revelarts
02-14-2011, 09:08 PM
Finally a good news story out of Afghanistan
Putting Poppies in the Gas Tank
Published on 02-14-2011 Email To Friend Print Version
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Source: The Atlantic
Back in the fall of 2008, Michael Bester and a business partner, both Army veterans doing contract work in Afghanistan, hit on the equivalent of the counterinsurgency’s trifecta: a way to improve the lives of ordinary Afghans, eliminate the illegal opium trade, and take the Taliban’s money. “We had been in villages where children were dying because they didn’t have proper medicine, because they didn’t have refrigerators,” Bester told me. Light up the villages, and perhaps you could empower Afghans to resist the Taliban. And the fuel? Most any feedstock would work, but one compelling option was the ubiquitous poppies that stoke the Taliban’s lucrative drug trade. Why not turn them into biodiesel instead?
Rudolf Diesel’s first engine ran on peanut oil; Bester wanted to be sure that poppies would function as well. So he and his partner consulted with experts, including an Australian plant geneticist named Philip Larkin, who had recently drafted a funding proposal titled “Biodiesel From Afghanistan Poppies.” Larkin knew that tractors in Tasmania, the site of the world’s largest legal opium industry, ran on poppy biodiesel. If it worked in Tasmania, it could work in Afghanistan: poppy seeds have an exceptionally high oil content (45 to 50 percent, compared with 40 percent in canola seeds), the oil has good “cold flow” properties (resistance to viscosity in cold weather), and, oh yeah, Afghanistan’s poppy crop could produce 100,000 tons of oil a year, or about 2.5 percent of annual global biodiesel consumption. Even the Pentagon’s budget-minders could benefit. The United States was paying perhaps as much as $400 to protect and deliver a single gallon of fuel to forward operating bases in rural Afghanistan, when a gallon of locally made biodiesel would have cost less than $10.
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http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/01/putting-poppies-in-the-gas-tank/8379/
Putting Poppies in the Gas Tank
Published on 02-14-2011 Email To Friend Print Version
Share |
Source: The Atlantic
Back in the fall of 2008, Michael Bester and a business partner, both Army veterans doing contract work in Afghanistan, hit on the equivalent of the counterinsurgency’s trifecta: a way to improve the lives of ordinary Afghans, eliminate the illegal opium trade, and take the Taliban’s money. “We had been in villages where children were dying because they didn’t have proper medicine, because they didn’t have refrigerators,” Bester told me. Light up the villages, and perhaps you could empower Afghans to resist the Taliban. And the fuel? Most any feedstock would work, but one compelling option was the ubiquitous poppies that stoke the Taliban’s lucrative drug trade. Why not turn them into biodiesel instead?
Rudolf Diesel’s first engine ran on peanut oil; Bester wanted to be sure that poppies would function as well. So he and his partner consulted with experts, including an Australian plant geneticist named Philip Larkin, who had recently drafted a funding proposal titled “Biodiesel From Afghanistan Poppies.” Larkin knew that tractors in Tasmania, the site of the world’s largest legal opium industry, ran on poppy biodiesel. If it worked in Tasmania, it could work in Afghanistan: poppy seeds have an exceptionally high oil content (45 to 50 percent, compared with 40 percent in canola seeds), the oil has good “cold flow” properties (resistance to viscosity in cold weather), and, oh yeah, Afghanistan’s poppy crop could produce 100,000 tons of oil a year, or about 2.5 percent of annual global biodiesel consumption. Even the Pentagon’s budget-minders could benefit. The United States was paying perhaps as much as $400 to protect and deliver a single gallon of fuel to forward operating bases in rural Afghanistan, when a gallon of locally made biodiesel would have cost less than $10.
.....
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/01/putting-poppies-in-the-gas-tank/8379/