The Compost Power Network (www.CompostPower.org) is a not-for-profit educational networking organization dedicated to expanding the use of regenerative soil-building energy systems based on woody biomass. I helped start the organization and am currently serving as Executive Director.
Our team includes experts on forestry, permaculture, compost science, renewable energy, biogas engineering and local economic development and we are dedicated to building a regenerative waste-free forestry/agriculture/energy model to answer the enormous challenges posed by peak-oil, soil depletion and wasteful energy systems.
One of our tasks is to aggressively expand the work pioneered in the 1970s by the French inventor Jean Pain, who powered his entire home and farm on the heat and natural gas he captured from specially designed woody-biomass-based compost-systems.
We have tested Jean Pain’s methods with some success and we believe that with a “Jean Pain Mound” it is possible for a home, farm or business to generate cost-effective combustion-free energy for space-heating and hot water, using local renewable resources while generating soil.
Jean Pain’s method of generating natural-gas using woody-biomass in anaerobic digesters can also potentially provide cost-effective, clean, renewable, local fuel for cooking, transportation, heating or electricity-generation.
One of the most exciting aspects of Jean Pain's results was that the high-carbon, low-nitrogen woody biomass becomes a balanced, complete compost by way of the bacteria pulling nitrogen out of the air and into the material, (nitrogen fixing).
Jean Pain's farm relied on woody-biomass compost for all of his crops and documented larger crop-yields compared to conventional compost/fertilizer.
Refinement and further testing are required to understand all the variables. We believe that woody biomass has tremendous potential to build our soils and provide us energy, while sequestering carbon, with minimal or zero emissions or waste.
Woody-biomass compost+energy systems have the potential to become holistic solutions supporting local food production, forestry health, localized energy independence, and sustainable economic development.
Our mission is three-fold:
To embark on research and development projects to refine and develop holistic systems for generating soil from woody biomass while capturing energy.
To expand awareness, public knowledge-base and application of regenerative soil-building energy systems based on woody biomass by making our findings available to all.
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