Rebuilding Haiti must start from the ground up, with agricultural education
Vetiver pellet mill & business opportunities!
Haiti Reconstruction International is now investing our main interest into turning vetiver grass into ENERGY.
We will first start selling stoves in rural areas that will use biomass such as vetiver and agriculture waist and tree trimmings from nitrogen fixing trees that we will be planting in between the hedgerows that will save and rejuvenate the soil to produce more food.
This will also save trees and stop erosion, and our vetiver program really takes off we will have billions of vetiver plants producing tons of grass that can be used for biomass.
Haitians to want to plant Vetiver and ways to subsidize those who plant it by those who will also benefit saving the Soil, filling the Aquifers, Reforesting the Mountainsides, keeping sediments off the reefs and mitigating hazards of frequent hurricanes.
Energy !
Our first project building clean efficient cook stoves with the best and latest Tlud technology will be using agricultural waist and tree trimmings for
rural areas. We will also be making models that will be using pellets to replace the selling of charcoal in
urban areas and eliminate the need for cutting trees!
But we need grass on all the mountainsides and this will create way more grass than we need for cook stoves. Then we will develop small electrification generation plants for communities all over rural Haiti using vetiver grass in bio-digestion. This process will also use humanure which will be the best way for sanitation eliminating Cholera bacteria and leaving great fertilizer.
I just returned from our Formation Site at Arcahaie where Joel Ducasse has the largest vetiver nursery in the Caribbean. He also has many other wonderful plants that need little cultivation which can be planted between the rows of vetiver on the mountainside the produce nitrogen and food! Stove production equipment is there but we are still waiting for tons of sheet metal and pelletizers that are held up in customs.
Click here or also under 2 Replenish soil Reforest to see more on the plants for mountainside gardening, Joel Ducasse and Ketty Paquiot are multiplying a seed developed in IDIAF, Puerto Rico.
O'Yes I found one more use for vetiver since our training center is not built yet, vetiver made a very nice 5 ft. deep mattress under our tent!
Pelletizing machines make over 3 tons of pellets in 8 hours, 9 tons if you ran them all day. They would have to be near a good road system for marketing product to urban areas.
Pellets would be sealed in bags to keep dry and can be transported in the same white bags on tap taps as they now transport and sell Charcoal. Chabonairs will be able to sell clean fuel, both physically and healthily as even breathing the dust shortens their lives. The stove emissions are the lowest of the stoves available in Haiti.
www.SmallPelletMill.com has developed a reasonably priced operation in the Czech Republic. 
Their Cutting grinder pellet mill RS 650 is designed for cutting and grinding straw, wood shavings and coarser sawdust for pellet production. It is also suitable for cutting and grinding straw for briquette production.
Grinds straw, sawdust, shavings, paper and bio waste.
The straw is finely cut by knives, then it is ground by special hammers, after that it is blown by staging blades outside the grinder to a distance of up to six metres. The grinding and cutting production depends on the type and humidity of the straw.
Paul Lawson with Lawson Mills Biomass Solutions from Canada sells their products in our part of the world
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Comment by Robert Fairchild on July 10, 2011 at 5:04pm -
Pelletizing grass may be too energy and capital intensive for Haiti. There is an interesting system developed in India by ARTI, Appropriate Rural Technology Institute.
http://arti-africa.org/2010/07/charcoal/
Won an Ashden Award:
http://www.ashdenawards.org/winners/arti
Uses 55 gallon drums filled with loose dry biomass inside a larger sheet metal kiln. After pyrolization the material is mixed with a binder and extruded with a modified meat grinder as charcoal briquettes, which are then sun dried. This may prove to be a more advantageous way of turning vetiver grass and other light bulky biomass into cooking fuel. Simplifies the whole process by avoiding the need for baling and chopping/grinding and reduces the transportation significantly, (by transporting charcoal "sticks" instead of bulky grass). Apparently being used in Tanzania and Uganda as well.
They also have a mini pyrolizer (basically a large TLUD) for smaller scale:
http://biochar.bioenergylists.org/artileafkiln
Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any provision to use the excess heat for cooking, pasteurizing water, or drying of more biomass. A large TLUD (30 gallon drum inside 55 gallon drum?) could be used as the pyrolizer and for cooking and drying.
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Comment by Mike Mahowald on July 10, 2011 at 10:16pm -
I also have looked at retort pyrolizers as 55 gal barrels maybe as a bakery oven.
I think our best bet is to start in countryside just binding grass bundles but to send grass any distances they would have to densify it and this could be a good option. If the heat from the retort ovens could be used to make electricity some day this would be a great solution.
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