Here is a post by Jim Mason to the TP bioenergy list;
Burning Man takes on green tech
Daniel Terdiman, for News.com
Published: May 7, 2007
If you head to Burning Man this summer and see an 80-foot slug belching plumes of fire as it inches across the desert, don't worry: it's not an environmental disaster.
http://www.nytimes.com/cnet/CNET_210...=1&oref=slogin
"here is a nice article considering how burning man might do the impossible: become a compelling venue for exploring participatory alt energy solutions. but everyone asks, "can an event primary founded on fire, really be anything other than wildly consumptive and destructive"? or does it just get a free pass because it is about something other than our everyday living.
towards this end, the mechabolic is going to be gasifying trash at the event. we are going to be gasifying event trash to create gaseous and liquid fuels for fire effects, mobility and electricity. the byproducts of the gasifiation are charcoal and ash, which becomes a terra preta soil amendment, returning the biomass nutrients in the event trash back to the soil, while sequestering carbon as charcoal in the process. free carbon sequestration through plow agriculture. all energy of decomposing biomass mined and used for energy, instead of lost through slow decoposition. nothing left to rot and off gas methane to the atmosphere (a la composting). all of which, oddly, requires the thoughtful use of fire.
who would have thought that there was a way to burn things to a more healthy planetary carbon cycle? but such is the promise of an integrated application of gasification, pyrolysis and terra preta. "
Erich
