give us access to thousands more families and the government's human capital. Until then, take care. -Scott Eaton 31-Aug-2009
	country and focus
	This project is located in Nicaragua. The main focus of this project is on improving the Environment. For more information about Nicaragua, read the Wikipedia entry for Nicaragua.

	Who is Running this Project
	contact	organization
	Scott Eaton Seattle Biochar Working Group (SeaChar) 2442 NW Market St. #552 Seattle, WA t: 206-612-3018 w: http://www.seachar.org/	Seattle Biochar Working Group (SeaChar) 2442 NW Market St. #552 Seattle, WA t: 206-612-3018 w: http://www.seachar.org/

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