The B2M Village Project is an open source, community-based system of technologies and philosophies focused on building energy-independent, sustainable rural communities.
B2M GasifierThe first step of the B2M process is gasification‒the conversion of wood chips to gas. The B2M village will make the technology easily maintainable with parts that can purchased at a typical hardware store and structure the community to capture the massive sensible heat that would be lost into the air.
CloseThe second step is to compress the gas. An important part of making this process work on the village scale is to leave the monitoring to computer-managed programs – freeing up the community's time to work on other things.
CloseThe last step of the process is to condense the fuel. This chemical process puts off a great deal of heat, which can be captured to heat essential buildings and provide steam to power electricity generators.
CloseBy arranging energy-intensive buildings around the B2M equipment, we are able to scavenge the heat incredible heat that is put off by the process and put it to use. Laundry, bathing, baking, and greenhouses are close by to capitalize on the energy. Next, houses are heated by piping hot water through the floor. The last stop is as tepid water to irrigate ground crops.
CloseA big part of the stewardship of marginal land is to respect nature's intention for it. An oak tree drops thousands of acorns in its attempt to seed a new tree and only a fraction will happen to land where an adult oak would thrive. By transplanting a sprout to an ideal location, we've fulfilled nature's needs and we can responsibly feed the rest to the pigs, which converts the land's resources into food for the two-leggers.
CloseThe B2M village is designed to work on marginal lands (since that is all that may be available to many communities). Our flagship village, Windward, rests in the mountains of Washington at 1,000 ft elevation, so the soil gets cold. Terraces help expose the soil to the sun and keep roots warm.
CloseAn incredibly important part of the B2M village system is culture. We have a tried and tested system of by-laws to help guide the decision-making and conflict-resolution portions of community interaction. We foster a culture of mutual support, including a gift economy that runs on labor and goods exchange.
CloseA space-efficient farming technique for raising fish and veggies in tandem. The fishes' waste becomes the plants' fertilizer as water is cycled through. Talapia, our fish of choice due to it's ability to convert feed nearly pound-for-pound to meat, require relatively warm water so the system's placement next to the B2M equipment is a great way to capture and use stray heat from the B2M process.
CloseElectricity for homes and other necessary functions can be provided with steam engines. In addition to burning fuel, we can capture the energy from the exhaust of our internal combustion engines – after all, two thirds of the energy from a car's fuel goes right out the tail pipe! - and we can use the heat from the chemical reactions in the B2M condenser. The bearings lades of the turbine can be made with oak and lubricated with tallow from our sheep
Equally important is the Negawatt – a unit of energy that measures energy we never had to use. By using gravity, warm clothing, and well-designed buildings, we can reduce our energy needs to consume only what we produce.
Routine plant maintenance produces pounds and pounds of weeds which are happily fed to the animals. Making a living on marginal land means using all of its resources and finding a multi-use place for everything it offers.
CloseAugust 2018 ‒ Summer Update
March 2018 ‒ Spring Update
Dec 2016 ‒ Winter Update
Oct 2016 ‒ Fall Update
Dec 2015 ‒ Winter Update
July 2015 ‒ Summer Update
The Biomass 2 Methanol Village (B2M) is an open-source, community-based project focused on creating energy-independent, sustainable communities worldwide. We believe it will take a global network of villages to create ecological sustainability, and we are dedicated to creating a working village model.
International energy companies are undermining the Earth, and B2M offers communities an opportunity to produce their own energy while stewarding their lands in a manner that is ecologically and economically sound.
B2M's village focus first encourages a small ecological footprint through whole-system design that produces negawatts. It then empowers communities to harvest local biomass energy through holistic ecosystem management and convert it into gasoline, diesel, propane and natural gas for local community use.
B2M empowers communities worldwide to break free from dependency on big energy corporations by producing their own energy. Every dollar's worth of fuel produced locally is a dollar towards helping local community thrive. By enabling communities to start the supply chain‒instead of being trapped at its end‒B2M provides local communities the power to shape their own future.
Village-scale energy sovereignty gives people greater control and autonomy over their lives and communities, empowering individuals to create a better world. When we are no longer reliant on unaccountable energy corporations to meet our basic needs, we are capable of creating a resilient culture that balances the well-being of our local communities and the ecosystems that support us.
Small, recurring donations allow the work to mimic the development of organic networks. By building in community involvement from the start, we ensure that as B2M unfolds, it will create an alternative to the multinational energy corporations.
We've already worked out how to turn forest waste into woodgas, a functional replacement for natural gas. We're currently working to analyse, store, compress and process woodgas.
B2M's goals
B2M's conceptual overview
B2M's biomass source
B2M's community context
B2M's historical context
The local focus of the work
The chemistry of biomass conversion
Unusual terms used in B2M